The first thing I did upon reading that Charleston Grill was closing was book a table for two for Saturday, August 23rd, the final night of service.

The jazz trio in the corner was just purring into its first set as we settled into our chairs by the garden windows. We opted for the six-course tasting menu with wine pairings, which seemed the only appropriate choice.

Three hours later, as we chatted with our servers over dessert, we learned the hotel was planning a fast turn and would open something new in the space in October. The deal was still being finalized, so no names were mentioned, but we heard the next restaurant would be led by a new chef who was already “a pretty big name” and would be coming in from out of town.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I thought.

The Backstory

Becky Lacey of the Charleston City Paper did a fine job assessing the legacy of Charleston Grill to Charleston’s food and beverage community, so I won’t cover the same ground here. Instead, I want to touch on the restaurant’s influence on Southern dining in its early years then fast forward to the closing night.

Most accounts of the restaurant’s history start in October 1989, when Louis Osteen took over the restaurant at Charleston Place and created Louis’s Charleston Grill. I’ve not seen anyone write about the establishment that preceded it, the Shaftesbury Room.

That’s Shaftesbury as in Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 2nd Earl of Shaftesbury, Chief Lord Proprietor of the Carolina Colony and acquirer of naming rights to Lowcountry rivers. Affixing such a name to a restaurant might suggest cuisine well-grounded in the history and traditions of Charleston, but that wasn’t exactly the case.

When Charleston Place opened in 1986 it was managed by the Omni Hotels chain, and the company tapped as executive chef 31-year-old Patrick J. Augustyn, a graduate of the Culinary Art School of Joliet, Ill. and former corporate chef at Omni’s headquarters in New Hampshire.

In December, Frank P. Jarrell reviewed the Shaftesbury Room for the Post & Courier and declared it “a Young Urban Professional sort of place.” That wasn’t meant as a compliment. Jarrell was unimpressed by the flavorless lobster ravioli and the lamb sausage (“It reminded us of Marmite,”) and bemoaned the too-salty brown sauces that finished the dry tenderloin steak and rack of lamb.

Jarrell saved his sharpest criticism for the final paragraph. “Since the Shaftesbury is named after one of the more-famous non-Charleston names in Charleston,” he wrote, “Why doesn’t it serve food that is more representative of the Lowcountry?” Instead of “quasi-Continental cuisine,” he suggested visitors would be better served by “an exposure to indigenous food.”

Enter Louis

The Shaftesbury Room didn’t make much of a mark on the local scene, and after three years Charleston Place decided to take a new tack. In August 1989 the managers auctioned off the restaurant’s crystal chandeliers and Italian marble bar and announced they had recruited Louis Osteen from Pawley’s Island to open a new, less formal bistro in the space.

A native of Anderson, Osteen had apprenticed for five years under Chef Francois Delcros at Le Versailles in Atlanta then moved to the South Carolina coast to open Pawley’s Island Inn with his wife, Marlene. There he earned a reputation as a culinary innovator by transitioning from high French to a more Southern form of fine dining that incorporated regional ingredients like Carolina squab and stoneground grits.

Osteen’s new Omni restaurant was named Louis’s Charleston Grill, and the hotel promised “a diversified menu with items that are indigenous to the area.” The Post & Courier’s Jarrell visited in November 1989 and declared Louis’s to be “much, much better” than its predecessor. He praised the “fabulous” appetizers, which included McClellanville lump crabmeat and lobster cakes, roasted shitake mushrooms from nearby Kingstree, and a salads with Blue Ridge goat cheese and fried oysters. The entrées were less locally-inflected—braised grouper in cream sauce, grilled filet with peppercorn-cabernet glaze—but Jarrell conceded that “for hotel food, Louis’s Charleston Grill is certainly a welcome change.”

In the years ahead, more and more diners found Osteen’s approach to be not just a welcome change but a compelling new mode of dining. Other local chefs were inspired to turn their sights on Southern dishes, too. In 1995 Bryan Miller of the New York Times lauded “Charleston’s restaurant renaissance,” declaring Osteen to be “the spiritual general” of “a battalion of new chefs.” He praised the crab-and-lobster cakes, confit of duck served over grits with red-eye gravy, and the fried green tomato salad with black-eyed peas.

The following year food writer John Egerton told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution that the Charleston restaurant scene “started with the Osteens . . . It used to be that you had to get invited to a private home to have a fine dinner in Charleston. The Osteens took that tradition and made it public.”

Succession

In 1995, Orient-Express Hotels took over Charleston Place from Omni. The new operators announced a goal of becoming “a five-star, five-diamond hotel,” referring to the rating systems of respected travel guides from Mobil and the American Automobile Association (AAA). Osteen ended up getting sideways with the new management, and he departed rather acrimoniously in early 1997.

To replace him, Charleston Place recruited Bob Waggoner from the Wild Boar in Nashville, Tennessee’s only AAA five-diamond restaurant at the time. The hotel’s manager told the Post & Courier, “It’s exciting to bring someone to Charleston who’s already made it and done it.” Louis’s was dropped from the restaurant’s name, but the Charleston Grill remained.

A California native who trained in classical kitchens in France, Waggoner lacked a Southern pedigree, but he embraced the New Southern aesthetic. Early menus included seared foie gras with cornbread and peanut sprouts and duck confit with caramelized Vidalia onions. The mahogany wall panels and jazz combo were retained, and so was the McClellanville crabcake, though Waggoner dropped the lobster and finished his with roasted hazelnuts and smoked salmon in ginger-infused chive sauce.

That February, Mobil awarded Charleston Grill its first four star designation, and for the next 12 years Waggoner kept the restaurant at the forefront of the city’s fine dining scene. In 2009 he passed the executive chef’s baton to his sous chef, Michelle Weaver, who led the kitchen into the 2020s.

When I reviewed Charleston Grill for the Post & Courier in April 2023, I observed, “Keeping an enterprise going from one generation to the next can be tricky, and there have been quite a few successions over the years at Charleston Grill.” I noted the departure of longtime general manager Mickey Bakst and beverage director Rick Rubel in 2020, the purchase of Charleston Place by Ben Navarro’s Beemok Hospitality Group in 2021, and sous chef Suzy Castelloe’s stepping up to take Weaver’s place in early 2023.

“So far,” I concluded, “the succession at Charleston Grill seems to have been a success.” That turned out to be wrong.

Closing Time

Our final evening began, like so many before it, with fresh housemade rolls accompanied by a dome of soft butter dusted with sea salt. A glass of champagne was poured alongside the white ceramic spoon containing the amuse bouche, a rich fruit puree dotted with finely diced peach and melon. That was followed by three silky slices of cool, rosy-hued tuna dotted with pureed avocado and finished with cucumber and Fresno chile so finely decided they were all but specks.

The larger plates brought earthy chanterelle ‘risotto’ made from chewy sorghum grains followed by smoky chunks of paprika-scented octopus over creamy sunchoke purée. The heaviest course topped tender Colorado lamb loin with blue oyster mushrooms and firm local limas in a pool of savory lamb jus.

And, yes, there was a crab cake, the throughline back to Osteen. Served between the tuna crudo and the sorghum risotto, this final iteration had the requisite blue crab lumps gathered by some imperceptible binding into a tall puck and seared brown on top. Candy-sweet local shrimp and heirloom cherry tomatoes in tart lime-dill vinaigrette added notes so bright and sparkling that it almost brought tears to my eyes.

Whenever a long-running restaurant closes (and Charleston Grill ran for 36 years,) it’s almost obligatory to call it “the end of an era.” This time, though, the words really fit, for it does feel like the end of an era for Charleston dining, and perhaps for the city in general.

My 2023 review noted that, “The new menu, like the city itself, may be gradually losing its old Southern accent in favor of a more cosmopolitan style, but the fundamentals remain solid.” I was enthralled by the meticulously executed dishes as well as the excellent wine, the spot-on service, and the overall mode of luxurious comfort—everything I look for in a big celebratory night out.

Increasingly, it seems, fewer and fewer people share that appreciation. Charleston Grill never became a darling of social media influencers. (It had no Instagram wall.) Once a mainstay of food writers’ “best of Charleston” lists, it didn’t make it onto the map for Eater Carolina’s latest “18 Best Restaurants in Charleston” list, though not one but two barbecue joints did. Conde Nast Traveler found no space for it among its “39 Best Restaurants in Charleston,” and the Charleston[RM1] City Paper didn’t even rank it in its top 50 for Summer 2025.

As I scanned the final evening’s menu, I noted with satisfaction the refreshing absence of chili crisp, matcha, and anything “Nashville hot.” Stylish gold-rimmed chargers awaited atop the table’s heavy white linen. Our servers were clad in sleek black vests over white shirts and long black ties.

None of that struck me in the moment as being out of step with our times, but it should have. After all, the text message confirming our reservation had requested that guests “embrace the refined experience of the Charleston Grill” with “polished casual attire.” For those who needed clarification, it added, “baseball caps, beachwear and athletic wear are not permitted.”

This is the city in which we live now, and restaurants like Charleston Grill no longer have a place in it.

What Lies Ahead

I’ll concede that my initial reaction upon hearing the plans for Charleston Place’s next restaurant was unfairly negative and close-minded. In theory, there’s no reason why a big-name chef from a far-off metropolis couldn’t move here, create a restaurant that wows out of the gate, then stick around a decade or two and make it a local institution.

Bob Wagonner did just that when he succeeded Louis Osteen back in 1997. Osteen himself was an established out-of-town chef when he arrived, and he ended up overhauling an outmoded restaurant and sparking a culinary revolution in Charleston. It could happen again.

Ten days after our closing meal, the identity of the new chef was revealed, and it’s a big name, indeed. Daniel Humm, who earned three Michelin stars at Eleven Madison Park in New York City, will create not an ordinary restaurant but a 12 month “pop-up” called “Chef Daniel Humm x The Charleston Place, Presented by Resy.”

There are so many odd things about that announcement. 12 months seems awful long for a “pop-up” but not long enough for permanency. Will Humm actually be in town for much of the residency or just swoop in for a few days and jet back to New York? And what does it mean to be “presented by” Resy—a restaurant underwritten by advertisers?

The venture’s new web site promises to showcase “Chef Humm’s world-class culinary vision through the lens of local Charleston ingredients and traditions.” The five-course, prix fixe menu will run $135 per person. I suppose the black bass and some of the vegetables on the sample menu could be sourced locally, but from the opening tomato cocktail with olive bread to the Baked Alaska for dessert, there’s not a single ingredient nor preparation that belongs to any Charleston tradition I’m aware of.

No grits. No okra. No benne. And, no, no crab cakes, either. It’s perfectly fine for a chef to come to town and open a cosmopolitan restaurant inspired by fine dining from around the globe. But why mouth the words, “local Charleston ingredients and traditions” if you don’t actually mean it?

Perhaps that will change once Chef Humm has had time to immerse himself in the local scene, but I may have to wait to find out. The restaurant opened October 2nd, and the initial tranche of reservations posted on Resy were almost immediately snapped up.

I wonder whether they’re still pouring any of the bottles of decades-old Madeira that must surely be left in in the cellar. For years Charleston Grill kept the deepest selection of that long-aged fortified wine, the favorite of the city’s elites two centuries ago.

I rounded out our last visit with a glass. The list featured a 1908 vintage, but it was gone by the time I ordered. I made do with an Oliveras Tinta Negra from 1929. “A Depression-era wine,” sommelier Jay Griffin noted wryly as he poured the dark, raisin-hued liquid into a short-stemmed glass.

I raised the glass to the emptying room and offered a silent toast to Charleston Grill. It was a good run while it lasted.