Kultura is a Filipino restaurant in Charleston’s Cannonborough Elliotborough
Kultura
Provided
While San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles restaurants are prominent in the Resy 100 list of restaurants that define dining today — they won’t call them best because that’s subjective — three Charleston restaurants made the list.
Jon Bonné, Resy’s managing editor, author and a two-time James Beard Award winner, said the restaurant reservation and hospitality platform asked restaurant partners and about two dozen city contributors across the country “what they love, what excites them, what sets a standard for exceptional dining.”
“This is a curation of restaurants that thrill us, that serve exceptional food that alternately might be comforting or daring, traditional or completely new,” he said. “These are places that make us want to return again and again, and define the best of our dining culture today.”
Not necessarily new, not helmed by a famous chef and anywhere in the U.S. In fact many on the list are in places not known for its restaurants such as No. 73, Helen in Birmingham, Alabama or No. 54, Huckleberry House In Bismarck, North Dakota.
“They could be absolutely anywhere — as we’ve learned, a great meal can find you where you least expect it, whether you’ve traversed the country or just headed down the block,” Bonné said. “They are, simply, excellent and cherished. They delight their communities, and make them better.”
Topping the list is Liholiho Yacht Club in San Francisco, which Resy describes as embodying “pretty much everything great that’s happened in American restaurants” since opening in 2015.
“Chef Ravi Kapur was already a star in San Francisco for his cooking, but LYC would allow him to merge that talent with his Hawaiian, Indian, and Chinese roots.”
He and partner Jeff Hanak “intrinsically understood — as did the rest of their team — what a great restaurant should look and feel like in these times.”
Homemade Spam, tuna poke, kinilaw with local halibut are “soulful and playful.”
The South Carolina restaurants on the list are No. 22 Kultura, No. 77 Bintü Atelier and No. 90 Fig.
Kultura is a Filipino restaurant in Charleston’s Cannonborough Elliotborough neighborhood, near the Medical University of South Carolina, the College of Charleston and Upper King Street.
Chef Nikko Cagalanan channels “his Filipino upbringing with a drive to experiment and continually add a new twist,” Sam Spence, Resy Charleston Writer, said.
Cagalanan started as a pop-up called Mansueta’s, named for his grandmother.
“Cagalanan has taken his renditions of classic Filipino dishes and finessed around the edges — as with the nonpareil quality of the yellowfin in his kinilaw, punched up with mint. A pork asado comes with a pineapple mostarda, and yes, that is chop suey on the menu, but here with scallops, coconut grits and a farm egg.”
He says on his website his cooking is a love letter to the Philippines and to the women who raised him.
“Born and raised in the Philippines, Nikko draws inspiration from his grandmother, Lola Mansueta, whose cooking, generosity, and warmth shaped his earliest memories of food and family,” the website says.
He began cooking in 2017 while working as a nurse and moved to Charleston two years later. He and his wife Paula Kramer opened Kultura in 2023 to honor their grandmothers.
He was named a James Beard Award Finalist for Emerging Chef in 2024 and won Food Network’s Chopped in 2022.
No. 77 on Resy’s list is Bintü Atelier on Charleston’s East Side, which they called a tiny jewel.
The Senegalese restaurant is owned by Bintou N’Daw and her husband Tracey Young, who lived in New York for 20 years before moving to Charleston. They opened in 2023.
Resy said the restaurant is casual, but N’Daw is classically trained.
“A dish like her shito spicy crab rice could easily present as a staple of the South Carolina coast, but it more reveals how local flavors have origins across the waters — and also shows N’Daw’s remarkable skill at balancing bold flavors,” Resy said.
No. 90 is FIG in Charleston’s Ansonborough neighborhood.
“It’s hard enough to get to the top,” Resy said. “To stay there, much less for 20 years, is nothing short of remarkable, in any city. Yet that’s what Mike Lata has done with FIG (and then with The Ordinary), having more or less catalyzed Charleston’s rise as a dining powerhouse.”
Resy called the menu “as exciting as any you’d find anywhere.”
“Flounder comes in a brioche crust with an artichoke dashi; there’s blue crab ravioli with a shellfish-tomato sauce and bottarga; a bouillabaisse with fresh-dug potatoes almost screams Lowcountry summer,” Resy said.
“In 2003, we began with a simple philosophy that holds true today: serve honest, local ingredients, with informed service, in a comfortable setting,” FIG says on its website.
It has been featured in numerous publications including Travel + Leisure, Garden and Gun, and Conde Nast Traveler.
It is also on the Michelin Guide’s list of American South’s 2025 Recommended Restaurants.
Resy also had a nod to South Carolina in its choice of No. 13 Charleston Restaurant in Baltimore, where “the name probably gives away chef Cindy Wolf’s inspiration — namely the South Carolina Lowcountry.”
Wolf lived with her parents in Charleston for a time. Her father was a vice president of Hardee’s Restaurants and Ponderosa Steakhouse.
She worked in Silks at the Planters Inn before attending the Culinary Institute of America.
The website described Wolf as one of Baltimore’s great cooking talents, combining French training with coastal bounty.
Maryland lump crab gratin, wild halibut with local corn and tomato relish, cornmeal fried oysters with a cayenne mayonnaise. “all of which explain why Wolf has frequently been lauded by the James Beard Foundation.”
And there’s a 60-page wine list.
The other restaurants on Resy’s top 10 list are:
2. Pêche in New Orleans.
3. Lutèce in Washington, D.C.
4. Kann in Portand, Oregon
5. The Grey Restaurant in Savannah, Georgia
6. Smithereens in New York.
7. Tapori in Washington, D.C.
8. Kira in Houston
9. Shaw-naé’s House in New York.
10. El Naranjo in Austin, Texas
Dining and Cooking