Start from 114 curated places around Charleston, SC, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Husk
Sean Brock's 2010 game-changer in a Queen Street Victorian, still defining new Southern with a chalkboard menu that rewrites itself daily based on what came in from regional farms. The kitchen rule remains: nothing on the plate originates outside the South.
FIG
Mike Lata's neighborhood bistro on Meeting Street, James Beard winner and the steady measure other Charleston restaurants are judged against for two decades running. The menu shifts with the seasons but the chicken liver pate stays.
Trails & outdoors
Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge Pedestrian Path
Wonder's Way, the 2.5-mile-each-way pedestrian and bike path on the cable-stayed bridge spanning the Cooper River between downtown and Mount Pleasant. Five miles round trip with the city's best harbor view from the towers.
Pitt Street Bridge
Mount Pleasant marsh causeway and former trolley-bridge ruin sticking out into Charleston Harbor. The walk is short, flat, and the sunset from the end is the local-Mount Pleasant move.
Things to do
International African American Museum
Pei Cobb Freed-designed museum that opened in 2023 on Gadsden's Wharf, where roughly 40 percent of enslaved Africans entered North America. The architecture lifts the building off the ground out of respect for what's underneath; the exhibits do the rest.
The Charleston Museum
America's first museum, founded 1773, on Meeting Street with a Lowcountry natural-history hall, a silver gallery, the Civil War H.L. Hunley submarine context room, and a kid-friendly mummy. Dated in spots, comprehensive overall.
Landmarks & sights
Rainbow Row
Thirteen pastel Georgian row houses on East Bay, the longest unbroken stretch of pre-Revolutionary commercial buildings in the country. The block is private homes now, so the visit is a five-minute walk-by, not a destination.
The Battery & White Point Garden
Live-oak-shaded promenade at the peninsula's tip with Civil War cannon, harbor views, and antebellum mansions on three sides. The seawall walk is the closest thing Charleston has to a town square at sunset.