Cru Café and Catering
Charleston, South Carolina
In Charleston, elegance meets comfort food at Cru Café.
Chef and owner John Zucker studied at Le Cordon Bleu and later under Wolfgang Puck, and when he began gaining notoriety for his Cru Catering services, people started clamoring for a restaurant, and Cru Café was born.
The cafe is housed in an 18th-century single-style Charleston home. The cafe has limited seating but includes chef tables where visitors watch their food being made.
“We get as many locals as we get visitors from all over the world,” Ryan Nelson, Cru’s public relations and marketing manager, said. “We’re able to balance the locals and visitors, and that is a huge compliment on our behalf.”
Nelson said they have catered to groups as large as 6,000 people but that they also love to work with smaller groups. One of their divisions, Cru on the Go, offers boxed lunches that are great for meetings with unusual dishes such as shrimp BLT wraps.
“They’re not your regular boxed lunches,” Nelson said. “They’re healthily done, they taste good, and they’re presented well.”
Zucker’s formal training at a French institution routinely inspires him, but his dishes cover everything from Asian to Italian to Caribbean flavors.
“He tries to make sure there are different tastes for different people at all times,” Nelson said. “But lots of favorites, like the four-cheese macaroni, will always stay on the menu.”
Favorite dishes include grilled basil-marinated shrimp, Thai seafood risotto, Chinese chicken salad and orecchiette pasta with kielbasa and peas. The Pit Cru division specializes in barbecue and oyster roasts. Many of the dishes use herbs and vegetables grown in a box garden at the catering office.
Gullah Grub Restaurant and Catering
St. Helena Island, South Carolina
Featured on Martha Stewart’s shows and Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and hoping to have his own cooking show soon, chef Bill Green is committed to cooking traditional Gullah cuisine. The African-American Gullah culture is rooted in the Low Country tradition of South Carolina and prides itself on local, seasonal cuisine.
“We use what we grow in the fields, what we catch in the creek,” Green said.
The Gullah cooking method is a slow process but well worth the wait. Collard greens can take anywhere from three to four hours to cook, for example.
“It’s time consuming,” Green said, “but you’re going to smile every time you taste it.”
Green said his cooks flavor with a combination of garlic, onions, pepper and other seasonings to add value to the already great-tasting food.
“We don’t want to take away from the natural flavors,” Green said. “We want to enhance them.”
The restaurant offers smoked chicken and ribs, gumbo, chowder, barbecue and sides such as okra, and red beans and rice. Catering options include oyster roasts, pig roasts, fish fries, Low Country boils, ribs and barbecue, as well as sides. A new bean cake made with lima, red, black and butter beans, which Green said is “out of this world,” will also be on the menu soon.
