FIG – Charleston, South Carolina

For my birthday, we had a delicious lunch at Chez Nous and then took a private carriage ride around downtown Charleston:

The streets of Charleston have a lot of beautiful architecture and the carriage ride started out with a stop with a ping pong ball game to figure out which route we would take to make sure there wasn’t a lot of congestion for people actually trying to get around downtown in cars. The woman working at the ping pong ball booth drops a ball into a box and where it comes out determines which route you take. Our horse, Mellow Yellow, was patient and good with the cars and oncoming traffic.

The residential streets are pretty quiet and everyone gets around with golf carts instead of cars:

A chicken we ran into on the afternoon ride:

After doing the relaxing carriage ride around downtown Charleston and walking to the water, we headed to FIG for an early dinner. The restaurant accepts reservations but we decided to walk in and try our luck. We had to wait a bit, but it was definitely worth it. The restaurant is located off a major street in the middle of downtown:

We started off with some refreshments:

We sat down at the communal table with another couple from New York, a mother/daughter duo from Charlotte, and eventually an uncle and niece. They serve freshly baked bread with delicious butter to everyone at the table to get started:

We decided to just order a bunch of items and share everything because we were hungry and wanted to try everything on the menu! We started with the chilled corn soup with razor clams:

FIG is a restaurant that uses local and seasonal ingredients so this dish isn’t on the menu right now, but I hope they bring it back because it was so light, refreshing, and very tasty (and really beautiful!) It reminded me and Ken of a chilled corn soup we had in Napa (at Solbar Calistoga).

We also ordered a salad with local butter lettuce and tomatoes:

This was a little underwhelming, but it didn’t matter because we ordered so many different delicious dishes that needed to be eaten! The waitress served us in courses so the next course was pastas. We ordered two – the soft shell crab with lemon, bottarga and herbs:

We also ordered the ricotta gnocchi with lamb bolognese because I can never resist bolognese:

Both pastas were excellent; they were both cooked to a perfect al dente, the sauces were rich in flavor and I couldn’t get enough of either of them (and Ken was extra nice because he let me finish everything!)

For our main course, we ordered the fish stew (for a few extra dollars, they’ll split it for you so we decided to do that):

The stew came with all types of seafood, including mussels, shrimp, squid, and also had some rice and an amazing rouille that you mixed in. We were so full but couldn’t stop eating!

The meal at FIG was really delicious and it was fun sitting at the communal table because we all talked to each other and everyone ended up ordering different items so we were able to see all of the dishes FIG offered. We can’t wait to check out the other great restaurants in Charleston!