Outside of Texas and Louisiana, where crawfish are a backyard party fixture, American eaters are most likely to encounter these newly trendy critters at seafood boil houses, where they’re bagged and buttered along with lobster, shrimp and snow crab legs.

The Charleston area this year was blessed with a tremendous set of new restaurants, a pattern established back in March when Vandy Vanderwarker and Will Love opened Maison on upper King Street.

Estadio general manager Brandon Underwood is genuinely enthusiastic about sherry, which is one of the fun things to drink at Estadio. Other choices include a well-considered selection of vermouths; localized gin-and-tonics and precise cocktails, the best of which incorporate one of the afore-mentioned sherries.

By opening an upscale café celebrating a specific subset of expat Latino cuisine, Tomas and Lynda Prado have taken the Charleston restaurant scene in a different direction.

Pleasure seekers with deep pockets have become accustomed to flecked gold in their burgers and shaved truffles on their fries, but Circa 1886 chef Marc Collins may well have devised the authoritative Cinderella treatment for pimento cheese.

After a spectacular start in 2016, McCrady’s Tavern ran low on creative fuel, and this year skidded to a stop as a quasi-steakhouse, serving its final meal in July. Five weeks later, the company opened Delaney Oyster House in Marriott property Hotel Bella Grace.

Butcher & The Boar is an excellent name indeed, since it instructs patrons exactly what to order. Charcuterie and pork are the restaurant’s definite strong suits, and its lively patio is an ideal setting for enjoying them.

What’s the best macaroni-and-cheese in Charleston?

Once you start reducing cuisines to a few distinctive ingredients, it’s not too much of a stretch to draw equally pat conclusions about the people responsible for them.

Beef is not a strong suit at Herd, which has a tendency to wipe out the advantages of good raising with copious amounts of salt and strongly flavored sauces.

At the three-month-old KinFolk, brothers Joe and Kevin Nierstedt have built a menu around smoked meat, soft-serve ice cream and the sort of fried chicken that’s likely to play a leading role in wistful memories of summer.

Armando and Esmeralda Cobian's restaurant doesn’t conceal its unwavering allegiance to fresh vegetables and fruit, avocado included.

VIP Bistro late last year opened in that plain-looking Meeting Street complex hard by the Ravenel Bridge exit ramp, which for six years has been anchored by Local 616.

With the exception of James Islanders stuck in the previously barbecue-deficient area between Melvin’s Barbecue and Smoky Oak Taproom, locals probably won’t adjust their barbecue habits based on what’s served at Martin’s.

As Park Circle’s restaurant scene has flourished, proud residents have taken to declaring that there’s hardly any reason to go downtown these days. And with the arrival on the Eastside of Baker & Brewer, a fused-together version of North Charleston favorites EVO Pizza and Holy City Brewi…

At the height of Pappy Van Winkle mania, bourbon obsessives made an astounding discovery: The whiskey in bottles marked W.L. Weller 12 Year wasn’t all that different from the hard-to-get stuff.

Owned by the former chef de cuisine at The Ordinary, Maison is about the closest thing the Charleston food scene has to a workplace canteen.

The conch stew is a to-drive-for dish at Korner Kitchen in Hollywood. And, when the weather’s nice, the prime seating is on the latticed-in front patio. 

Malagon is making exceptional food, but its owners don’t want you or me to know it.

Charleston and New Orleans aren’t exactly the same, but when visitors who’ve been to The Big Easy first come to The Holy City, they’re apt to feel like they’ve found their friend’s straight-laced cousin who doesn’t cuss or fling his beer bottles on the sidewalk. The two places are united by …

Our food critic visited three Charleston restaurants when they first opened in the past year. After giving them all two stars in the first round, she revisits them to see what's improved and what stays the same.

Royal terns may fly, but Charleston area diners tend to drive, so when John and Ben Williams opened a restaurant named for the seabird, they wanted potential customers to know their cars wouldn’t be a problem.

The massive Folly Beach restaurant, which measures three dining rooms and 6,500 square feet in all, has good intentions that spawn nothing but disappointment.

There are some places where it doesn’t take a compass to know which way the culture goes. People in Miami have to go north to reach the South, and people in Seattle have to go east to find the Wild West.

Shrimp-and-grits hasn’t been a Lowcountry signature for very long, but the dish has more than made up for lost time with ubiquity.

Over the course of a year of restaurant reviewing, which translates to approximately 120 meals eaten for professional purposes, there are bound to be a few duds. Sometimes my mind will involuntarily flash back to cold and droopy squash blossoms or a mound of grated and burnt potatoes.

 For the most part, the food at Tradd's in downtown Charleston is just mildly bad.

Cast your mind back, if you can, to that moment roughly a week ago, when you were meditating on the collision of worlds Old and New, and the culinary consequences it wrought.

It’s silly to fret over people not understanding precisely what a food critic’s work entails, since it’s hardly a job that most folks hold down for a summer in college or learn about from an uncle who’s spent a lifetime in the biz. But if a genie gave me chance to correct just three fallacie…

Melfi’s is the third restaurant that Brooks Reitz and Tim Mink have opened on the short strand of Upper King Street bounded by Congress and Sumter streets

So an entrepreneur, a sommelier and a chef walk into a bar.

Folly Beach's Lowlife Bar is as spacious as a standard restaurant, but so long as it’s serving, walls only surround a portion of the concrete-floored room, making the ocean feel nearer than five blocks away.

SCENE: A real estate office in a West Ashley duplex. The firm’s top and only agent is sucking on a vape pen and rifling through paperwork.

With football season underway and Election Day looming, here’s something upon which everyone can agree: Charleston has so much pizza.

Chubby Fish is already one of the area’s great neighborhood oyster bars, and it’s located in a neighborhood that’s delighted to claim it.

Diners who can’t fully enjoy their roast chicken if a fellow in the next booth over is wearing a ballcap, who reflexively flinch when a hostess greets them with a hearty “hey, guys!” will be tickled to know that every table at Revival, the restaurant that recently replaced Drawing Room at Th…

Parcel 32 is one of the few downtown restaurants at which you’ll want to consider carving out cocktail time in advance of your reservation, Food Editor and Chief Food Critic Hanna Raskin writes.

The Establishment has put together a very professional front-of-house cast, but when it comes down to correctly cooking a fish, things have a tendency to go awry.