![]() “You look at the number of restaurants and the amount of people who are coming and the size of the talent pool, and it doesn’t add up anymore,” Mr. Next door at Minero, the Mexican restaurant he started, a sandwich board on the street beckons customers with the promise of tequila and TV, not the nixtamalized masa handmade from heirloom corn. Now the only beet dish on the menu is a salad dressed in raspberry vinaigrette. Brock helped reinvent in 2006, used to feature dishes like his beet au poivre, in which the vegetable was pressure-cooked, dehydrated and coated in peppercorns so it presented like dry-aged New York strip steak. McCrady’s, a historic restaurant that Mr. Husk has spawned sister restaurants in Greenville, S.C., and Nashville, neither of which he is involved with anymore. Brock once presided over have changed, too, even though the same restaurant group still owns them. It has held the top spot on Travel & Leisure magazine’s best-cities list for six years in a row.Īs a result, the city is in the middle of the biggest hotel and restaurant boom in its history. Southern Living readers picked it as the South’s best city for 2019. For eight years in a row, the city has topped Condé Nast Traveler’s list of the best small American cities. Dupree helped start in 2006, packs in 30,000 people each year, and is so popular that NBC’s “Today” show broadcast live from the event in March. The Charleston Wine & Food Festival, which Ms. The feel-good machine doesn’t seem to stop. Even on a weekday night, the city seems filled with bachelorettes tumbling out of Uber cars, culinary tourists angling for tables and wide-eyed cruise ship passengers, 225,000 of whom arrived in 2018. More than seven million tourists a year crowd Charleston’s charming streets, some with homes that date to the early 1700s. ![]() To say they succeeded is an understatement. Civic leaders turned with new dedication to tourism. When Hominy Grill opened in 1996, the city’s Navy base and shipyard was closing. He is one of many Charlestonians who complain that the city is crowded with concept restaurants serving $18 cocktails and expensive, mediocre interpretations of Lowcountry standards. “The locals of Charleston have been pushed to the wayside, the black locals and the white locals, for this new wave of tourists and people moving here.” “We lost our culinary identity, and I am not just talking about Gullah Geechee but about the whole Lowcountry cuisine,” Mr. His ancestors come from a Gullah Geechee community in Wando, outside Charleston. Dennis, a chef whose cooking centers on the Gullah Geechee food traditions developed by West Africans who were enslaved along the southeastern Atlantic coast. “I don’t know what the city is right now,” said B.J. At least 100,000 captured Africans passed through Charleston Harbor on their way to being sold as slaves. ![]() Brock and Hominy Grill have turned up the heat on a discussion that was already brewing in Charleston, a jewel-box city built on hospitality and rice culture but also on a brutal history as the nation’s capital of the slave trade. He came close, leading Southern food into a new chapter begun by Hominy Grill, the original Watershed restaurant in Atlanta, and before them, Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Ala., and Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, N.C. Brock opened Husk in 2010 with the swagger of a prizefighter, promising to show that Southern cuisine was the greatest in the world. It closed in the same month that the chef Sean Brock officially severed all ties to the restaurants that had vaulted him to national fame, including McCrady’s and especially Husk, where he drilled down into the African roots of Southern agriculture and made a religion out of cast-iron cornbread. ![]() By itself, the closing of a 23-year-old restaurant in a city whose dining culture stretches back to the George Washington administration doesn’t signify the death of anything other than a place whose chef and owner, Robert Stehling, 55, was ready to end a good run and move on to something that didn’t require as much effort.īut Hominy Grill was a seminal place, a bastion of Lowcountry cooking that helped turn this city into a culinary destination.
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