The Southern Fork

When I first spoke with Chef Michael Toscano in 2017, he and his family were just getting settled in Charleston with the opening of Le Farfalle. Now, seven years later, the chef seems as if he’s truly settled into a new rhythm between NYC and the Lowcountry. He and his wife Caitlin currently have four restaurants: the aforementioned Le Farfalle, da Toscano in New York’s Greenwich Village, da Toscano Porchetta Shop in C...

Deborah Freeman is the creator of Setting the Table, a multi-award winning podcast exploring Black foodways and culinary history that in 2023 was honored by the International Association of Culinary Professionals as “Podcast of the Year.” She’s also a colleague in the food writing world, with contributions including to Eater, Condé Nast Traveler, and Garden and Gun, and is the food editor for Richmond’s Style Weekly. We sat down vi...

Roosevelt Brownlee lives on the curve of a quiet street in Savannah, GA, the tall stalks of okra in his vegetable garden just visible from the side drive. It’s one of many such streets in the port city, and only a few minutes from the old City Market area where he spent his earliest years. But in between those two Savannah addresses, Roosevelt has traveled the world, from France to Africa, the Caribbean to Denmark, coo...

One of my greatest quiet joys is cooking from a well-written cookbook on a weekend night, music on the bluetooth and new scents and tastes filling the kitchen. My favorite cookbook that I’ve cooked from this year is Latinisimo: Home Recipes from the Twenty-One Country of Latin America by Sandra Gutierrez. Sweeping in its scope, it is an encyclopedia of the home cooking of Latin America today, and each of the hundreds ...

Columbia, SC’s Main Street architecture still has much of the charm of a mid-century movie set. There are jewelry stores, restaurants, hotels, and gift shops in buildings that range from the turn of the 20th Century to modern day. Tucked in among the hustle and bustle is Lula Drake Wine Parlor, which eight plus years ago was just another dusty building awaiting renovation. Now it is a gilded lily that comes alive at ni...

Charlotte, NC is one of the fastest growing metropolitan cities in the United States. While the city has always looked forward, it was actually founded before the American Revolution and the site of the first US Mint. But in the past two decades, the intense growth and the addition of a light rail system have brought immense changes citywide. In the middle of it all, the Nguyen family has been feeding its community, on...

Over more than half a century as an editor at Knopf, Judith Jones became a legend, nurturing future literary icons such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. But although I was an English major, I first learned of Judith Jones years later, when I realized that Edna Lewis, M.F.K. Fisher, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, James Beard, and, most famously, Julia Child, all had the same editor -- her. Judith celebrated...

Rice was South Carolina’s first great agricultural staple. Before the American Revolution, it had already made South Carolina the richest of the 13 original colonies, and Charleston one of the richest cities in the world.  But it did so on the backs of enslaved skilled laborers, most of whom had been kidnapped from the rice growing regions of West Africa. For hundreds of years, they and their descendants built earthwor...

Shaun Brian Sells started life in a two-person tent surrounded by plantation ruins in the flats of Coral Bay, St. John, US Virgin Islands. It was in that environment where his love for cooking began– by roaming and foraging through the valley, fishing off his dad’s sailboat and cooking for up to eight siblings at a time. Those challenges became the source of his inspiration. At Cudaco on James Island, SC, he brings that inspiration...

Adrian Lipscombe is a native Texan, a chef, an urban planner, and a civic activist, though she prefers the term catalyst. In 2016, she moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin and opened Uptowne Café, a gathering place and a space for her to explore the synergy behind her Southern upbringing, Midwest ingredients and African American culinary history. In 2020, she founded the 40 Acres Project, which seeks to preserve the legacy of...

Although Charleston, SC, has changed a lot, it is still one of the cities in the US with a decidedly European feel. Many parts of it are very walkable, there are cobblestone alleyways and al fresco dining, and lingering over a meal is absolutely encouraged. One of the best places to linger this time of year -- or anytime really -- is Malagón Mercado y Tapería. Juan Cassalett is the executive chef and co-owner, and alth...

On a cool, misty morning when the trees were bright green with their first flush of leaves, I rounded a corner on Route 215 in the NC Mountains and arrived at one of Sunburst Trout’s rainbow trout farms. Pristine water flowed continuously into multiple holding ponds, which held different sizes of trout with plenty of room to move around and swim. Here, in this storybook cove, these beautiful fish have grown for generat...

Chef Dave “Smoke” McCluskey, an official member of the Mohawk nation, has spent more than 30 years in the culinary industry, in everything from fine dining kitchens to catering gigs to even organizing and hosting boucheries. Those are traditional gatherings centered around communal hog butchering that also offer a space to celebrate local foodways, and swap knowledge, stories, and seeds. It was at one such gathering that he was gif...

Passion for your work can give you energy to do more than you ever dreamed you’d have time for. That’s the case for William Dissen, chef of The Market Place in Asheville, NC, which this year, its 45th in operation, was named a semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation. William began honing his skills through study at the Culinary Institute of America and in various kitchens, including the Greenbrier Reso...

Jael Skeffington is the co-founder and CEO of French Broad Chocolates in Asheville, NC. What started in 2006 as a chocolate passion and a cafe in Costa Rica with her partner Dan, has grown to 85 employees, a Chocolate Lounge & Boutique in downtown Asheville, and an experiential Chocolate Factory & Cafe. French Broad sources the finest cacao from farmers and producers in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Perú and transforms it i...

Do you ever consider going to Hilton Head Island, SC for a fresh-out-of-the-oven French baguette or a raspberry tart that’s perhaps gilded with gold flakes and filled with lemon curd? Maybe not, but you might want to reconsider because Hilton Head Social Bakery, with two locations on the island, has been baking that and much more since Chef Philippe Feret and his wife Marissa opened the bakery in 2016. Phillipe was an apprentice in...

Despite the bio I’m about to share, I think Ray Isle is one of the least pretentious people in the wine world today. He grew up in Houston, and he learned to see wine as an adventure, an adventure that’s taken him all around the world. Ray is the longtime executive wine editor for Food & Wine as well as the wine and spirits editor for Travel + Leisure. He writes Food & Wine’s monthly “What to Drink Next” column as well as regular f...

Augusta Road in West Columbia, SC, isn’t a storybook setting. Strip malls are lined up down the road, flanking a Wal-Mart and a sprawling old school U Haul campus. But just keep going and turn off the road at the Aldi and there’s a  summer camp style building tucked in some trees and a modest BBQ sign. That’s when you know you’ve reached the city limits, City Limits BBQ to be exact. Owner and pitmaster Robbie Robinson grew up in ne...

According to Saveur magazine, Border Food is defined as Mexican food with a distinct identity —influenced by the cooking of Chihuahua and Texas, but with a number of little twists. Because Texas is so large and diverse, it’s a more nuanced label than the overarching Tex-Mex, and one surprising spot that it is celebrating with abandon is in Greenville, SC. Dayna Lee is the chef and operator of Comal 864, a petite spot with a big hea...