Charleston, SCSouthern

Sean Brock's Queen Street restaurant put a strict rule at the center of its cooking: if it did not come from the South, it does not come through the door. The daily menu changes with the Southern harvest, and Garden and Gun points to the Sunday brunch of quail and johnnycakes. The MICHELIN Guide listed it as Recommended in 2025. It remains a touchstone for the New Southern movement that followed its 2010 opening.

A family-run soul-food kitchen in North Charleston, women-led for decades and a 2017 James Beard America's Classics honoree. The steam-table lineup that Garden and Gun singles out runs to okra soup, fried pork chops, red rice and lima beans, ladled out cafeteria-style at lunch. Go early, since the favorite dishes sell out and the doors close in the afternoon. It is Lowcountry home cooking held to a standard.

A soul-food institution on the Eastside that has fed the neighborhood for decades. Garden and Gun points to the smothered pork chop, lightly breaded under a blanket of smooth gravy, and the kitchen is also known for crab rice, shark steak and big down-home breakfasts. It sits on the Charleston City Paper Top 50. Come for an early lunch and order the pork chop.

Chef Kevin Johnson has cooked a vegetable-forward, seasonal Lowcountry menu on Cannon Street since 2011. Garden and Gun points twice to the Lowcountry seafood pilau, a mess of Carolina Gold rice, field peas, clams, shrimp and fish, as the dish to order. The dining room roasts and preserves much of what it serves, and a wood oven anchors the kitchen. Book ahead for a weekend table.

A fixture in a converted Queen Street Victorian since 1976, and the kind of place the Post and Courier says reads like a roll call of Charleston classics. Fried green tomatoes, shrimp and grits, chicken and waffles and the buttermilk biscuits are the orders. It runs breakfast through dinner in a warren of porch and parlor rooms. Ask for a porch table and start with the biscuits.