Weekend Getaway: Return to Charleston, South Carolina
The Southern coastal city is one of our favorite places to visit. That's largely thanks to a superb food scene that includes stellar options for seafood, barbecue, and cocktails.
Welcome to the weekend!
Do you have a place that you feel particularly in sync with? We love many places around the country, of course, but Charleston really speaks to us both. We’ve visited numerous times — we love the food scene, which includes our favorite barbecue joint (anywhere!), a beloved seafood restaurant with stellar cocktails, and so much more. We also like to start each day with a walk around town, stopping at old cemeteries, walking down to Charleston Harbor, and popping into great shops (Amy hit up Buxton Books, Beau & Ro, and Goldbug Collection on this visit. Kenney popped by Ben Silver, the local Billy Reid outpost, and ordered a custom canvas tote bag from J. Stark). Founded in 1670, Charleston is also a city with a lot of history; make sure you take time to visit the new International African American Museum, where we recently spent a morning.
We just returned from an eight-day trip, in which we revisited longtime favorite spots and found plenty of new ones. Charleston’s food scene is extremely robust, and we ran out of time to get back to some spots we love, which speaks to the sheer volume of options in this city. In this Weekend Getaway newsletter, we’re covering all the spots you need to visit, from a Chinese barbecue joint to a cocktail bar focused on coastal drinking (P.S. — Traveling somewhere else? You’ll find all our Weekend Getaways here!).
We’ve also organized all our recommendations into our Charleston Field Guide, a 74-page, six-day itinerary to the city that includes our favorite spots for coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, and more. It’s our biggest Field Guide to date, and you’ll want to snag it if you’re considering a trip to the Lowcountry. The downloadable guide is for sale for $20 on our website, but paid American Weekender subscribers get this guide for free, along with free access to our full library of guides and our American Weekender Google Map.
Before we log off for the weekend, we've shared some links to add to your Weekend Reading list. Chicago magazine food critic John Kessler shares his list of the city’s best new restaurants, Shannon Wianecki writes about one of her favorite places in Hawaii, Edmund Tijerina shares his top breakfast tacos in San Antonio, plus a couple dispatches from Arizona and Oregon. Thanks for reading!
— Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt
Leisure in the Lowcountry
CHARLESTON, S.C. — If there are three main food groups at American Weekender, they’re probably seafood, barbecue, and cocktails. We eat everything, of course, and feel that a meal is not complete unless it includes a big serving of veggies. But for us, seafood, barbecue, and cocktails are worth traveling for, and no one does this trio better than Charleston.
Which is why when we arrived in Charleston on an early morning flight from Chicago, our first order of business was getting some seafood. We headed to lunch at Babas, a terrific all-day spot that has two locations and that we go to many times during each stay. We swing by for quiche and peanut lattes at breakfast, orange spritzes for aperitivo hour, and pickled shrimp salad for lunch. With gem lettuce, local pickled shrimp, avocado, parsley, and shallots, it’s light but filling, and perfect for a spring lunch al fresco.
Babas would be on our “perfect day” list for Charleston. So would The Ordinary, where we popped in at open on our first evening in town to drink daiquiris made with toasted Carolina Gold rice and house martinis made with Ford’s Gin; “ocean vermouth” steeped with shiitake mushrooms, kombu, and oyster shells; sea salt; and a pickled green tomato garnish. We stop in at The Ordinary as many times as we can when we’re in Charleston — it consistently has the friendliest service and best oysters, and it’s our favorite place to start our night.
After drinks at the Ordinary, we dined at Melfi’s, a cool Italian joint from
. We’d been on a previous visit for cocktails (Dr. Melfi’s, a shaken Negroni sour, is one of our favorite drinks in town), and this time we also shared prosciutto and burrata with vin cotto, creamy crab and artichoke-stuffed cannelloni, and pizza with salami and veggies.That’s a pretty great first day in Charleston. But there’s so much more here.