167 Raw moved from a tiny room at 289 East Bay Street, now 167 Sushi Bar, to a long narrow 19th century building on King Street with original brick walls and a walnut bar. It takes no reservations. City Paper readers voted it Best Oysters and Best Raw Bar in 2026, and on r/Charleston the tuna burger is the dish people name.
167 Sushi Bar is the sushi and yakitori room from the 167 Raw group, in the East Bay Street storefront where 167 Raw itself began before moving to King Street.
39 Rue de Jean is a French cafe, brasserie and bar on John Street just off Upper King, with exposed brick, a patio and a private room upstairs. Explore Charleston reported in spring 2026 that it was marking its 25th anniversary with themed wine dinners and expanded lunch. It belongs to Holy City Hospitality, a Charleston group, and City Paper readers voted it Best French in 2026.
82 Queen is the Lowcountry restaurant on Queen Street that City Paper readers voted Best She-Crab Soup in 2026. The top answer in a r/Charleston she-crab soup thread agrees. Opinion on the rest is split: it is offered as the most Charleston restaurant in one thread, and in the same thread a commenter says it is not as good as its reputation.
BellyUp! Charleston / Over 50
Good places to eat and drink in Charleston, minus the nightclubs. When a spot gets loud later or draws a lot of kids, the card tells you.
41 spots
The Cantonese sister of Kwei Fei, from Tina and David Schuttenberg. Explore Charleston says more than half the dishes are vegetarian or vegan-friendly: scallion oil noodles and Shanghai-style shumai among the dim sum, and family-style General Tso's, sweet and sour and black pepper dishes all available with tofu.
Courtney Colangelo started Cakette in her home kitchen during maternity leave, baking birthday cakes for friends, then ran pop-ups ... including a Friday tent outside Prophet Coffee ... before opening the bakeshop at Durant Avenue and Simms Street. She writes that Cakette exists in part to make maternal leadership visible in the independent restaurant business. The Post and Courier notes its vegan and gluten-free pastries. It is open four mornings a week.
An upstairs room at the beach with no ground-floor dining room to walk past. City Paper's Top 50 for summer 2026 says chef and owner Ken Vedrinski, formerly of the downtown restaurant Trattoria Lucca, built a second-story dining room with brick walls, reclaimed wood floors and, in what the paper calls a rarity for the Lowcountry, floor-to-ceiling windows on the Atlantic. Handmade pasta anchors the menu, including ricotta gnudi with mushrooms and guanciale.
CudaCo. is a seafood market with a small kitchen, founded by chef Shaun Brian and seafood distributor Chris John around turning overlooked fish into good eating. The site says they want to 'become a catalyst for change in the seafood industry'. Seating is limited indoors with a picnic area outside. In 2025 the owners added a crudo bar on Folly Road with crudos, ceviches and wine, per the Post and Courier.
Edison is owned and run by husband and wife Chef Joel and Chelsea Lucas, and the site says it is now in its tenth year on James Island. The menu is seasonal and changes. Dinner only, with a shaded patio the site calls secluded.
Fin & Crab is the upstairs restaurant at the City Marina that was the Marina Variety Store, a breakfast spot started in the 1960s by 'Big Mike' Altine. Cindy and James Capps, who own Rusty Hooks Dockside Grill in Southport, North Carolina, bought it in November 2025 and reopened on 23 January 2026. Much of the staff stayed, including longtime cook Earl Felder, whose pancakes are still on the menu. Booths were swapped for tables to open the water views. Salty Mike's, the dive bar downstairs, reopened the same day.
Chef Frank Kline owns and runs Grace & Grit, which he opened in August 2017. The kitchen works from local seafood and produce, and its calling card is the Grit Flight, a sampler of the house grits. Tables sit inside or under the oaks on a dog-friendly patio.
Allison Anspach opened Grit Bakery in May 2025 on the ground floor of the Meeting Street Lofts. Her sourdough uses a six-year-old starter, small-batch flour milled near Asheville and a 36 to 48 hour ferment. She also bakes for The Archer next door, Sightsee Shop and City Lights Eastside, and her pastries are sold at Luther's Market.
Harken is a cafe and bakery on Queen Street run by owners the site names as Greer and Cameron. The bakery case is built around a biscuit collection, including a ricotta biscuit, plus cookies and bars.
A coffee bar and vintage clothing shop in the back of Reynolds Laundry, opened in June 2025 by Tyler and Kennedy Troyer, who moved from Boone, North Carolina to join their friends Erin and Jon Carpenter, the laundromat's owners. The laundromat was on The Kelly Clarkson Show in April 2025. Drinks include a strawberry shortcake latte and a pistachio matcha, some poured into cowboy boot glasses, with Counter Culture beans.
A small Folly Beach room with a courtyard out back that the street does not show. The saloon quotes Charleston Magazine on its own site: 'a haven for vegetarians, vegans and omnivores alike, with sidewalk booths and a sunny back courtyard'. City Paper's Top 50 for summer 2026 says co-owner and chef Lesley Carroll rotates the menu with the seasons, with dishes such as red curry mac and cheese and Tom Kha Gai gnocchi. The Post and Courier's food editor calls it his Folly Beach favorite.
Joey Sakran moved from upstate New York in 2008, spent nearly two decades at Boeing, and retired to open the pizzeria he had wanted, with his daughter Rebecca, in December 2025. It sells New York slices and 14 to 18 inch pies, garlic knots, fried ravioli and meatballs from a family recipe. His brother Jason Sakran co-owns Bon Banh Mi and served on Charleston City Council. It is in the Shoppes at Montague Corners.
The venue calls it 'Chinatown BBQ made with Southern Smoke': Chinese roasted and chopped meats given what it calls a gentle smoke. Owners Shuai and Corrie Wang also run Jackrabbit Filly; the venue says a fire closed King four months after it opened and that Shuai was then cast on Top Chef season 22. Wang means King in Chinese, which is where the name comes from. The venue lists Bon Appetit's Best New Restaurants 2024. Counter service, first come first served. It says it has no high chairs but a few booster seats. Wood species not stated; not whole hog.
A Sichuan kitchen attached to a music hall. City Paper's Top 50 for summer 2026 says it is set next door to the Charleston Pour House in the space once occupied by The Lot, and that nothing about it is subtle, from the food to the music to the chef. The menu is sorted into blocks labeled 'Loud', 'Hot' and 'Vibes', and the paper recommends starting with the crescent dumplings.
Chef and owner Patrick Owens opened Langdon's in 2003, and it has stayed a dinner-only fine dining room in the Shelmore Village shops since. The site describes classic fine dining that fuses Lowcountry cooking with wider influences. It sits under Owens Dining Group, which also runs Opal in Mount Pleasant.
Ma'am Saab is a Pakistani restaurant owned by Maryam Ghaznavi and Raheel Gauba, at the Meeting Street corner that long held Jestine's Kitchen. The venue says its founder is from Karachi. Charleston City Paper readers have voted it Best Indian/Pakistani in 2024, 2025 and 2026, and it took part in Charleston Wine + Food in 2026. The menu marks gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan dishes.
Chef Maryam Ghaznavi and her husband Raheel Gauba, co-owner and creative director, call Malika the first Pakistani restaurant in South Carolina. Maryam was born in Pakistan and grew up as her family's 'chief taste tester'; the couple met in Canada and later moved to the Lowcountry. They started with a pop-up at The Daily in 2019 and opened Ma'am Saab at Workshop in 2020 before Malika. The menu is Pakistani street food: biryanis, karahis, saags and kababs.
Chef Raul Sanchez has cooked around Charleston for more than 15 years, including at R. Kitchen. In February 2026 he moved Maya del Sol from Reynolds Avenue near the old naval base to a space behind The Starlight Motor Inn on Rivers Avenue, with a handful of tables and a long chef's counter facing an open kitchen. Lunch is tacos, burritos and daily specials ... at night there are two seatings of a five-course menu built on family recipes, with occasional Indian and Chinese dinners. Charleston City Paper keeps it in its Top 50.
A Hampton Park neighborhood bar north of the Crosstown, away from the visitor streets. City Paper named it the 2026 Best of Charleston winner for Best Meal Value, and its Fig Lebowski burger ... whipped feta, bourbon onion fig jam and crispy prosciutto ... won the most creative category in the paper's 2026 Burger Throwdown. Owner Mike Tronoski told the paper the kitchen runs a different burger special every day.
Open late. Go earlier if you want a calmer room.
A neighborhood coffee shop with a whole wall of board and card games. The Post and Courier says owners Sarah Reuter and Marshall Tyers collect the games from thrift stores, yard sales and auctions, and suggests a latte for the adult and a hot chocolate for the child over Guess Who? or Trouble.
A family owned and run Southern restaurant on Coleman Boulevard serving breakfast, lunch, supper and weekend brunch, walk-ins only. Its signature is Ashleigh's Shrimp & Grits, which the restaurant says has been voted Best Shrimp & Grits ten years running. The family has since opened a second restaurant in Summerville's Nexton and runs a food truck in Moncks Corner.
Wood-cooked whole hog is the center of the menu. Pitmaster Hector Garate was born in Puerto Rico and the venue says he specializes in beef cheeks, brisket, whole hog and house-made sausage, cooks on an offset smoker he built himself, and uses only local meats (it names Brasstown Beef, Creekstone Farms and Peculiar Pig Farms). The name honors his grandmother, who grew up on a cattle ranch. Destination BBQ adds that the hog is seasoned with Puerto Rican influences, that the South Carolina-style hash and rice is made from smoked hog heads, and that Palmira began as a pop-up. Wood species and sauce tradition are not stated on the pages fetched.
A bar inside a bookshop on a residential corner. The Post and Courier (17 May 2024) wrote that when you walk into the corner store at 50 Bogard Street there is a long wooden bar with black barstools to the left and bookshelves of titles for sale to the right. Co-owners Jenny Ferrara and her husband, Michael Bourke, longtime Charleston residents, opened it in 2024 because they like to read while having a drink and wanted to build a little clubhouse. On 11 June 2026 the paper reported it ranked sixth in USA Today's 2026 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for independent bookstores, the only South Carolina shop on the list. It draws people before and after dinner at Chubby Fish, Vern's and Bistronomy by Nico.
Dat and Phuong Nguyen both left Vietnam, met in Belgium at a Vietnamese New Year celebration in 1986, and came to the United States in 2007. Dat worked at H&L Asian Market and opened Pho #1 inside it before the couple moved into their own room on Rivers Avenue in 2012, in the former Raul's Taqueria. When The Post and Courier profiled them in 2022 the menu ran to 79 dishes, all under $13 ... pho, banh xeo, egg rolls and bun.
Bryson and Savanna Purcell started Prophet serving coffee out of a converted 1996 Subaru Sambar. Bryson, from Anderson, had spent seven years leading worship at a local church. They opened a tiny commuter cafe at 4411 Spruill Avenue in late 2023 and expanded in June 2025 into the former Wind and Waves Brewing space a few doors up. The Post and Courier's July 2026 guide lists it for coffee and baked goods.
A cafe inside a farm market on Johns Island's Main Road. The owners describe Stono Market & Tomato Shed Cafe as locally owned and run, under a canopy of live oaks, with lunch at the Tomato Shed and supper three nights a week. The market side sells sauces, stone-ground grits, local honey, jams and crafts, many from local makers.
Jonathan Roth, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who cooked in Switzerland, opened Sweet Palm with his wife Aylin in October 2025. It is a quick-serve cafe that makes its food in house, from breakfast sandwiches and burritos to cinnamon rolls and topped croissants. The beans come from Foresight Coffee Roasters in Mount Pleasant.
The Mount Pleasant room of Anthony DiBernardo's all-wood barbecue group. The venue says it smokes over hickory, oak and other hardwoods; the menu's five sauces are sweet red, vinegar, Carolina mustard, Alabama white and jalapeno.
The original Swig & Swine. Pitmaster and owner Anthony DiBernardo came to the Lowcountry with the US Navy, cooked on the submarine USS Batfish, opened Swig & Swine in 2013 and became sole owner in 2019. The venue says it smokes over 'high-quality hickory, oak, and other hardwoods'. Its menu lists five sauces ... sweet red, vinegar, Carolina mustard, Alabama white and jalapeno ... plus hash and rice. Discover South Carolina says DiBernardo smokes whole hogs for up to 16 hours; Destination BBQ describes whole hog on Thursdays.
A butcher shop that turns into a dining room once a week. On Friday evenings Ted's serves a featured menu or custom steak house dinners and gives 10 percent of the Friday dinner proceeds to a quarterly local charity partner, with reservations recommended for dine-in and take-out. The shop says Ted was among the Charleston Wine + Food Festival's 2026 Community Impact Award honorees, recognized at a luncheon on 27 January 2026, and that Real Simple consulted him for its July 2026 steak grilling article.
Owner and executive chef Chris Stewart is an eighth generation Alabama native who learned to cook from his grandmother, who ran a meat and three in Birmingham through the Depression. The dishes he grew up on, country fried steak, fried chicken, deviled eggs, pies and cobblers, turn up on the menu. Locals name it more than any other room when asked for a good dinner that is not downtown prices.
Kimana Littleflower, a longtime Charleston food and beverage professional, opened The Junction in 2015 because she saw a need for something different in the Park Circle community she calls home. The plan was breakfast all day, sandwiches, an eclectic brunch menu and cocktails. Charleston City Paper readers voted it Best North Charleston Brunch in Best of Charleston 2026.
Chef and owner Ben Berryhill's restaurant, which the site calls 'the intersection of South by Southwest' ... Southern cooking crossed with his Texan background. It bills itself as the islanders' hangout, with a bar that opens at four and a Sunday brunch.
Patty Lamond's restaurant in the Harris Teeter shopping center on Palm Boulevard, away from Front Beach. Moultrie News called her a 10-year restaurateur in March 2026 and reported her saying it took years to build the business and that locals carry it through the winter.
A bar in a small building behind a roadside Southern restaurant, a few miles from the Ravenel line. The Post and Courier (16 April 2024) described it as a neighborhood hideout in a small structure behind Angel Oak Restaurant, with specialty cocktails, live music and most of the restaurant's food menu. Chef Jay Kees, a Culinary Institute of America graduate from Mississippi, opened the restaurant with his wife, Nicole, in 2012 and follows what the paper called a plow-to-plate philosophy using Johns Island farms. The restaurant's own site tells guests they can 'enjoy the speakeasy bar behind the restaurant'.
Live music some nights. Go before the band starts if you want to talk.
A wine bar in a house, not a storefront. The Post and Courier's 2026 itinerary (14 January 2026) describes it as tucked inside a 150-plus-year-old single house in Cannonborough-Elliotborough, steps from Chez Nous and Chubby Fish. Sommelier Matthew Conway opened it in October 2021 with his wife, Carissa. Micah Pearson runs the food menu. The same owners run The Press, a burrito window next door.
Owners Shawn and Gabriella have more than 25 years in restaurants between them ... Shawn managed Bennett's Calabash Seafood in Myrtle Beach for 15 years. The room is bright and tropical, the sauces are made in house, and Charleston City Paper's 2017 taco crawl sent people here for taco cecina, salted dried beef. It has grown into a small local group with rooms in Summerville.
Bethany and Dano Heinze opened Vern's in 2022 in a converted corner grocery store at Bogard and Ashe streets, according to The Post and Courier. Dano Heinze is the chef-owner. The room is known for escargot with tarragon and Gruyère, handmade pastas, roast chicken and house sourdough. It earned One MICHELIN Star in the inaugural American South guide on 3 November 2025, with the food and the wine program both cited in local coverage.
Nick and Kelly Ruhotina, the couple behind Nick's German Kitchen in Mount Pleasant, opened Vinea on 18 September 2025 in the space Sermet's Courtyard held for years. Sermet Aslan had retired; the Ruhotinas kept the layout and some of his artwork as a tribute. The Post and Courier reported housemade pasta, fish from local purveyors and lamb, beef and veal dishes, with the menu rotating every couple of weeks.
Workmen's Cafe is Angie Bellinger's meat-and-three on James Island. The Post and Courier lists pork chops and lima beans, meatloaf, ribs and fried chicken, served weekday lunch only. Explore Charleston includes it on its list of places to eat Gullah cuisine, and the Southern Foodways Alliance made a short film about Bellinger and the cafe.
Xiao Bao Biscuit has been at the corner of Rutledge and Spring since 2012, in a former gas station, and the venue still calls it the origin location. The Post and Courier credits Josh Walker, Duolan Walker-Li and Joey Ryan with opening it. The kitchen pulls from Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Japanese cooking, and the okonomiyaki is the dish most often named. The house rule is on the site in capitals: no reservations, just come, with one large-party booking a night on a fixed shared menu. It is Recommended in the inaugural MICHELIN Guide American South.
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