How Charleston became a fine-dining destination

Ride down any of the main streets of downtown Charleston in the evening and spot clusters of people on the sidewalks peering closely at buildings.

Appreciating the architectural richness of the Holy City?

Probably not. More likely mesmerized by menus.

That would've been a fairly rare sight when Franz Meier came to Charleston in the mid-1970s.

Thirty-five years ago, downtown was hardly the bustling dining scene it is today, with restaurants beckoning from nearly every commercial block between Broad and Spring streets.

A Charleston Wine + Food Festival would've been unimaginable, with renowned chefs from across the country traveling here to work with equally renowned chefs of the Lowcountry.

There was little talk of Charleston being a dining "destination," no bragging rights like back-to-back James Beard winners or restaurant walls glittering with Diamond and Star plaques from AAA and Mobil.

Fine dining was available, but nothing like it is in 2010.

Meier was one of the first of a new generation of restaurateurs who would make the city, as the late New York Times editor R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr. predicted in 2006, "one of the South's important culinary capitals -- a worthy rival, if on a smaller scale, for New Orleans."

The German-born Meier remembers when one of the present-day restaurant hubs was a bomb, and not in the "awesome" sense.

"East Bay Street looked like Berlin after the war," he says. The building that would become Magnolias "had windows knocked out and debris inside."

Deidre Schipani, Post and Courier restaurant critic, was a regular visitor to Charleston for years before moving here five years ago. She, too, recalls a vastly different landscape before revitalization revved up in the 1980s.

"The approach into the city was somewhat devastating, there was a sense of a lot of decay, that you were definitely in a fringe area. Vendue was still a warehouse district."

Today, the French Quarter area is packed with shops, galleries and several of the city's toniest restaurants: Cypress, Robert's, Magnolias, SNOB, High Cotton, Grill 225. Meanwhile, "white tablecloth" dining has spread to every commercial corridor downtown and spilled beyond the peninsula -- east, west and north.

A new colony

Thirty years ago, the Schipanis never ventured off the peninsula in search of top-notch food. "The fine-dining experience and the Charleston dining experience was more formal than what it is now," she says. "It was associated with a certain level of service, process and procedure, and a 'look.' "

Meier tapped into that scene in 1976, when he and two partners, Chris Weihs and Harry Waddington, bought the Colony House on Prioleau Street.

Weihs, also from Germany, and Meier had been working in food and beverage on Hilton Head Island; Waddington was a bar manager at the Navy officers' club in Charleston.

The change in ownership marked the genesis of what Kathy Britzius, director of the Greater Charleston Restaurant Association, calls the "European backbone" of Charleston dining. While Perdita's, at Exchange and Prioleau streets, already boasted a Council of Paris Medal of Honor and a national reputation, the new Colony House soon would turn haute cuisine in Charleston on its head.

Robert Dickson worked in the kitchen for six months before opening his own restaurant in the Rainbow Market and claiming fame as Charleston's "singing chef."

The Colony House partners introduced a continental menu that emphasized imported foods, not Lowcountry. "They saw it as a need to upgrade," Dickson says. "When they actually did it, they realized the locals liked what they had been getting. Business fell off a lot."

"We had a revolution on our hands," says Meier, who left the restaurant business in 1994 but still lives in Mount Pleasant.

The partners regrouped, which led to the opening of the Wine Cellar. It was a restaurant-within-a-restaurant, a room in the Colony House devoted to French cooking and fine wines. A six-course meal was offered for $17.50.

"We couldn't use a sledgehammer, we had to slowly educate," Meier says. "The thought was that we could afford to experiment with the Wine Cellar. We felt we had a good chance of making it successful, and that's exactly what happened."

Within a few years, the European influence had spread. Serge Claire opened Marianne on Meeting Street, and another French chef, Philippe Million, opened a restaurant of the same name in the building that was home to McCrady's Tavern on Unity Alley.

Britzius, who has been with the association for a quarter-century, says the time was ripe for Charleston.

"In the early years, we would say all the time we would make it a dining destination. You've got a beautiful city, great weather and people love to eat. It was that drive to be on the cutting edge like other places."

The late '70s was the "tipping point," says longtime restaurateur Dick Elliott. The Lowcountry began seeing an influx of new people with more diverse tastes.

The development of barrier island resorts such as Hilton Head, Kiawah Island and Wild Dunes was a factor. But "Spoleto was the capper," he says.

"It brought people who had familiarity with fine dining in other places," Elliott says. "They created a demand. Some of them looked around and said there's nothing here (restaurants), so I think I'll start one."

Building blocks

The next decade produced two agents of change that would set the table for explosive restaurant growth in the 1990s.

One was the Southern Division of Johnson & Wales College. It took up residence in 1984 in the old Cigar Factory, then called the Charleston Business and Technology Center, and began offering its culinary arts programs to civilians. For three years prior, the college's programs had been available locally only to military personnel.

Enrollment doubled to 140 students by the second year. Most worked in the local hospitality industry while in school and were a pipeline of workers for local kitchens.

"If there was moment in time that shifted the compass of dining in Charleston, it was with Johnson & Wales coming to the community," says Schipani.

"It allowed the restaurants to take risks. I think people had a lot of confidence in the Johnson & Wales program. It was a reliable skill set," she says.

Around the same time, ground was being broken in the block bordered by Market, King, Hasell and Meeting streets. Charleston Place, a $78 million hotel and retail project, rose from a huge, sandy lot where a JCPenney once stood. From the day it opened in 1986, Charleston Place became the commercial heart of the city and energized redevelopment of surrounding blocks.

Downtown began to flower.

Meier gives a large chunk of credit to the mayor.

"Joe Riley's vision had an enormous impact on what happened to Charleston, particularly his appreciation of the arts. Bringing Spoleto was a major move. Bringing Charleston Place was critical."

Echoes Donald Barickman, founding chef of Magnolias: "Charleston Place really opened the eyes for real estate and the refurbishing of these shells of buildings. Every time a building was renovated, it helped Charleston become more of a destination.

"Charleston wouldn't be what it is without the Preservation Society, the most well-preserved city in the nation," Barickman adds.

Conceptual moves

Meanwhile, Meier and company hatched a new restaurant in the space that had housed the venerable Perdita's. Carolina's opened its door in 1987 and immediately became the talk of the town.

It was the first local restaurant to feature an open kitchen, an idea Meier had picked up from California.

Elliott says Carolina's was most unusual for Charleston.

"It was a New York-style restaurant. It was hip. The decor was put together by a wonderful architect, Stan Topol. It was a melding of contemporary and Charleston influences. It was the place to be."

Dickson also says Carolina's was a breakthrough. "It was probably the most modern interior to date when it opened. When I walked in there, I didn't believe it was Charleston. They took a whole new approach."

But the rebirth of Charleston was about to be aborted, at least temporarily. Hurricane Hugo came calling on Sept. 21, 1989, lashing the Lowcountry with 135-mph winds and washing through downtown with 15 feet of seawater.

The Category 4 storm was devastating but eventually revealed a silver lining.

"It destroyed a lot, but a lot of things were rebuilt better than before," Meier says.

Elliott thinks the successful revitalization of Charleston after Hugo set the stage for "the dynamic growth you saw in the late 1990s and early 2000."

Coincidentally, Elliott had begun negotiations to buy the Colony House in September 1989. Then a textile executive and lawyer, he became a restaurateur as the old decade gave way to a new one.

Elliott represented a new breed of restaurant owners in Charleston: businessmen who had no prior experience in the industry but who sniffed opportunity.

"I was not a gourmand and wine connoisseur, but I was fascinated by the business of restaurants," he says.

Auto dealer Tom Parsell was another, teaming with chef Barickman to open Magnolias the same year.

"More and more businessmen were investing in chefs who had proven themselves and started a partnership, sticking their toes in the water to see," says Barickman.

Parsell and Barickman went on to open Blossom and Cypress restaurants near Magnolias on East Bay Street.

A new concept also was beginning to jell among downtown restaurants. Although Louis Osteen laid the foundation at Louis' Charleston Grill, Magnolias was the first to give it a name: Uptown Down South. It was Southern ingredients and cooking, often with a contemporary twist, such as Barickman's collard green egg rolls.

Southwestern and California cuisines already were proving to be popular nationwide, the chef says. "I think restaurateurs in Charleston realized there was a void for new cuisine in the South."

Elliott latched on to Southern food champion Frank Lee, the chef at Wild Dunes who had trained in acclaimed American-French restaurants in Chicago and Washington. Lee was a Carolina native who sported a baseball cap, not a toque.

After Elliott sold the Colony House, he, Lee and David Marconi partnered in Maverick Southern Kitchens. Slightly North of Broad, or SNOB, at East Bay and Faber streets was its flagship from Day One.

"We began to see a real stretching going on" in local menus, says Elliott. "Look at the menus back then and see the use of Southern things, but clearly some Asian influence" as well as French.

Better ingredients also were available to chefs. In the early days of Robert's, "produce was nil," Dickson laments. "I served yellow squash for years. You couldn't always get zucchini." Food distribution was limited to one or two purveyors.

By the 1990s, overnight shipping meant fresh or specialty foodstuff such as microgreens or imported fish could be delivered to a restaurant's doorstep. Gradually, locally grown food became a badge of honor, mirroring a national trend.

In the Lowcountry, the farm-to-table movement started as chefs tried to get their hands on local produce -- tomatoes, greens and Wadmalaw sweet onions -- before they got boxed up and shipped to New York, Barickman says. The thinking was, "Can't we keep some of these and put them on a pedestal?"

"They (the chefs) all really embraced the local foodstuff, says Schipani.

Schipani says that resonated with Charlestonians, who never abandoned their taste for the native cuisine. "I really think people here ate collards in and collards out, ate grits in and grits out."

While restaurants such as Circa 1886, SNOB, Blossom and Magnolias provided "the imprint of the Southern dining experience," says Schipani, local hotels also contributed greatly to Charleston's cachet.

"A lot of Americans don't look to hotels for fine dining experiences; it's unusual," she says. While not uncommon in Europe, "Here it is an obstacle."

However, "nobody thinks twice about going into our hotels" for outstanding dining, including Charleston Grill at Charleston Place, Peninsula Grill in the Planters Inn on North Market Street or Grill 225 in the Market Pavilion Hotel on East Bay Street.

The addition of thousands of hotel rooms also fueled growth, restaurateurs say. Between 1995 and 2000, some 2,600 new hotel rooms came online in Charleston County.

"If you create enough beds, restaurants follow inevitably," says Meier.

Growing our own

Another, but more subtle, development also took root: Charleston started growing its own chefs.

Elliott, for one, realized that kitchens were lucky to hang on to employees for two years. "I saw that happening, and that's contrary to my sense of good business."

Instead of recruiting, Elliott and Lee focused on grooming staff from within, such as Anthony Gray of High Cotton on East Bay, who just marked his 11th anniversary as chef.

A "family tree" of chefs is visible, says Schipani. "You can look at a property and see how many people Frank Lee has mentored. Robert Carter (Peninsula Grill) must be the grandfather of mentoring."

The presence of Johnson & Wales brought a lot of culinary people to study in Charleston, says Elliott, and the students provided a solid work force for the restaurants. "But the fact of the matter is, most of the graduates went elsewhere."

Johnson & Wales University left Charleston completely in 2006 for a new campus in Charlotte. But the state already had acted to fill the void. A state-of-the art Culinary Institute of Charleston was built at Trident Technical College and opened in 2005.

"We're now seeing Trident Tech develop a different kind of person who is local," says Elliott. "There's a lot of talent around, and the (Culinary Institute) is giving them the fundamentals."

Beyond 2010

What the future holds for the local restaurant industry is anybody's guess and largely dependent on the economy, most agree.

"It will be expanding, but probably at a slower pace," says Meier. He sees Charleston's Neck Area as a potential opportunity and says Mount Pleasant has a lot of growing to do.

Dickson, who will retire in June, thinks high-end dining in Charleston may have reached its max for now.

"We all cook the same products," he says, so future restaurants may be forced to find a "theme." "We're at a growth stunt for more variety," he says.

Elliott, too, says significant growth in fine dining may be at its limit, at least on the peninsula.

But, "I think we'll continue to see an evolution because the tastes of people change and personalties come and go."

Teresa Taylor is the food editor. Reach her at food@postandcourier.com.