Discover a vibrant prix fixe during the year-long residency
Slipping into the Charleston Grill unveils a profound shift: a space once as enveloping as warm velvet appears starkly lit, a white-walled canvas reverberating with the hum of conversation. Framed photos depicting mounds of dirt stare out across the expanse. While the hotel undergoes its planned renovation, chef Daniel Humm has arrived for a year-long residency.
Famed for guiding Manhattan’s Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park through various reincarnations, he now plants his refined, climate-conscious sensibilities in Lowcountry soil. The endeavor aspires to marry global ambitions with regional ingredients. With a prix fixe starting at $135, the offerings are serious but not ostentatious. The inch-thick directory to the Grill’s deep cellar seems intact, the cocktail program delivers near perfection, and a largely local floor staff provides familiar faces. The food, however, is decidedly different.
The focused menu layers tight precision and technique among contemporary fine dining themes. An amuse of clear “tomato water” flush with basil sets a vegetal tone. Radish carpaccio dresses impossibly thin slices of apple, daikon, and pistachio in a salad as crisp as a winter morning. Local crudo is accentuated by bursts of finger lime and blunt horseradish heat.
The butter-poached lobster, glossed with squash and lemongrass, is decadent but delicate, bowls wiped clean with the remaining flakes of a thousand-layered bread roll striated with fried onions. Arriving tables eye the whole roast chicken “for two” that is paraded to and fro as a testament that the ordering party is, in fact, receiving a whole bird in the form of two breasts and a cup of “reduction” (thigh meat in consommé with a toupee of chicken foam).
The city hasn’t seen an opening with such transformative potential since Sean Brock descended on McCrady’s with a suitcase full of molecular gastronomy. Like Brock, Humm will discover that Charleston has a cuisine of its own. He could use this year to interpret its depths—gold rice new from the field, the musky slime of midsummer okra, and briny pluff-scented oysters—lest he be just another itinerant influencer.
The Charleston Place
224 King St. | (843) 577-4522
www.chefhummcharlestonplace.com
Wednesday-Sunday, 5-10 p.m.
