Best Lowcountry Restaurants Around the World

The best-scored lowcountry place in each of 4 cities.

Regional variations

Charleston

The center of Lowcountry fine dining and the modern revival. Husk, FIG, The Ordinary, Rodney Scott's (BBQ adjacent), and the heritage institutions like Hominy Grill. The cuisine's most refined contemporary expression.

Savannah and Georgia coast

Slightly less refined, more home-style, with Mashama Bailey's The Grey as the modern reference point. Strong influence from Liberty County and the historic Geechee community.

Gullah-Geechee sea islands

St. Helena, Edisto, Sapelo, Daufuskie. The most directly West-African-rooted cooking in the United States. One-pot rice perloos, red rice, okra soup, hoppin' john, smoked-pork-and-bean stews. Saltwater Geechee cooking is its own specific subregion.

Coastal North Carolina (Cape Fear region)

Overlap with Lowcountry, with stronger pork BBQ and lighter rice emphasis. Wilmington and the Cape Fear delta share the coastal-shellfish base but cook with a North Carolina Coastal Plain inflection.

Defining lowcountry dishes

Shrimp and grits

Sauteed shrimp in a butter-and-bacon-fat-sherry sauce served over creamy stone-ground grits with sharp cheese. The Lowcountry signature; Hominy Grill's version in Charleston is the modern benchmark.

Hoppin' john

Rice and field peas (Sea Island red peas in the original tradition, black-eyed peas in many modern versions), cooked together with smoked pork, served on New Year's Day for luck. West African in lineage.

Lowcountry boil (Frogmore stew)

Shrimp, smoked sausage, corn on the cob, and red potatoes boiled in seasoned water with Old Bay or homemade spice mix. Dumped on a newspaper-covered table for communal eating. Often called Frogmore stew after the St. Helena Island community.

She-crab soup

Creamy soup of blue crab meat and crab roe (the 'she' in she-crab), with sherry, cream, and a hint of mace. Charleston's signature soup, dating to the 1920s.

Red rice

Tomato-stewed long-grain rice with smoked sausage or bacon, onion, and bell pepper. The Lowcountry cousin of jollof and West Africa's one-pot rice tradition.

Pickled shrimp

Shrimp marinated in vinegar, onion, bay leaf, mustard seed, and red pepper, served chilled as a starter or party dish.

Okra soup

Long-simmered tomato-and-okra stew with smoked pork or beef, sometimes with shrimp. The Gullah-Geechee table's most-cited West African legacy dish.

Benne wafers

Crisp, paper-thin cookies made with toasted benne (sesame) seed, butter, brown sugar, and flour. The Charleston cookie, sold from old-line shops and at every Lowcountry holiday.

Carolina Gold rice

The heritage long-grain rice variety that built Charleston's antebellum wealth and was nearly extinct in the 20th century. Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills led the revival starting in the 1990s; now the rice of choice for any serious Lowcountry kitchen.

Country ham

Dry-cured, salt-and-smoke-aged ham, sliced thin and served on biscuits or with red-eye gravy (ham drippings deglazed with strong black coffee).

Boiled peanuts

Green (raw) peanuts boiled for hours in heavily salted water (often with Cajun seasoning), eaten warm. The Lowcountry roadside snack and bar bite.

Crab cakes

Lump blue crab meat lightly bound with breadcrumb, egg, mayo, and Old Bay, pan-fried until crusty. The Lowcountry version is lighter on filler than the Chesapeake version.

How to order

A Lowcountry meal often starts with a shrimp or crab starter (pickled shrimp, she-crab soup, crab cakes) or boiled peanuts at a bar. The main is rice-led (shrimp and grits, red rice with sausage, hoppin' john) or shellfish-led (lowcountry boil, fried oysters, soft-shell crab in season). Sides are stewed vegetables (okra, butterbeans, field peas, collards) and cornbread or biscuits. Benne wafers or peach cobbler closes the meal. At a serious Lowcountry restaurant, the wine and beer list will include local Charleston and Savannah breweries and a thoughtful Southern wine selection.

The rookie mistakes: ordering shrimp and grits at every meal (it is one of many great dishes, not the only one), expecting the rice to be plain (Carolina Gold and red rice are the dish, not a side), ignoring the boiled peanuts at the gas station (they are the regional snack), and missing the soft-shell crab season (May into early summer, with the best examples in coastal Carolina and Georgia). Tipping is 20 percent.

What to drink with it

Sweet tea is the table drink, though Charleston has the strongest cocktail program in the South (sazerac, mint julep, gin-and-tonic with garden herbs). With shrimp and grits, a crisp white (Albarino, Vermentino, a dry Riesling) works. With country ham, a sherry or madeira. With lowcountry boil and shellfish, ice-cold beer (Westbrook IPA, Holy City lager). The South Carolina wine industry is small; the local pairing strength is in beer and cocktails, plus an increasingly serious selection of Old World whites and roses on the better Charleston wine lists.

Where to eat it

Charleston is the center: Husk, FIG, The Ordinary, Hominy Grill, Rodney Scott's BBQ, Bertha's Kitchen (the Gullah-Geechee soul food anchor in North Charleston), Hannibal's Kitchen. Savannah for The Grey, Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room, and the Geechee-influenced cooking of the Georgia coast. Beaufort and the sea islands for the most directly Gullah-Geechee experience (Gullah Grub on St. Helena Island). Outside the region, the cuisine has not really exported, which makes a Charleston-Savannah trip the essential way to encounter it.

A short history

Lowcountry cuisine emerged from the rice plantations of coastal South Carolina and Georgia from the late 17th century, where enslaved West Africans, particularly from the rice-growing region of Senegambia, built one of the wealthiest plantation economies in the antebellum United States while preserving and adapting their own foodways. The Gullah-Geechee community on the sea islands maintained these traditions through Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the 20th century. The modern Lowcountry culinary revival began in the 1990s and accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s with the chefs (Sean Brock, Mashama Bailey, BJ Dennis) who recentered Carolina Gold rice, benne, and Gullah-Geechee cooking in fine dining.

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