By Tom Crosby
To find the celebrated Charleston Grill restaurant, customers navigate the marbled hallways of the Charleston Place hotel's upscale shopping corridors until they come to a grey marble arch flanked by mahogany wood columns and huge potted plants.
A walk through Charleston Place, one of the poshest urban luxury hotels in the Carolinas, creates a feeling of elegance and sophistication that continues when you enter the Charleston Grill. Both the restaurant and hotel are repetitive winners of AAA's prestigious Four Diamond rating.
The rich, dark mahogany wood evident everywhere generates a warm ambiance, not unlike an exclusive upper class English men's club. Robust air conditioning creates a refreshingly cool urban oasis from Charleston's often humid heat.
Upon entering, there is a sealed wine cabinet on the right and next to it, a wooden barrel with several open bottles of red and white wines. All of the wines may sampled before ordering a glass or bottle to accompany your meal. (Some other wines are also available for sampling).
On the left, past a tiered holder with six lit candles, is the bar, with the ten bar stools usually occupied by pre-dinner couples. Straight back past the bar, the cocktail lounge contains two circular cushioned booths on the left, which are the only smoking tables in the 125-seat restaurant.
(A private Vinter's room seats 40 with glass fronted wine cellars containing wines from around the world serving as walls.)
Other cocktail tables create seating for 30 in the cocktail lounge, with a small area in the rear used by a jazz quartet, providing a soft melodic background from 8 to 11 p.m for the main dining room to the right. On Sundays, the quartet is replaced by a lone guitarist.
Colorful eclectic wall hangings, many of them portraits or paintings revolving around music and entertainers, decorate the walls. The paintings are supplied by nearby galleries on King and Broad (many of the paintings are Jonathan Green works, that he supplied directly. h Many of his pieces can be seen at the Chuma Art Gallery in Charleston, in addition the 1940's and 50's black and white prints showing people and scenes of Charleston are on loan from the Museum of Charleston, the SC Historical Society and the Carolina Art Association). Guests sometimes buy the paintings off the walls. (A portrait of Ella Fitzgerald has remained on the walls for years as a sort of trademark.)
Young female hostesses greet and escort guests to their tables. Inside the restaurant, ten-foot high glass windows that form the L shape of the dining room overlook a garden courtyard used by diners from the hotel's Palmetto Cafe, weather permitting. So lush is the exotic and often flowering greenery around the courtyard edges, activity in the garden is obscured.
Once seated, the linen-covered tablecloth holds silver cutlery from Cristofle Hotel-France and Luxembourg china from Villeroy and Boch.
A fresh rose emerges from a bubble-bottom vase and a black candle lamp, along with crystal wine and water glasses, completes the place setting. As of November 2000 the restaurant will use exclusively Riedel stemware, the best quality stemware you can buy.
The shiny green marble floor, dark mahogany wood and the white ceiling with ornate crown molding adds to the sophistication, aided by the fact most diners are in suits and dresses. While there is no dress code, the attire - classy casual - worn by customers remains a notch above most other Charleston eateries.
Diners also find elegant touches continue in the rest rooms, with marble sinks and brass hardware, hand towels on shelves instead of a dryer or paper towels, a vase of fresh flowers, stylish beige wallpaper and paintings on the walls.
As our waiter delivered the menus and explained the choices, our toughest choices came from the 35-page wine list, which is so varied it has its own index. More than 42 wines and champagnes are offered by the glass, while the main wine list has prices beginning at $20 for a U.S. white wine, a 1998 Chenin Blanc from Dry Creek Vineyard in Clarksburg, to a 1982 bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc, St.-Emilion, France for $955. Charleston Grill recently added the 1996 Napa Valley Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignion to the wine list - single is listed at $2495.
Several wines, like the Chateau Cheval Blanc, are available from several different years. Especially tasty was a Pinot Noir from Jim Clendenan, bottled especially for the restaurant. The restaurant won the coveted Wine Spectator magazine award for excellence in 1998 and 2000 and actually offers more than 820 wine labels, with the majority culled from the best wines of the US and France.
The wine emphasis can be traced to 1997, when Chef Bob Waggoner, already renowned as a chef with skills so strong he was the first chef to open and own a restaurant in France, he was recruited by Orient-Express, owner of Charleston Place, to become the force behind the Charleston Grill.
Waggoner, a California native, had worked with several legendary French chefs such as Lameloise, Barrier, Gagnair, Boyer and Meneau. He also had earned The Wild Boar in Nashville, Tennessee an AAA Five Diamond restaurant rating in 1996.
Once at the helm in Charleston Place, Waggoner quickly made an impression, blending his French training with the abundance of Low Country ingredients to produce unique and mouth-watering menu items. (Low Country cuisine has its roots in South Carolina's coastal plain products coming from the rivers, streams and sea as well as those grown or raised on land.
Waggoner, something of a "chef celebrity," has appeared on shows such as "Great Chefs of the South," "Gourmet Getaways with Robin Leach," and has been interviewed for by television food reporter Burt Wolf for a series of shows appearing on The Travel Channel, CNN and PBS stations nationwide.
A weekly dining highlight is a Plantation Supper, typically held on Sunday nights and featuring fresh local ingredients. Waggoner's passion for freshness led him to cultivate his own herb garden on the hotel's roof.
On our Saturday night visit, before we ordered, a circulating waitress brought a basket of different breads to choose from. She returned several times during the meal, permitting active sampling of a variety of fresh baked breads.
While others ordered appetizers, I choose one of the best salads I have ever eaten - baby lola rosa leaves with Clemson blue cheese, marinated shiitake mushrooms and roasted hazelnuts in a sweet port and fresh rosemary sauce. It was too tasty to be low in calories.
The dinner menu in September is seasonal however; Waggoner will often change or add an item more frequently to take advantage of high quality and unique produce, seafood and game from local purveyors. Sparkled with innovative local creations including McClennanville lump crabmeat cakes in a diced creek shrimp and roasted pistachio-chive sauce for an appetizer and salad of southern fried chicken livers over frisse and young mache with apples, bacon and walnuts in aged red wine vinaigrette sauce.
As suits a grill, there were five beef dishes among the 13 entrees listed, including slowly grilled veal tenderloin over a roasted eggplant and smoked bacon mousse line with roasted cherry tomatoes in a fresh thyme chardonnay butter. After trying the tenderloin, I became convinced that if too many people ate it, calves would soon become an endangered species.
Five fish dishes are offered, include grilled Low Country scamp grouper fillet with Charleston Grill potato skins and hot slaw in roasted shallot cabernet butter. One vegetable tasting plate and and two fowl entrees rounded out the entrees. (The local burlill duck and vidalia hash pie in a warm apple smoked bacon and sherry pecan vinaigrette sounded tempting.) Side dishes are ordered separately.
The dessert menu offers seven spectacular choices from chocolate to cobbler to cake, yogurt or ice cream - all prepared with the individual touches that create memorable eating finishes.
We tried the Chocolate Pyramid with White Pistachio Mousse and Semi-sweet Praline Cream between Layers of Almond Genoise that featured a solid block of chocolate that required some muscle power to get to the magical taste. We also tasted the Low Country fresh berry cobbler with vanilla ice cream, blackberries, huckleberries, blueberries and raspberries. After peeling off the crust, a spoonful of the interior jolts taste buds back to the days of childhood and fresh-baked berry pies topped with hand-made ice cream.
The left page of the dessert menu offers ports, cognacs, single mash scotch, single barrel and small batch bourbons and sweet dessert wines. A selection of six French cheeses with sun dried fruits and nuts are also available.
The finish was perfect, with a generous pouring of a 20-year-old Sandeman tawny port.
Please call 843-577-4522 to make a reservation. |
