It was pretty big news in August when Jason Stanhope announced he was leaving FIG after 15 years in the kitchen. During that tenure, he had been promoted to executive chef, won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast and helped cement the restaurant’s status as one of the city’s top fine dining destinations.
Geographically, Stanhope wasn’t heading too far away. He had been recruited by the Philadelphia-based hospitality firm Method Co. to overhaul the restaurants at The Pinch, its boutique hotel at the corner of King and George streets. That meant revamping The Quinte, the hotel’s oyster bar, and launching a new restaurant in the building next door.
Its name, Lowland, is curious, for it hints at the South Carolina Lowcountry but is more commonly associated with Scotland. On its website, the restaurant is described as “a Southern tavern serving timeless classics and luxurious comfort food,” which seems a bit ambiguous, too.
The Southern box gets ticked, I suppose, by the biscuits and deviled eggs that lead off the menu. There’s just one Cheryl Day biscuit per order ($7), but the thick, golden brown square is more than enough to share. Named for the owner of Savannah’s Back in the Day Bakery, who provided the recipe, it’s all delicate fluffiness inside. That texture carries over to the accompanying circle of whipped farmer cheese, which is filled like an edible bowl with sweet, mild pepper jelly for dredging or dipping.
There’s also only one deviled egg per order ($5) — or perhaps two, depending upon how you count your deviled eggs. The two halved whites have a bright yellow filling piped into tight beehive-like squiggles that are rich and dense in texture. The best part is the platform the eggs are perched upon, which looks at first like a tangle of spaghetti but turns out to be long ribbons of celery root tossed in a creamy remoulade laced with tart caper and bits of diced pickle.
These are not your typical upscale takes on classic Southern fare, and there’s not a lot of Southern character to the rest of Lowland’s menu. The same could be said of the restaurant’s setting. Yes, it occupies an old house that was built around 1834 and has now been meticulously restored, but it’s a three-story Greek Revival townhouse, architecturally more typical of New York than Charleston.
The first floor dining space is dubbed the parlor room, though it’s actually two rooms separated by a wide doorway. The walls in one are dark red, the other light tan. Each has wide pine plank floors and soaring 12-foot ceilings framed with white crown molding.
Upstairs, another dining room holds a mix of round tables and green-backed banquettes, and its walls are clad floor to ceiling in dramatic murals of geographically ambiguous woodland scenes, hand-painted in dark green. The long strands dangling from the trees invoke Spanish moss, but the whole seems more an ethereal, Japanese-inspired fantasy than an actual Lowcountry landscape.
Still, they’re beautiful rooms, with the original deep-set windows and ornate scrollwork on the doorways. The decorations — potted plants, framed paintings, tiny lamps, a three-masted model ship — seem carefully staged as an eclectic jumble. In each of the parlor rooms, a large fireplace is framed by a wooden mantel, painted black and bearing inspirational exhortations in white script: ”Everybody Come Alive” and “Everybody Love Alive” — they read like Airbnb pillows, but I’m pretty sure they’re Jimi Hendrix lyrics.
Amid that highly curated and almost opulent setting, the service is more downscale. Servers are dressed in jeans, black shirts and gray aprons. The food is presented simply on pale-blue stoneware plates and in low gray bowls. A scattering of green herbs is the primary ornamentation.
There’s nothing simple about the flavors, though.
The crispy quail ($20) enrobes rich, dark meat in a crisp, powdery batter. Alongside for dipping is a ramekin of toum, a Lebanese emulsified garlic sauce with a bright citrus finish.
Stanhope’s version of steak tartare ($16) blankets the beef under shaved cheese and piles crisp-fried potato chips alongside. What makes it a standout plate is the smoked trout mayo that binds the silky cubes of beef, imparting an irresistible smoky kiss to each bite.
Many of the other plates also lean toward the tried-and-true — New York strip au poivre ($48), rigatoni with Calabrian pork ragu ($26) — though with some decidedly upscale spins, like the “fancy cognac sauce” on the tavern burger ($26).
An excellent way to take chicken parm uptown is to swap out the bird in favor of a hefty slice of bone-in pork and call it pork cutlet parmigiana ($42). It’s topped with a modest layer of red sauce dappled with melted white cheese and a generous drift of shaved parmesan, but the best part is the cutlet’s tight jacket of crisp, golden batter.
Celery is a once-beloved and now oft-maligned vegetable, but in Stanhope’s hands it seems poised for a comeback. His celery salad ($21) is a splendid exercise in contrasting textures and flavors. The mild crunch of the chopped stalks is complemented by earthy bites of walnut and the soft, sticky sweetness of dates. Long shavings of Prairie Breeze cheddar add a layer of aged richness, while torn mint leaves give a final finishing pop.
Celery makes a cameo appearance on the triggerfish entrée ($38), too — chopped and tucked beneath the tender white filet, which is nicely scored with brown grill marks. The fish, unfortunately, is dressed in a sauce piccata that’s short on acid and long on butter, and while the peeled fingerlings have a touch of intriguing smokiness to them (perhaps from the fish’s grill char?) they’re much too firm for such a delicate plate.
While we’re addressing unpleasant topics, I must note that the desserts are a bit of a mess.
A sloppy mound of dark chocolate mousse ($13) is topped with a scoop of “boozy cherries” that overdeliver with a harsh bite of alcohol and spice.
The Banoffee pudding ($15), a deconstructed take on Britain’s banoffee pie, could use a little reconstruction. One side of the gold-rimmed bowl is smeared with tan toffee, and the rest holds a pale yellow mass of banana pudding with a dollop of whipped cream and a scattering of candied pecans. Balanced over the top is a long, surfboard-like strip of halved banana lacquered with sticky, caramelized glaze. It’s all pleasantly sweet and gooey, but otherwise quite unmemorable.
Following on the heels of so many remarkable flavors, these stumbles really stand out. So, too, do small gaps in service, which seem to compound as the night progresses.
The small dining rooms are elegant and inviting, but as the dishes arrive, one fast on the heels of another, the small tabletop quickly becomes a chaotic jumble of glasses and plates. As the surrounding chairs fill, the volume rises and the staff begins to seem a bit harried and frazzled.
But one can always head to the back of the building, where Lowland’s real ace in the hole is found. Once the mansion’s carriage house, it’s been transformed into a stylish, clubby bar that serves the same menu as the main dining rooms.
The walls are a mix of thin-slatted brown wood paneling and red Venetian damask wallpaper, and exposed overhead are ancient hand-hewn wooden beams. Most dramatic are the two original brick fireplaces. One rises behind the long copper-topped bar, now filled with rows of liquor bottles on shelves. The other has a rack of antlers hanging on the chimney and a pair of leather club chairs in front.
Refreshingly, there is no television in sight. You can even slip in through the side door from the cobblestone alley between The Pinch and the restaurant.
It’s calmer and more sedate back in the bar, which gave me time for quiet contemplation about the Lowland’s contradictions. The concept still seems a bit in flux. When the restaurant opened, Stanhope revealed ambitious plans to serve a separate prix fixe menu in the upstairs dining room, but that idea seems to have been abandoned.
More than anything, I sense a still-unresolved tension between luxury and comfort. The restaurant’s marketing invokes terms like “fun, approachable food” and “timeless classics.” In November, Stanhope told The Local Palate he was aiming for dishes that “can excite the food writer or also your pickiest cousin at the same time.” (He’s apparently never dined with my cousin.)
I do feel, though, like they’re closing in on the right formula. I managed to dine on either side of Lowland’s recent menu changeover from winter to spring, which saw the pork parmigiana replaced by pork chop schnitzel with yogurt gribiche ($48) and the triggerfish picatta by red grouper with sweet onion soubise ($39).
The latter preparation is definitely a keeper. Beneath stripes of grill char, the white wedge of grouper is flawlessly tender, and the supporting bed of creamy soubise has just a touch of sweetness and a kiss of onion that fades almost to nothingness. Snow pea pods offer a nice crunch and, in an unbilled cameo, a few pickled ramps add unexpected sparkles. It’s a wonderful dish.
For me, the best parts of a Lowland meal are precisely the ones most likely to pull diners out of their comfort zones. Fried quail is pretty familiar, but what the heck is toum? Who would have thought a salad composed primarily of celery could be so delicious?
It’s with bites like these, I suspect, that Lowland will make its mark on the Charleston dining scene.
