If you prefer your city food tours to be more eating than walking, then the Charleston Culinary Tour is the one for you. This experience included home-style cooking, a barbecue tasting platter, fancy nachos, mac ’n cheese, a giant cupcake and more all on one street in Charleston - talk about bang for your buck!
Staff Review
Meeting at the Charleston Visitor Center, there was me, a couple from Atlanta, Georgia, and the tour guide Beth, making this essentially a private tour! Beth started with an interesting back-story on what ‘low-country cuisine’ is, and how it’s influenced by the native Americans, English, French Huguenots, and West Africans, and how these cultures all mix together to create unique and flavorsome cooking.
| Virginia's On King
Having been suitably tantalized, we left the Visitor Center towards our first stop of the tour; Virginia's On King. Here we were treated to delicious and hearty chicken and dumplings, plus green fried tomatoes and sweet cornbread - a southern staple. While we ate Beth regaled us with the history of the restaurant, and the incredible woman who inspired the style of cooking. As well as the restaurant’s past, we also discussed how the native Americans taught the British to farm on their land and which grains grew well in the climate; known as the Three Sisters of agriculture, the crops are squash, corn, and beans.
| Smoke BBQ
Full of home-style cooking and local history, we wandered further down King Street to Smoke BBQ, a relatively new establishment serving up their conceptual ‘elevated barbecue’. Run by two brothers who have years of experience in both the restaurant and cheffing business, our plate included a twice-cooked chicken wing, a slice of their signature pulled pork burger, southern-style potato salad, and one of the best coleslaws I’ve ever had. To top things off, one of the brothers, Michael Feldman, came out to talk us through the history of his food truck/restaurant enterprise, and their unique take on classic BBQ. Come back later and they’ll even give you a free shot of fire whisky!
| Victor Social Club
On the way to stop number three we had a look at Saint Matthew's Lutheran Church, the tallest building in Charleston (now and forever due to height restrictions in the city). A pretty alleyway led us to Victor Social Club, a speak-easy style bar with traditional decor and values, blasting Frank Sinatra from the ceiling. The bar itself doesn’t serve food, but there are two restaurants on either side; Michael’s and Vincent’s, seafood/steak and Italian respectively, that provide incredible food whilst you sip on gourmet cocktails (we just stuck to the water though). Whilst we waited for our plates Beth told us about how alcohol was illegal in Charleston up until 1974, and you could only buy 2 ounce bottles after that until as recently as 2004 - can you imagine!
First up was one of the biggest slices of bruschetta I’ve ever seen, on thick bread with fresh and juicy tomatoes. This was followed by sizzling home-made potato chips and an incredibly indulgent bacon macaroni cheese - and this wasn’t even the last stop on the tour. Beth accompanied our food with more fascinating stories about the history of Charleston, and how the city made its money through rice, cotton, and indigo plantations that made the owners richer than you can possibly imagine. Unfortunately severe weather wiped out the industry, so much so that the original design (or ‘recipe’, if you will) for South Carolina cotton planting was lost forever.
| Cupcake DownSouth
You may be thinking there’s no way we can possibly eat any more food, and the curators of this tour must have felt the same way, because our final stop was optional - we could have our dessert now or take a token and come back another day. Cupcake DownSouth opened its doors in 2006 and has taken the country by storm, featuring in countless news articles, TV shows and interviews in highly prestigious publications. I opted for the Peachy Keen which featured peach and cinnamon streusel (which I had to Google), vanilla cake, peach frosting and a peach candy on top. I took it home with me for a delicious and sugary late-night snack - bliss!
| Thanks for reading!
That concluded our epic culinary journey down King Street, just before we collapsed in a gluttonous stupor. I’d highly recommend this tour to anyone wanting to experience southern low-country cuisine, and lots of it, with a good portion of local history to go with it. Huge thanks to Beth for being such an incredibly knowledgeable tour guide and giving us fantastic recommendations for the rest of our stay!
