The dish

I’ve been Charleston a few times, and I can never run out of new restaurants to try there. I don’t think any city of its size is this dense with quality places to eat (and drink, both coffee and cocktails). This time around, I finally tried one of their two famous barbecue places, Lewis BBQ, which also has locations in Greenville, SC, and now Atlanta. Their ribs were some of the best I’ve ever had, with the perfect texture to the bark and the interior, sliding off the bone while still retaining some bite, and the rub has a rich brown sugar flavor. The pulled pork sandwich has maybe two servings’ worth of meat on it, also with excellent texture, although I didn’t get a lot of bark there so the flavor was more muted. The collard greens are solid, but the corn pudding is a star, almost dessert-like because it’s so rich and the corn gives it so much sweetness. It’s got to be among the top five BBQ places I’ve ever tried, although that list isn’t growing as much now that I’ve stopped eating beef and eat much less pork than I used to. (I’ve still yet to get to the other Charleston institution, Rodney Scott’s.)

Dave’s Carry Out is a tiny Black-owned shop that mostly does just one thing: fried seafood. It looks like it’s closed, or even abandoned, and the interior is bare-bones with only a few places to sit, but man is that fried flounder good. It was more than a serving’s worth, two large fillets, fried to order, perfectly crisp with plenty of seasoning. The sandwich comes with basic white bread, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. They also offer fried shrimp, red rice (which was fine), and sometimes special sides like lima beans.

I’d wanted to go to EVO, a pizzeria in North Charleston, for probably a decade or more, and finally got there on this trip. They offer wood-fired pizzas that sit somewhere between Neapolitan and New York styles, with a crispier crust than the former, and they use mostly locally grown and sourced ingredients. The pizzas are small, and the crust itself is more texture than flavor – it’s crisp, but without a whole lot of interior to it, so you don’t taste the dough very much, and it’s more a vehicle for the toppings than a part of the whole. We also got their version of a caprese salad, which was some early tomatoes (so their flavor wasn’t close to peak) with a small amount of crumbled mozzarella on top. I’d call this a disappointment, given how long I’d heard that they were one of the best pizzerias, if not the best, in Charleston.

For coffee, I went to my downtown favorite, Second State, twice, getting a pour-over once and a macchiato the other time. The pour-over was a Colombian Sidra that was fermented using the thermal shock process, so the beans are rapidly heated and cooled, described here. The barista said there were guava notes, and she wasn’t kidding – this coffee is a guava bomb, from the aroma through the first note you get on every sip. That won’t be for everyone, but I thought it was outstanding, with some more complex notes in the finish that were less overtly tropical. I also spent some time writing at Mudhouse over on King, as they have a better loose-leaf tea selection (and above-average coffee). My favorite coffee roaster in the area is Prophet up in North Charleston, but I didn’t get there on this trip.

I had lunch at Sorelle, a restaurant inspired by Italy’s all-day cafes, which has a take-away market with seating available for lunch before the tables turn over to the fine-dining dinner menu. The excellent spicy chicken Caesar sandwich isn’t actually that spicy, with a little ‘nduja in the dressing, and includes some roasted peppers and lemon, so it’s much more interesting and complex than the typical Caesar salad. The Sicilian pizza was a little disappointing, as there wasn’t much cheese on it and there was way too much garlic (a phrase I very rarely use in my life).

Portrait Coffee in Atlanta’s West End is a Black-owned roastery/café – very rare in the specialty coffee space, unfortunately – that recently did a collaboration with Big Boi to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Outkast’s Stankonia. I didn’t try that coffee, as it’s a darker roast than I typically like, but did have a lighter roast Honduran coffee that was excellent with the honeyish notes common to that region. I also loved the café space itself, which was decorated with LPs, books, and art from Black artists of the last half-century.

Portrait happens to be next door to one of Eater’s top restaurants in Atlanta, the all-vegan Tassili’s Raw Reality, which mostly sells wraps and salads built around their dressed kale, which you can get as mild, spicy,  or a mix of the two. I went for the mixed, which was just the right spice level for my tepid palate, in the South of the Border wrap, which has black-eyed pea hummus, couscous, avocadoes, and tomatoes on a chili-pepper tortilla. I got the half size, which was more than enough for a meal for me. After my first bite, I thought I’d made a huge tiny mistake; it was a little bitter, which definitely happens with raw kale if you don’t dress it properly, and seemed underseasoned. I ended up eating the whole thing, because it clearly got better the more I ate – or maybe I just got the end of it without as much dressing and other toppings in that initial taste. So if you go there, don’t give up after a bite or two. It was all good enough that I’m going to try to replicate the concept at home with my own dressings.

Moving along to Athens, I got out of the Friday night game just in time to get into Puma Yu’s right before their kitchen closed at 9:30. It’s a “non-traditional Thai” restaurant and cocktail bar in what is otherwise mostly an industrial park, with a pergola outside and a dozen or so tables inside that help wall off the distinctly un-homey vibe of the rest of the complex it’s in. I was looking for something lighter, so I ordered their spring salad and tuna crudo. The salad had mixed local greens, including chard, little gem, and spinach, with crushed peanuts, fried shallots, several herbs, chili flakes, and a tangy tamarind dressing. I’d go back just for that salad – it was ridiculously good, from the quality of the greens themselves (mostly ‘baby’ greens so they were still pretty tender) to the balance of salt, acid, and sweetness in the dressing and the shallots, to the texture contrasts from the peanuts, shallots, and the crisp greens. The tuna crudo in lemongrass vinegar and makrut lime leaf oil ended up a little overshadowed because its flavors were milder, and I probably should have eaten them in the reverse order because the acidity of the salad’s dressing ended up muting that of the tuna. The fish’s quality was superb, though. For a cocktail, I tried the Retirement Plan, which, hey, I’m 52, it’s never too early to think about retirement, right? It’s made with rhum agricole, which doesn’t always play well with mixers, along with cachaça, both spirits made from sugar cane juice (rather than molasses, like traditional rum). The drink is finished with maraschino liqueur, melon (I think honeydew), lime, and Thai basil; it was pleasantly alcoholic but not overpowering, and the Thai basil was prominent enough to keep the drink from tasting too much like a beach resort cocktail.

White Tiger is a small barbecue & burger spot in a converted house a stone’s throw south of Puma Yu’s; I zagged a little here and got the seared salmon sandwich, thanks in part to their employee’s recommendation, and the grilled vegetables of the day. The sandwich comes with cream cheese (which I omitted because that stuff is gross), capers, cucumbers, organic field greens and lemon vinaigrette dressing, on a toasted ciabatta, and my only complaint is that ciabatta isn’t strong enough for that much stuff in the middle. The salmon was dead-on medium, which is how I like it (probably more than most folks like it cooked, but I either want salmon raw or close to cooked through, not the in-between gummy-bear consistently of rare), and vegetables on top added plenty of bright acidity and salt to help balance the fattiness of the fish. The grilled vegetables will vary by season; I got primarily broccoli and cabbage, which were really smoky and a little charred to bring out some sweetness, although they needed a little acidity so I ended mixing them with some of the toppings that fell off the sandwich.

My one coffee stop in Athens was 1000 Faces, which I’d actually been to before, when I went to UGA in 2020 to see Emerson Hancock and Cole Wilcox. It’s a great space, busy both times I’ve been there, and their pour-overs are just $5.

Mama’s Boy comes up on lots of lists of the best restaurants in Athens, particularly for their biscuits. The biscuits are good, but not elite, and everything else was just okay or worse, particularly the “hashed potatoes,” which tasted like they came out of a freezer bag.