Restaurant week has come and gone in Charleston. Being a mid-priced city, restaurant week here is a fragile thing. The espoused purpose of a restaurant week (or at least what my interpretation of its purpose has always been) is to offer a representative sampling from the nicer restaurants on the cheap.
In Boston, New York, DC, et al, this works well - a $35 dinner at 21 Club or Cafe Boulud is quite the bargain. But in Charleston, things just aren't as pricey. For $35/person, one can escape from most restaurants in town with at least two courses. The vehicles to spend $800 on dinner simply don't exist.
So restaurant week in Charleston toes a fine line. Falling on the successful side of it were both Blossom and Tristan.
Blossom, part of the HMGI-owned East Bay triumvirate that includes Cypress and Magnolias, purports to "take seafood with Southern sensibility to the next level", whatever that means. Marketing pitch aside, if forced to pigeonhole Blossom I would say this - they know how to cook a piece of fish. Both Maggie and I ordered a fish entree - hers a healthy chunk of salmon on tomato-basil risotto, mine an elegantly blackened Mahi Mahi on a grit cake with pickled green tomatoes.
Both were at least 2 inches thick and both were cooked perfectly. And I mean perfectly. There is perhaps a five-second window of perfection when cooking fish - a window I blindly and luckily stumble into every few months on my stove at home, but is otherwise nearly mythical. Blossom's kitchen is apparently capable of cranking out fish like this with the precision of an atomic clock and the regularity of a Metamucil addict.
The accoutrements I found somewhat questionable - oddly sweet pickled tomatoes and a bland grit cake added little to the stellar Mahi Mahi, and Maggie's risotto tasted a bit more like spaghettiO's® than I would have liked. But I chalk this up to the vagaries of restaurant week menus. The impeccable cooking, the friendly and precise service, and the casual-fine-dining atmosphere were as well executed and enjoyable as I've had anywhere. I get warm and fuzzy inside anticipating another meal at Blossom.
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I didn't see Tristan coming. I knew only that it was smack in the middle Market Street, and that was enough for me to have avoided it until now. When I think of Market Street, I think Bubba Gump Shrimp Co and T-Bonz Grill & Grill (with apologies to the entirely decent Mercato). I didn't expect the technically-advanced cuisine of head chef Nate Whiting and the sleek interior, nearly antithetical to Charleston's aesthetic traditions.
The food is New American with an experimenter's touch of molecular gastronomy. More than Blossom, at Tristan one feels that $35 for three courses is a real bargain. The abbreviated menu was fascinating, yielding enough information to intelligently order, but leaving the presentation and character of each dish a mystery until it was served by our enthusiastic waiter, thrilled to have such brisk business in the middle of January.
This isn't my favorite genre of food, but there is nothing else like it in Charleston. Tristan reminds us that every now and then it's refreshing to break from the charm of the Holy City and feel a bit more metropolitan.
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Blossom Cafe
171 East Bay Street, Charleston, SC 29401-2126
(843) 722-9200
Tristan Restaurant
55 South Market Street, Charleston, SC 29401-2004
(843) 534-2155
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