On our first night in Charleston, it was our anniversary. We wanted to go somewhere nice - preferably someplace that had seafood. We did some looking on the internet for restaurants in Charleston and one kept coming up - Amen Street. My wife remembered seeing Amen Street when we were out walking around earlier in the day. We decided to go to Amen Street for dinner that evening.
Like most buildings in Charleston's French Quarter, the building that houses Amen Street was built in the mid-19th century. It was originally a mercantile firm along what was originally called Amen Street up to just before the building was built. In 1865, William M. Bird bought the building to house a supply house used for building materials to help rebuild homes and businesses in Charleston after the Civil War. The William M. Bird Company was the building's tenant for nearly 90 years, even surviving a devastating earthquake that struck the region in 1886 damaging much of the building.
Since the mid-50's, the building underwent a number of owners and different businesses before a restaurant by the name of East Bay Crab Shack went into the space. Like many restaurants, that establishment went out of business during the recession of 2008. Two local businessmen and restauranteurs - Richard Stoney and Keith Jones - bought the building in early 2009 and spent a good part of that year renovating and updated the space into a new restaurant spot. In November of 2009, Amen Street opened its doors taking the name of the former street that was on the south side of building before it was constructed.
Richard Stoney sold his share of the business to Keith Jones a few years later and Jones is now the principal owner. Frank Wright - who started as a fry chef at Amen Street in 2012 - rose through the ranks over the years and is now the executive chef at Amen Street.
Even though we had a rental car, we had experienced some parking problems when we first went to downtown Charleston and decided to take an Uber from the hotel. It had been raining rather heavily in Charleston earlier in the day and our Uber driver apologized that he was going to have to take an alternate route to Amen Street. "When it rains here, the water collects in low-lying areas," he explained to us. "They've shut down some of the streets on the short route to where we're going, so we'll have to take the round-about way there."
We had reservations at Amen Street at 6:30 p.m., but our Uber driver pulled up to the front of the place on Bay Street about 15 minutes early - even with taking the long way to the restaurant. (see map) After going to the hostess stand, we were seated at a booth near the front of the restaurant. We had been seated there with our menus for a while before our server Michael came over to greet us. "I'll be with you folks in a moment," he said quickly before he hurried off in another direction.
The restaurant was actually very nice. The exposed walls appeared to be the original bricks and the wooden plank floor was worn and weathered underneath the glossy varnish. The main dining area was a long narrow room with recessed lighting. Individual spots highlighted the photos and artwork on the brick walls. But the highlight of the room were the five oyster shell-imbedded light fixtures down the center of the room. I'd never seen anything like them before and they were pretty cool.
The bar area was opposite from the booths in which we were seated. It featured a dark wood bar with dark wooden cabinets behind the bar. While they had a full bar for cocktails, beer was available in cans and bottles.
The raw bar was at the corner of the bar just as you come in the front door. Just to the right of the raw bar case was a smaller room for overflow dining. The case had five or six different types of oysters and the shucker was busy all evening with orders that were coming in right and left.
A quick word about our server Michael - we were looking to get something to drink, but he was chatting it up with the people seated directly behind me in another booth. He was chatty with us, too - maybe a little too chatty at times. But he turned out to be a good server and a good guy. A restaurant industry veteran in the Charleston area for a number of years, Michael had a list of restaurants to visit while we were there. "Don't go to the places all the guide books and Yelp tell you to go to," Michael said as he allowed me to take a picture of his list of nearly 30 restaurants to choose from. "These places are the ones you want to check out."
I mentioned that I didn't see Amen Street on the list and he laughed and said, "Well, that goes without saying!" He took our drinks order and my wife got a very dirty Stoli martini and I got a Juice Bomb hazy IPA from the Sloop Brewing Company from the Hudson Valley in New York. In fact, I had four during our time at Amen Street because I knew I wouldn't be driving that evening.
Of course, we had to have oysters-on-the-half shell. Michael gave us some recommendations of the oysters to get in groups of four. Two of the selections were from South Carolina - the Bird Island Selects and the Roddy Rocks; and we got four of the Fortune oysters from Nova Scotia. The Fortune oysters were the biggest of the group and Michael explained that South Carolina oysters had been over-harvested and that there had just been recent efforts to help rejuvenate the oyster beds in the Low Country. "They're still good, but they just don't have much size," he said. They had a house brand vinegar-based hot sauce on the table that I mixed with some fresh ground horseradish. The hot sauce wasn't as peppery as a Tabasco sauce, but still had a bite. (I found out later on that I could have purchased a bottle of the sauce while we were there. I wish I would have known that before we left.)
The menu was heavily weighted toward seafood, but that's what we wanted for our anniversary dinner. Appetizers included peel-and-eat shrimp, tuna tartare, mussels, and fried oysters. For people who didn't want seafood, they had a burger and a blackened "cut-of-the-day" steak available. Salads included a Caesar salad, a farm-to-table greens salad, and a roasted beet salad. That's what my wife wanted to get to start out. She ordered it with a cabernet vinaigrette dressing, but after a couple bites she determined that there was no dressing on the salad. Or if there was some dressing, there wasn't a lot of it. My wife tried to get Michael's attention to ask him about getting some more dressing, but he was busy a few tables away chatting up the customers. She just ended up eating the salad as it was.
For our main entrees my wife got the bourbon-glazed salmon on a bed of smoked-bacon-braised collard greens, whipped potatoes and thinly sliced green apples. My wife got a glass of an Italian pinot grigio that they had for a house wine. She was in heaven with each bite. She said the salmon was fresh tasting and the glazing gave it a bit of a charred taste. She offered me a bite, but I still can't eat any type of cooked salmon. Raw salmon, smoked salmon - yes. But my stomach still turns from getting sick on salmon when I was in France over 15 years ago.
My choice that evening was the blackened mahi mahi of which I asked Michael to tell the chef to "step on it" with extra Cajun seasonings. The mahi mahi filet rested on a bed of jambalaya with chunks of andouille sausage. Grilled broccolini came on the side. The mahi mahi was outstanding and the Cajun seasonings gave it a spicy flavor that didn't overpower the taste of the fish. The jambalaya was also very good and I could have probably had the jambalaya on its own.
I was sort of stuffed after the mahi mahi and jambalaya, but when Michael came around with dessert suggestions my wife couldn't say no to the key lime pie. The tart filling with the sweet graham cracker crust was also outstanding. Light, yet rich, the key lime pie was a great close to what had been a great dinner.
Michael lingered with us after our meal as we talked about some of the restaurants on his list. One of the restaurants we had on our list was a James Beard Award-winning restaurant. Michael wasn't too crazy on that restaurant and said that he thought another similar-style restaurant was much better. "I think they lost their edge once they won the James Beard (award)," he said. I will say that the other restaurant he recommended was outstanding. In fact, each of the restaurants he suggested that we tried while we were in Charleston were very good to outstanding.
But the best meal that we had while we were in Charleston was probably Amen Street. I usually don't like to lead off with the best place we visited when I'm going to write a series of entries about restaurants in a given area, but Amen Street was better than we could have expected. The seafood was tremendous and even though Michael could be a bit too chatty, he was a good server and had a load of knowledge about the restaurant scene in and around Charleston. Amen Street was another memorable anniversary meal for my wife and me.
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