Cover Story: Charleston's Chez Nous is the Place to Be
The tiny restaurant with a six dish menu has quietly become one of Charleston's best places to dine.
IN TODAY’S NEWSLETTER
Cover Story: How a Charleston restaurant reinvents itself every night. “Coming into work knowing that the menu changes every day is exciting,” says Chez Nous chef Jill Mathias. “It’s definitely made me excited for nine years.”
Weekend Reading List: A quiet seaside getaway, beautiful trips by train, some great breweries in Montana, and more.
Featured Destination: This is your last chance to download a free copy of our Charleston dining guide. Find out how below, and get a sneak peek of our September featured destination.If you’re enjoying American Weekender, please consider subscribing! A free subscription gets you previews of the weekly posts, while upgrading gets you access to all the posts and the archives, as well as a free featured dining guide each month.
Daily Reinvention at Charleston’s Chez Nous
CHARLESTON, SC - Whenever I’m planning to dine at a restaurant, I start obsessively reading the menu days in advance, trying to figure out exactly what to get. I keep the menu open in a tab on my browser so I can plot my order between other tasks. To dine at Chez Nous, a lovely restaurant that opened in Charleston in 2014, there’s no planning required. The menu is posted each morning on their Instagram, and there are just six dishes — two starters, two entrées, and two desserts (plus an off-menu cheese plate available for dessert or a pre-dessert course). The menu is so tight that if you dine with one other person, you can get everything.
That’s precisely what we did during our dinner. The daily menu is the same for both lunch and dinner, and chef Jill Mathias and her team work to craft a lineup of dishes that reflect the Southern growing season while taking inspiration from the cuisines of Southern France, Northern Italy, and Northern Spain.
Mathias hand writes each day’s menu — “the illegible menus,” she laughs. “People love it or hate it, but I think it’s part of being convivial and interacting with your server. They’re very knowledgeable about the menu.” — and plans out the offerings a week in advance. “We always try to have a fish and a protein or a pasta that can be made vegetarian,” Mathias says. “We think about the season, what the farmers have, and how that fits into our areas of focus. We try to do it at least a week in advance, but anything can happen — a delivery doesn’t show, or it rains and the farmer doesn’t have strawberries.”
Putting together the menus for the week is a team effort, and the cooks are assigned different categories to dream up dishes for the next week. “I might assign one person an appetizer and entrée and on Saturdays the chef de cuisine writes down all the ideas and gives them to me,” she says. “I look at everything and come up with menus from the ideas. I think coming into work knowing that the menu changes every day is exciting. It’s definitely made me excited for nine years.”
Mathias says that offering a daily fish preparation “happened organically” but she sees it as fitting into people’s changing diets. “I think there are more and more people getting away from eating beef and pork,” she says. “If people are not vegetarian, they’re pescatarian.”
On our visit, the white fish was served over a paprika sauce with blistered peppers and onions. Our other entrée was crisped-up pieces of lavender-roasted chicken atop green vegetables. To start, we had a tomato salad with a trio of oeufs-mayo with chervil and a bowl of mussels in anchovy broth. A ricotta tart and scoop of cinnamon ice cream finished things off. To go with the food, you can order wines by the bottle or glass from the terrific Old World-focused wine list, but we had our server put together a full slate of pairings for $65.
Mathias says that while she’ll repeat some dishes, “it’s usually not more than once in a couple of months. Sometimes we do things once a season, like the French onion soup, which takes two days to make. In summertime, it’s easier to not repeat since there is such an abundance.” Signatures include chilled soups like ajo blanco, a Spanish almond and garlic soup, and pissaladière, an onion and anchovy tart.
The restaurant, which seats 36 people inside over two small floors and about two dozen more outside when the weather permits (“this time of the year it can rain at the drop of a hat, so it can be dicey”), is located in an 1835 house down an alley on a side street. Chez Nous has wooden floors, a fireplace, a little bar, and a wooden staircase leading to tables upstairs. It feels homey and historic, but you could also call it rustic, which is how Mathias describes the cuisine. “There aren't any bells or whistles to the style of food we cook,” she says. “It's very much what you’d have if you went to somebody’s house. If we have chicken, it’s just roasted chicken. It’s nothing fancy; it’s just made with really good ingredients.”
Chez Nous, 6 Payne Ct, Charleston, SC
Seaside Getaway: Charleston restaurateur Brooks Reitz, author of A Small and Simple Thing, wrote a guest post for Yolo Intel where he shared one of his favorite places to stay along the South Carolina coast.
Following the River: Writer Ashlea Halpern explores the Upper Mississippi River for Midwest Living and finds a century-old bakery making Bavarian cream donuts in Minnesota and a general store serving old-fashioned sour cream raisin pies in Wisconsin.
Mountain Retreat: In Garden & Gun, writer Kristin Luna shares a few peaceful jumping-off points for folks looking to visit the Great Smoky Mountains but avoid the crush of summer tourists.
Ride the Rails: “Sleeper trains are having a moment,” writes Marianna Cerini in Condé Nast Traveler. She shares five sleeper trains that are perfect for the slow-travel vacation.
Big Sky Brews: On a recent visit to Missoula, Montana, The Oregonian’s Andre Meunier checked in on five breweries that are worth your attention. The New England IPAs at Draught Works Brewery are calling our name.
— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
Chez Nous is just one of the places we love in Charleston. You can find more of our picks for the area in our Field Guide to Charleston, a digital dining guide formatted specially for your phone. During the month of August, paid subscribers can snag a complimentary download on our website — just use the code CRABRICE at checkout.
In September, we’re headed to our next featured destination of Portland, Maine, one of the best small cities for eating and drinking. We just returned from our latest visit, and we’ll be sharing our favorite spots for lobster rolls and fresh oysters, along with recommendations for bagels, cocktails, hot dogs, and more.