Andrew Zimmern Calls Charleston ‘One of the Most Exciting Food Scenes in America’—Here are His Top 10 Restaurants

Chef Andrew Zimmern may best be known as the host of shows like “Bizarre Foods,” “The Zimmern List,” and “What’s Eating America,” but at his core, he’s a cultural anthropologist who examines the role food plays in telling the world’s most important stories. And there’s one city that he’s especially passionate about right now for just that kind of work.

“Charleston has one of the most exciting food scenes in America,” the 65-year-old restaurateur raved in a Facebook post earlier this year, adding that he’s thrilled to be returning to the South Carolina city November 13 to 15, 2026, for the Food & Wine Classic Charleston. “Join me for a weekend of unforgettable meals, incredible chefs, and thought-provoking conversations all in one of my favorite cities.”

As a staple of the festival since its inaugural year in 2024, Zimmern returns this year with two sessions. First up is “The Secrets Behind the World’s Most Iconic Restaurant Dishes” on November 14, where the five-time cookbook author will discuss recipes and the stories behind legendary entrees. Then on November 15, he’ll join James London for a cooking demonstration entitled “The New Surf and Turf: Fresh Takes on the Ultimate Pairing.” 

But most of all, he looks forward to enjoying the buzzy Lowcountry dining scene. In honor of the festival, Zimmern revealed his top 10 Charleston restaurants to enjoy between sessions, exclusively to Travel + Leisure.

FIG

232 Meeting Street
At the top of Zimmern’s list is FIG, the farm-to-table bistro he called an “essential American restaurant.” A mainstay since 2003, he explained that “it remains remarkably uninterested in coasting on its reputation,” praising chef Mike Lata—who he called “one of America’s greatest chefs hiding in plain sight”—for making the local ingredients “feel inevitable rather than advertised, with superb sourcing, disciplined cooking and one of Charleston’s most serious wine programs.” 

The Ordinary

544 King Street
From the same team behind FIG, The Ordinary is anything but commonplace: a Southern seafood hall and oyster bar inside a bank dating back to the late 1920s. Zimmern said he sends folks there to prove Charleston is, at heart, a seafood town. “Go hard on the oysters and shellfish, sit at the bar if you can, and let the architecture do some of the drinking for you,” he said.

Leon’s Oyster Shop

698 King Street
An old garage sets the scene for Leon’s Oyster Shop, ensuring that its delectable mix of shellfish and fried chicken is served in a “room that understands restaurants are supposed to be fun.” Zimmern admitted “adores just hanging out here,” wasting away afternoons—even two or three—since it hits that “increasingly rare trick of being fashionable without feeling remotely precious.”

Chubby Fish

252 Coming Street
One of the most “perpetually mobbed” restaurants in town has a constant line out the door for good reason: “The cooking has real nerve,” Zimmern said of Chubby Fish, one of his top places to eat in the country right now. It’s not only the “purest expression of modern Charleston seafood cooking,” but it’s also “built around what local fishermen actually bring him rather than what tourists expect to see.” 

Vern’s

41 Bogard Street
Zimmern praised Daniel and Bethany Heinze’s Vern’s as “the neighborhood restaurant every neighborhood wishes it had—intimate, loose, deeply personal and cooking at an extraordinarily high level.” Of note are its “beautiful pastas, terrific bread, seasonal cooking and a smart, idiosyncratic wine list that somehow feels like a real dinner rather than cos-play theater.”

Magnolias

185 East Bay Street
Magnolias is more than a longtime favorite in the Holy City; it also “helped with the modern version of the city’s restaurant story when it opened in 1990.” Among its most famed dishes from culinary director Kelly Franz are its fried green tomatoes and grilled filet of beef. “More than three decades later, it remains a terrific primer on polished Lowcountry cooking and a reminder that longevity in the restaurant business is earned the hard way,” Zimmern raved.

High Cotton

199 East Bay Street
The combination of antique bricks and pine floors at High Cotton creates “handsome rooms, genuine hospitality, seafood, steaks, Southern cooking and enough polish to make dinner feel like an occasion,” the chef praised of the restaurant run by the Hall family, also behind Halls Chophouse. “There is nothing coy or minimalist about it, just the real deal.”

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 of the Michelin-starred contemporary American restaurant. “The cooking can be intricate without becoming an edible graduate thesis, and the whole experience retains the generosity and hospitality that too many tasting-menu restaurants manage to misplace.”

Palmira Barbecue

2366 Ashley River Road
When it comes to merging eclectic influences, Zimmern said, “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” at Palmira Barbecue. That careful balance, he raved, is the very definition of regional cooking, being “respectful of where it came from” and then “pushing the conversation somewhere new.”

Kultura

267 Rutledge Avenue
Reflecting his Filipino roots—especially his grandmother’s cooking—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. His favorites include arroz caldo, kinilaw, pancit, and curries. But above all, he’s impressed with what the restaurant represents: “A chef bringing his own immigrant story to a city whose food culture has always been shaped by people arriving from somewhere else.”

Read the original article on Travel & Leisure