If you read my blog on a consistent enough basis, you'll notice one of my recurring gripes is with dull and uninspired landscapes. You know what I'm talking about. Those depressing stretches of road that are nothing but a myriad of strip malls and chain restaurants and for some reason like fifteen auto part stores all clustered next to one another. You can find the same drabness in suburbia in the form of one giant house built 25 times in a row and crammed in to one subdivision, invariably built atop formerly pristine wildlife. I don't know how to say it any other way, but all of that feels very "gray" to me. It's the kind of setting that makes me want to take a shower just from driving through it.
My wife and I picked Charleston, South Carolina as our place to honeymoon, and I'm so glad we did. Charleston gave us the exact opposite of that dreary, lethargic feel. Everything was genuine, preserved and felt purposeful. All manner of architecture, Georgian to Victorian, Federal to Italianate gave the city an engaging and captivating buzz. Even the humid ocean air felt built-in, as if commanded to be there by the row houses and centuries old churches. One particular moment struck me as especially charming; when my new wife and I decided to stroll aimlessly through the streets of Charleston just to see what we could find. Before we knew it we had unwittingly stumbled in to a three hundred year old Unitarian cemetery; a truly incredible and humbling experience.
In case "places where dead people are stored" isn't exactly your bag, it should also be noted that Charleston is an overwhelmingly impressive city on the gastronomic as well. The city itself has fewer than 150,000 residents and continues to find itself in consideration as one of the top culinary hotspots in the world. With the ability to boast being home to things like Sean Brock's flagship restaurants Husk and McCrady's; as well as being the host city to 2013's Cook It Raw event, it's hard to say those accolades aren't deserved
Still, behind the glitz and glamor and celebrity that exists in Charleston's food scene, something else truly magical can be found. Guided by grand exaltation from Yelp! reviewers, my wife and I decided to head to lunch at Martha Lou's. It should be said at this point that this entry isn't exactly blowing the lid off of any secret to the excellence contained within Martha Lou Gadsden's incredible restaurant. We had entered at just the right time, which is to say we were sat at a six top with a family of four who we had never met before. This is something I experienced several times in Charleston. If a place was packed you didn't wait for a table, you were crammed in to wherever you could be sat. Moments later the place was slammed to a standing room only capacity. Most of the people left, but some of the loyalists decided it was worth it to stand and eat. I am seriously grateful we came when we did, because truthfully I'm not sure I would have assumed it was worth standing in a tiny, sweltering restaurant just to get my hands on some reputable fried chicken. If I knew then what I know now, I would understand that it would have been worth it to stand on hot tar for what I was about to eat.
Nothing could prepare me for the majesty that awaited me. For something like $15.00 my wife and I gorged ourselves on literally the best soul food I've ever eaten. Soul food is something that is very easy to assume will be delicious. I mean who doesn't love a plate teeming with rice and beans, collards, macaroni and cheese and fried chicken? I could eat that meal every day for my life and be happy, of course that would be before prematurely expiring from a massive cardiac episode. What isn't easy is making something like baked macaroni and cheese a truly excellent, stand out dish. But there I was, in a restaurant about the width and length of a semi-truck trailer (maybe smaller) in what had to be over a hundred degree weather, eating pure bliss.
The most impressive thing about the whole experience? How about the fact that when I got there, 83 year old Martha Lou Gadsden herself was working the fry station, making sure everything came out just right. Towards the end of the meal when my wife and I (both disgustingly full at this point) had funny picked our plate clean, Martha Lou finally gave herself a break. Sitting at one of the benches in her restaurant, waving herself with a menu, she yelled for someone to give her some sweet tea. After receiving her tea she noticed our sluggish visages melting away in the corner. She asked who we were and where we were from. Upon hearing that we were newlyweds she leaped up and gleefully demanded we sign the bible sized guestbook she had at the front of the restaurant. We happily signed out names somewhere in the middle of the book, probably about 200 pages in. I asked her how long the book had been around for. "Oh that one?" she said "Maybe two weeks!". Patronage well deserved.
I hopefully don't live in a world so joyless that I need to pontificate anyone in to seeking out amazing food, but if a story needs a moral, here one is. We were loaded on newlywed cash on that smoldering July afternoon, we really could have dined anywhere in a city with five star restaurants on literally every corner, but a hunch and fifteen bucks led us in to one of the top ten meals of my life. Never assume that money and quality stack up equally. In or around Charleston? Make a stop at Martha Lou's. You will not be disappointed.
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