Charleston, South Carolina, is a foodie’s playground. No matter what you are looking for, you’ll find it there – upscale, hip, trendy or casual dining. We surely enjoyed finding great lunch fare during our visit. We loved it so much that we wanted to share some of the best places for lunch in Charleston.
Background
We were determined to eat well during our limited 4-day visit to Charleston. Even though we had spent considerable time planning dinners, we had not been as organized with choosing places for lunch. Certainly, we wanted to sample Charleston’s fabulous cuisine at lunchtime too. However, we were pressed for time and did not want lengthy meals. Furthermore, we didn’t want our choice of restaurants to dictate our sightseeing schedule and locations.
While many of Charleston’s finer restaurants offer lunch (often at good values), our goal was to find places that had unique and creative menus for a quick bite. Despite the fact that we had decided to splurge a bit during our dinners, we wanted to find restaurants where the lunch meals would be reasonably priced and service relatively fast.
Here are 5 of the best places for lunch in Charleston that you should not miss:
1. The Obstinate Daughter
Inventive, relaxed and oh so good, The Obstinate Daughter is a short drive from Charleston’s Historic district to Sullivan’s Island. Focused on local ingredients, the Obstinate Daughter is in a wonderfully rustic and smart setting. It features soups, sandwiches, salads, pastas and pizzas for lunch. Of course, because it is in Charleston, there is a lot of seafood on the menu too. Moreover, this place is also fabulous for dinner with a menu featuring additional items such as lamb cassoulet, seared fish, and seafood sausage.
The Best Frogmore Stew
Do not miss the Obstinate Daughter’s Frogmore Stew. It is “off the charts”. Frogmore Stew (or chowder) is a classic Lowcountry soup made with shrimp, sausage, corn and potatoes. (It is also called a Lowcountry Boil or Beaufort Stew.) Everyone in Charleston has his or her version of it. The Obstinate Daughter’s version was luscious – – flavorful, rich and fresh. The truffle oil added a nice touch to it. It is worth a trip just to try this chowder. In fact, it is so good that the recipe has been published in several papers. You can find the recipe here.
Delectable Pizza
Our server highly recommended the pizza. Her suggestion was on the mark. Beautifully charred, thinly crusted, flavorful and delectable, the pizza was well worth the carb intake. When it comes to pizza, I’m a bit of a purist. So I ordered the Miss Carolina Pizza, which is made with traditional tomatoes, mozzarella, basil and olive oil. The pizza size was large enough to satisfy two appetites. The other pizzas feature lots of interesting ingredients (clams, confit lemon, kimchi collard, etc.) and are worth exploring.
Desserts
Typically, we pass on dessert for lunch and save the extra calories for dinner. In this instance, the Chocolate Bottom Crème Brûlée sounded too good to resist. Ganache, bourbon, candied bacon crumble. . . this dessert tasted as good as it sounds. It was a wonderful mix of sweet, savory, crunchy and worth every calorie.
The Obstinate Daughter is a great Charleston lunch place. Its menu is moderately priced and filled with a variety of outstanding options. Service is attentive and casual, and the atmosphere is pretty and informal. And if you come here for just one reason, it would have to be the Frogmore Stew!
2. Butcher & Bee
Go to Butcher & Bee if you are searching for a fabulous place for breakfast, lunch or dinner. We found that it was perfect for a casual, distinctive and very noteworthy lunch.
Remarkable Menu
The lunch menu has a wide-variety of items in all shapes and sizes. For instance, it serves dips, baked goods, lunch bowls, salads, sandwiches and desserts. Everything on its menu sounded wonderful. Not only is the fare extremely creative, it is made from healthy, fresh and local ingredients. Most importantly, everything that we ordered was delicious.
Delectable Dips
Butcher & Bee features some really interesting dips as appetizers. And their plentiful sizes make for a great lunch starter. The popular Whipped Feta with fermented honey, black pepper and pita sounded interesting and different. Without question, the feta dip lived up to our expectations.
The wonderfully balanced smoothness of the salty creamy feta combined with the sweet honey melted in our mouths with each bite. Frankly, this is a dish you could eat at any time of the day. The other dips (hummus with harissa, schug, and crispy chickpeas) and Bacon wrapped dates were tempting too.
Likewise, our other starter, Chanterelle Toast with pickled mustard seed, was excellent. It featured succulent well-seasoned chanterelle mushrooms over a delicious slice of earthy grain rye bread. Every bite was filled with savory goodness.
Bowls and Salads
Next, we ordered the Grilled Avocado Crispy Salad and the Anson Mills Brown Rice Bowl. We added grilled shrimp to both dishes. Each dish was fresh, flavorful and chockfull of fabulous ingredients. The Avocado Crispy Salad blended Carolina Gold crispy rice with mixed greens, peanuts and serrano chilies.
In contrast, the brown rice bowl combined warm vegetables, miso almond butter and turmeric onions. Every bite provided an alluring combination of flavors. However, be mindful of how much food you order because the portions are generous and very satisfying. In fact, we ordered more than we should have. So although desserts and baked goods looked mouthwatering, we were much too stuffed to try them.
So Much More
Unfortunately, we only had the chance to visit Butcher and Bee once. We wish we could have dined there more times to sample its interesting, well thought-out and changing menu. There was so much more that we wanted to try as everything sounded and looked enticing. Everything was delicious and beautifully served, and the servers were super friendly. In all, we can’t wait to eat there again. This is truly one of the best places for lunch in Charleston.
3. The Daily
The Daily, by Butcher & Bee, is also another perfect stop for a quick bite and an excellent cup of coffee – or tea. It too features homemade baked goods and wonderful salads and sandwiches. And, as with almost all of the places we ate at, The Daily sources local ingredients and focuses on thoughtful, original dishes with a southern slant. They think of themselves as a neighborhood marketplace and don’t believe in a trade-off between convenient and delicious food.
Baked Goods and Sandwiches
The Daily has an outstanding bakery and you can’t go wrong with anything that comes out of it. For instance, sandwiches involving toast, biscuits, pita, and buns are uniformly original and tasty. As an example, the pita sandwich with chicken shawarma, Israeli salad, tahini, schug, hummus and cabbage was fresh, well prepared and distinctive. Its size was just enough for a satisfying midday nosh.
Salads, Wraps, Smoothies, Beverages
Their menu also has terrific array of salads, wraps, smoothies and beverages, including mimosas. Original and refreshing, the Fall Halloumi Salad was a winner. Combining arugula, roasted squash, grilled Halloumi cheese, pepitas, dried cherries, pickled onions and croutons, the salad was dressed in a delightfully light lemon vinaigrette. It was brimming with flavors and freshness. And a lovely Tangerine Ginger Ice Tea was the perfect complement to our meal.
This was definitely a worthwhile stop as we took a break from our sightseeing activities. The Daily is the type of a place that you wish were conveniently located on your regular route to work, your home or your gym. It would allow for more frequent stops. The array of exceptional options and menu creativity earned The Daily a spot on our list of best places for lunch in Charleston.
4. Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit
This is the place where you will find one of the world’s best biscuits. Because Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit gets a lot of press, we were reluctant to try it. In fact, so much has been written about it, the place sounded like a tourist trap. However, I am glad to report that Callie’s lives up to every bit of its hype. As such, we were elated to have stopped there.
Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit is located in the Upper King Street district, in a small narrow storefront. This restaurant district is known for its culinary innovation and food lab start-ups. (Callie’s has a second location in Charleston’s City Market.) It is take-out only. When we arrived at 10 am, there was a long line outside. However, it moved quickly. Because of pandemic restrictions, and social distancing requirements, only so many people were allowed in the store at a time. Once the order was placed, you had to wait outside until they brought out the packaged goodies. We waited about 10-15 minutes for our biscuits delivery.
Biscuits, Biscuits, Biscuits
Callie’s menu features biscuit sandwiches (sausage; egg and cheese; bacon egg and cheese; BLT; pimento cheese; sausage gravy), biscuits with various flavors (cheese and chives, country ham, cinnamon, blackberry, sharp cheddar), and grits with about 20 toppings. Because we wanted to sample a lot, we decided to order 6 different biscuits. Their sizes can be misleading; even though they are relatively small – Callie’s biscuits are only 2” X 2” in size – they are tall and filling.
Luscious, light, and scrumptious, Callie’s biscuits live up to their reputation. With a perfect crispy light brown top, these biscuits are moist, buttery and flavorful, even without any additions to them. They are so good! Trust me on this – – you’ll be thinking about these biscuits for a very long time, wishing you had ordered more.
As noted earlier, we sampled 6 different biscuits ranging from country ham to blackberry. All of them were outstanding. Nonetheless, we had our favorites. The sweet biscuits, especially the blackberry, balanced the buttery, savory lusciousness of the biscuit with the sweet blackberry jam. It was heavenly.
This place is perfect for a very quick breakfast, lunch or afternoon snack. As such, we recommend ordering a half dozen biscuits on Callie’s app and going to pick them up. Then enjoy them in one of Charleston’s many lovely parks and public spaces. Ordering ahead will keep you from waiting too long for your delectable packages. It will be a very satisfying and unforgettable eating experience.
5. BROWN’S COURT BAKERY
Located in a more residential street, near the Upper King Street district, Brown’s Court Bakery is the perfect place to grab a quick baked treat and coffee. Its daily menu features, of course, lots of exceptional pastries and breads. In addition, they make sandwiches, soups and savory baked goods that would make an exquisite quick lunch.
Due to COVID, Brown’s was take-out only. Because everything looked incredible, we wanted to order a lot. Unfortunately, we limited ourselves to 2 items: a delectable Chocolate Croissant and a Brie Cheese and Candied Pecan Danish. Both were light, flaky and scrumptious.
Conclusion
There are a lot of great lunch places in Charleston. Just scratch the surface and you’ll come up with many delightful and appealing lunch places. This blog mentions just a handful. If we had spent more time in town, I am certain that we would have discovered even more great lunch places in Charleston. However, these were the ones that left a mark on our taste buds. They were awesome. Without doubt, Charleston is a truly remarkable food town.
