Lowcountry Bistro Visited 9/21/2012 3.5 Forks

Lowcountry Bistro 49 S Market St., Charleston, SC 29401

A good friend of mine organized a fabulous trip to Charleston, SC and I was so excited to go because it's slowly becoming one of the top culinary destinations in the US.  I had a list of restaurants about 20+ deep that I had wanted to try but sicne we were actually staying on Isle of Palm, which is about 30 minutes away from Charleston, we didn't really get to try most of the restaurants on my list.  We ended up staying in and cooking dinner a lot at home, which turned out to be a lot of fun.  Oh well, who's up for another trip to Charleston to check off the rest of the places on my list?  The one restaurant we were able to try was Lowcountry Bistro right after the carriage ride downtown.  The carriage ride was beautiful and exactly what I thought of when I pictured the South.  Since we had a 2 year old with us, we couldn't really go anywhere fancy.  We had asked our tour guide where to go and he had suggested Lowcountry as some good Southern grub.

The great thing about this place was its location.  It was right off the main drag downtown so it was very convenient to get to.  The menu here was lots of fried Southern goodness.  I was so torn as to what to get: shrimp and grits, fried green tomatoes, pulled pork, mac and cheese, etc.  I finally settled on a grilled chicken sandwich with a carolina crab cake topped with a fried green tomato and aioli mayo and served with a side of sweet potato salad ($16).  A combination of almost everything I was looking for (if only the chicken was fried and not grilled - but probably better for my health) And of course since I was in the South, I had to order a side of grits ($4) with cheddar cheese and ham.  The rest of the table got a variety of Southern food such as shrimp and grits, pulled pork tacos, cornbead, fried okra, and stuffed mahi mahi.  My sandwich was pretty delicious.  The combination of the chicken, crab cake and fried green tomato was great and the texture of all 3 ingredients seemed to work well together.  My one complaint was that there was too much bread for the 3 patties and that's one of my biggest pet peeves when there's extra bread hanging off a sandwich.  The sweet potato salad, strangely, tasted exactly how it sounds.  While it didn't have mayo (thank god because I think it would have been weird), it was pieces of slightly undercooked sweet potatoes, served with spring onions and lots of sweet spices (such as cinnamon).  It wasn't really my thing but it was an interesting alternative to your usual mayo based white potato salad.  As for the grits, I did really like them, although they were a bit grainy and just a little bit dry.  But I did love the fact that it wasn't boring and flavorless like a lot of grits I've had in NYC but that it wasn't doused in butter to give it flavor either.

All in all, Lowcountry perfectly suited for what we needed for the group: big space, convenient location and good ole Southern food.  This doesn't mean that I wouldn't have loved to try all the other restaurants that were talked about (Husk, Fig, Hank's seafood, etc).  I will just have to make another trip back down South to fit them all in.

Photo Credit: Yelp