Beautiful South, Charleston, South Carolina: Stop 12 (for me) on The Great Charleston RoadFood Crawl

The Great Charleston RoadFood Crawl ended for me on Saturday night. The rest of the group had three more stops for Sunday, but duty called. I had to rise with the dawn and speed and post o’er land and sea back to get back home to Washington. Fittingly, the last meal was another fine one, Beautiful South, downtown at 128 Columbus Street.

The name Beautiful South is a clever play on the Chinese transliteration of the United States, měi guó, or Beautiful Country. It’s a lovey restaurant with a sleek bar and a graceful modern interior with soft lighting and muted noise.

The restaurant features Southern Chinese cuisine, and they emphasize family style — shared dishes. Need they pointedly note that “ordering individually is strongly discouraged.” We dutifully ordered and shared, as we had been doing all along, although the fact that they could not seat the entire group together cut down on the number of dishes we could share. Still, we did a noble job.

First up was a dish of scallion noodles. .

I enjoyed these. The noodles had a sort of elastic texture that seemed to soak up the soy and scallion oil for a pleasing flavor and texture. On top are some crispy scallions. It was a nice dish.

Next up was an order of teochow green beans.

As you can see, these were blistered and given a tasty char. Some crispy tofu, minced green olives, and sautéed mustard greens added a variety of flavors and textures.

Our first entree was a pork belly clay pot.

Here braised and sliced (as opposed to cubed and pan-fried) pork, roasted bok chop, and pickles topped a layer of flavorful rice. All of that was good, but the real treasure was the rice at the bottom of the pot, all soaked with vinegar and soy sauce, as well as the juices from the pork. And even better than that were the caramelized bits that had to be scraped from the pot. Such flavor! You have to order this.

We also ordered fried rice char siu.

The dish contained some tasty chunks of roasted pork along with the usual eggs, sundry vegetables, and double cooked rice graced with garlic, ginger, ,soy and oyster sauces, and a nice sprinkling of scallions. This was an excellent choice as a relatively neutral counterpoint to the final entree, General Tso’s chicken.

This was the best version of the dish I can recall eating, and I’ve eaten quite a few. The chicken was neither over-breaded nor overly sweet. It lacked the heaviness so common, and was actually light and crispy. The meat within the crust — thighs — was succulent, just terrific. The chef also did a fine job getting the broccoli just right. The sauce mixture of scallions, vinegar, soy, and garlic was taken up several notches by a host of dried Tianjin chiles. I ate a few of the chiles, and despite the usual cardboard texture they had an alluring flavor. I just loved this.

The dishes came out seriatim, and they were paced well through the appetizer and vegetable, and first entree. Then they started to back up a bit, but that’s fine when you’re eating family style. You don’t want five people sitting around twiddling their thumbs while one person is studying the dish to calculate the fraction that constitutes a fair share, or trying to scrape the hot pot.

These were sophisticated, well thought out dishes, and my hat is off to Beautiful South. We all enjoyed the food and the company, and I don’t hesitate to recommend Beautiful South for a night out with friends.

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