We'd never been to the low country before. That's the honest truth. We'd heard about it, obviously. You can't spend any real time in the food world without hearing about Charleston, without someone leaning across a table and telling you that you have to go, that the food scene there is something different, something worth the trip. We'd nodded along for years and never made it happen. Charleston Wine and Food finally gave us the excuse.
So we loaded up the Thaan Grills on a pallet, pointed the lighter south, and went.
The festival itself was held across the city over several days, and the energy from the jump was exactly what you hope for when you show up somewhere new. These are food people. Serious ones. Chefs and restaurant owners and the kind of home cooks who have stopped calling themselves home cooks because that framing stopped fitting a long time ago. The conversations were good from the start, and they only got better as the weekend went on.
We were debuting the Thaan Grill at a major food festival for the first time and we weren't entirely sure how people would respond to it. The thing people kept coming back to was how simple it is. How intuitive. You don't need a backyard, you don't need a lot of space, you don't need an hour of setup before you can get cooking. We grilled pineapple on it at one point, mostly on a whim, and the crowd that gathered around for that was genuinely one of the highlights of the weekend. Pineapple. And Mango! Who knew? The grill doesn't discriminate, and neither should you.
Chef Michelle Wallace cooked on the Thaan Grill on Saturday at Firefly Distillery and what she put out was insanely good. Watching a chef of her caliber work a live fire setup and seeing how naturally the grill fits into the way she cooks was exactly the kind of moment that makes you feel like what you've built is actually doing what you hoped it would. We were grateful she was up for it.
We also got lucky enough to cross paths (quite literally, on the street one afternoon) with Chef Vinnie Cimino from Cordelia in Ohio, which was one of those spontaneous collisions that festivals are made for. The live fire community is smaller and more connected than people on the outside might realize, and every conversation we had this weekend reinforced that. These chefs are paying attention, they're curious, and they're generous with what they know.
And then there was the city itself.
We'd heard before we left that Charleston would feel familiar, that people kept comparing it to Portland in ways that were hard to articulate but easy to feel once you got there. Turns out they were right. The density of good restaurants, the way the community rallies around them, the sense that people here take eating seriously not as a performance but as a genuine part of how they live. It didn't hurt that Charleston Wine and Food shares some real DNA with Portland's (now-defunct) Feast, two festivals built on the same belief that food culture is worth celebrating at a high level and that the people making it deserve a proper stage. Being inside that felt like home in the best possible way. We hit the seafood tower and martinis at The Ordinary and it delivered completely on its reputation. Sullivan's Fish Camp was another highlight, and it came with a bonus we didn't see coming: running into Chef Christine Lau, who is set to open Lady Fish in Portland, Maine this summer and who we are very much rooting for. Drinks at Seahorse, coffee at Baba's. The city fed us well in every sense.
But the part we keep coming back to, the part that will stick with us longest, is Silver and Cherry Iocovozzi from Neng Jr's.
There are people you meet in this industry who remind you why you got into it, and they do it without even trying. Cherry and Silver cook from somewhere genuinely joyful, somewhere real, and it comes through in every single bite in a way you just can't manufacture. Being around them for a few days filled something back up in us that the grind of building a business has a way of quietly depleting. They're the kind of leaders this industry doesn't talk about enough. No performance, no pretense, just two people who are completely and fully themselves, and food that reflects that right back at you.
Silver's wings and bellychon were so goddamn good we're still thinking about them.
We'll be back, Charleston. Sooner than last time.
