FIG is Chef Andrew Zimmern’s favorite Charleston restaurant.
FIG
Provided
Food & Wine Classic Charleston returns to the city Nov. 13 to 15 and “Bizarre Foods” Chef Andrew Zimmern will be back to lead two sessions.
As a lead-up to the event, Travel & Leisure asked Zimmern for a list of Charleston’s best restaurants. The magazine called Zimmern “a cultural anthropologist who examines the role food plays in telling the world’s most important stories.”
“Charleston has one of the most exciting food scenes in America,” the 65-year-old restaurateur said on Facebook.
His sessions are “The Secrets Behind the World’s Most Iconic Restaurant Dishes” on Nov. 14 and “The New Surf and Turf: Fresh Takes on the Ultimate Pairing” on Nov. 15.
The event takes place at the Charleston Visitor Center at 375 Meeting St.
Other chefs include Adrian Miller, a two-time James Beard Award-winning culinary author, certified barbecue judge who calls himself a recovering attorney; Amanda McCrossin, a certified sommelier, wine personality, and podcast host; Bethany Heinze, co-owner and Operations/Beverage Director at Vern’s, which is included in Zimmern’s list.
Andrew Zimmern’s favorite Charleston restaurants
Here are the restaurants Zimmern selected, and many of them have won accolades from various sources previously.
FIG
232 Meeting Street
The farm-to-table bistro opened in 2003 with chef Mike Lata, who Zimmern called “one of America’s greatest chefs hiding in plain sight.”
The Ordinary
544 King Street
Another restaurant from the owners of FIG, The Ordinary is a seafood hall and oyster bar inside a bank dating back to the late 1920s.
Leon’s Oyster Shop
698 King Street
There’s something endearing about Leon’s tagline: “From the bozos who brought you Melfi’s and Little Jack.”
Michelin Guide named it one of the 12 best seafood shacks in the United States.
Opened in 2014, Leon’s is located in a paint-and-body shop that belonged to Leon Ravenel. The essence of that shop remains with garage doors, concrete floors and some of Ravenel’s memorabilia. And the name, of course.
Chubby Fish
252 Coming Street
“The cooking has real nerve,” Zimmern said — the “purest expression of modern Charleston seafood cooking, built around what local fishermen actually bring him rather than what tourists expect to see.”
In 2024, Southern Living magazine included Chubby Fish in a list of places not to be missed — the only one in South Carolina on the list.
Vern’s
41 Bogard Street
Daniel and Bethany Heinze’s Vern’s is “the neighborhood restaurant every neighborhood wishes it had —intimate, loose, deeply personal and cooking at an extraordinarily high level,” Travel & Leisure said.
It won a Michelin star in 2025, one of four in South Carolina: Scoundrel in Greenville and three Charleston restaurants, Malagón Mercado y Taperia, Vern’s, and Wild Common (also on Zimmern’s list).
It was the one South Carolina restaurant on the third annual New York Times Best Restaurant List. It also was lauded by Condé Nast, James Beard and various Charleston publications.
The Times restaurant writer Priya Krishna, said of Vern’s, “Finally, wine-bar food feels interesting again.”
Daniel, who goes by Dano, was selected as a semi-finalist this year for best chef in the Southeast by the James Beard Awards.
The restaurant was once a corner grocery, built in 1881, in the Elliottborough neighborhood, a section in downtown Charleston of trendy shops and restaurants and largely restored homes that attract young professionals and students.
Vern’s is named for Dano Heinze’s late grandfather, who owned a butcher shop and grocery stores in Wisconsin, publicist JJ Duggan said. Guests are given a postcard bearing a photo of him standing in front of his butcher case.
Magnolias
185 East Bay Street
Longtime Charleston restaurant that Zimmern says “helped with the modern version of the city’s restaurant story when it opened in 1990.” Think fried green tomatoes and grilled filet of beef.
High Cotton
199 East Bay Street
Antique bricks and pine floors at High Cotton create “handsome rooms, genuine hospitality, seafood, steaks, Southern cooking and enough polish to make dinner feel like an occasion,” Zimmern said.
Wild Common
103 Spring Street
“For the ambitious end of contemporary Charleston dining, Wild Common is essential, with global ideas, Southern grounding, and serious technique in the kitchen,” Zimmern said.
Palmira Barbecue
2366 Ashley River Road
“Hector Garate is doing some of the most interesting barbecue in the South, folding Puerto Rican flavor and technique into Carolina whole-hog traditions with the obsessive fire management of contemporary craft barbecue,” Zimmern said.
Kultura
267 Rutledge Avenue
Chef Nikko Cagalanan’s Kultura is all about “taking the food he grew up with and pushing it forward without turning it into some tedious exercise in chefy reinvention,” Zimmern said.
The Filipino-inspired restaurant also was featured in 2024 on Esquire magazine’s Best Restaurant of the Year list and Resy’s list of restaurants that define dining today.
Kultura is in the Cannonborough Elliotborough neighborhood, near the Medical University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston and Upper King Street.
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