Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Food in Charleston, SC
My favourite coffee bean dealer shop, Coastal Coffee Roasters, has grown quite a bit over the years, and has been offering tasty baked goods in the cafe part for a while now.
Stopped by today to grab some more coffee, and thought I’d grab one of their giant cinnamon rolls while I was there. These things are seriously huge, like the size of your head. They also had similarly sized scones today, but I’ll try those another day.
Here it is with a banana for scale.
The Flame Thrower from Vicious Biscuit. Biscuits almost as big as your head.
Over by the Tanger Outlet Mall in North Charleston, just a few doors down from Mr. K’s Used Bookstore on International Blvd is a new Thai restaurant, Thai East Fusion. I learned about it from a recent article in the Post & Courier and we decided to check it out this afternoon.
Rows of benches line the side of the strip mall space, with a row of tables running down the middle. Inside is comfortable, brightly lit and not overly decorated.
We started off with a dish of kimchi and the ginger salad. The salad that came out was larger than expected with a nice amount of sweet ginger dressing that wasn’t too gingery.
The kimchi, according to the P&C article, is made in-house using the family’s secret recipe. Crisp, pungent, spicy, and delicious. Probably some of the best kimchi I’ve had in the area.
Entrees come in 5 levels of spiciness: No spice, mild, medium, spicy, and Thai spicy. For dinner, I chose the Pad Thai with beef (Thai spicy), and Connie got the Basil Chicken (medium). Generously laden plates came out, each enough for three or four people (two or three if everybody is really hungry).
The Pad Thai was pretty tasty with the good flavourful kind of spicy. A few squirts of Sriracha sauce can be used to bump up the spice level even more.
The Basil Chicken was quite good with a nice coconut-y curry sauce. The chicken was nicely cooked and very tasty. The medium spicy-ness was perfect for Connie. For fellow anti-cilantro types, the cilantro on the Basil was just a garnish and is easily removed (or just ask to leave off the cilantro).
Everything we had was delicious. We quite enjoyed the meal, and are looking forward to going back to try the mango sticky rice, which they unfortunately didn’t have when we were there.
A new pizza place near MUSC opened up yesterday, owned by the same people that own Halo. It adds some much needed variety to the eating scene near the hospital that’s also within a reasonable walking distance.
Just down the block from Halo is Nimbo Pizza (not much of a website yet, but they only just opened). It’s got a fun space theme going on inside the place, with framed NASA Space Tourism posters and other sci-fi movie posters hung on the walls.
There’s a pretty extensive menu of pizzas, sandwiches and salads with creative space names like the Interstellar Italian, Total Eclipse of the Parm, Meaty Meteor, Mars Margherita and the like. You can see them all on a couple of very colourful chalkboards above the ordering counter.
I went for the 10″ Meaty Meteor pizza today. Pretty good pizza. Thin, crispy crust that’s not too floppy and not too chewy.
Half of it made for a decent sized lunch portion, although I could have easily finished off the whole thing. Didn’t want to have to fight off a food coma while sitting at my desk for the rest of the afternoon though.
Good pizza and a nice short walk from work. If you’re on a tight schedule, you can call in an order so that it will be ready when you get there. There’s also an option on the website to put in an order online too.
Will definitely be going back on those days when I don’t feel like cafeteria food.
Pho Bo from Lotus Vietnamese Cuisine in Park Circle.
A nice beef broth with rice noodles and thin slices of sirloin. Could have used some more noodles though.
If it wasn’t for the cilantro in the broth, it would have been excellent. Those of you who actually enjoy the taste of cilantro would probably like this a lot.