Charleston, unsweetened

'I want a table like this at home," said my friend, breaking a minutes-long silence by verbalizing what many in our group were probably thinking. I know I was. But his was a fairly generous assessment. I mean, can you call a weather-beaten sheet of plywood balanced on a pair of industrial-size plastic barrels a table?

Apparently the answer is "yes," at least when you're up to your elbows in oysters at Bowens Island Restaurant. The next interruption to our silent reverie came a few minutes later, when our host once again carefully pushed aside boxes of Piggly Wiggly saltines, squeeze bottles of not-so-hot hot sauce and sweaty bottles of amber Palmetto ale to unload yet another mountain of roasted oysters. Greedy fingers raced to grab the biggest and best bivalves, many still clumped together and streaked with muck, each one a rapturous, barely briny treasure plucked from the sea a few hours earlier.

The only noises within earshot were the crack of oysters being jimmied open, the collective slurp of my fellow oyster-crazed eaters and the crash of empty shells being blithely tossed through holes cut in the "table" and into the barrels below. In a short time, a surreal staccato began to develop: crack, slurp, crash; crack, slurp, crash.

I was sandwiched between two Southerners far better versed in the ritual than I was. For every oyster I clumsily shucked, they effortlessly flicked through two or three. "You need to play catch-up," said the pal on my right, although it came out sounding like ketchup.

I looked around. Sixteen of us were huddled inside a shack on a dock jutting into serene estuary waters, the scene framed by a low, lush landscape and a sweltering late-summer sun. The air was heavy with humidity, and as rivulets of sweat streaked down my spine, two thoughts flashed through my mind. One, the torpid temperature had given me a newfound appreciation for Tennessee Williams' heat-stroked dramatics. And two, despite my discomfort, I was madly in love with Charleston.

At least what I'd seen so far, which was primarily the Wentworth Mansion, my palatial Victorian-era hotel, and views snatched during the 20-minute drive that brought us to the tip of this island. My newfound affection ramped up a few more notches when our host Robert Barber, still wearing his shrimping boots, appeared with an overflowing bowl of his other house specialty: fried shrimp.

Not that this fragrant delicacy even remotely resembled anything so State Fair-ish as the words fried shrimp might otherwise imply.

Barber's grandparents founded this back-roads oyster- and shrimp-lover's haunt in 1946, and the intervening decades have burnished a Southern-fried patina on the place. And it shows: Tenderly dredged in flour and barely acquainted with searing oil, the pale little curlicues had a pristine crispiness on the outside that gave way to the juiciest, most flavorful shrimp I've ever tasted. It was my baptism into fresh-caught Low Country shrimp, and I was hooked, popping them in my mouth like so much popcorn until my bliss was momentarily buzz-killed by a depressing prospect: How will I ever go back to Byerly's frozen EZ-peel jumbos?

Lessons on Southern cooking

As we all waddled back into the bus, I did some quick mental mathematics. I had just 72 hours to spend in this exquisite seaside city, and part of that time would have to be devoted to meetings, my purpose for the trip. I suppose I'd have to get a little sleep, too. That meant a long afternoon, at best, to race through as many antebellum highlights as time would permit.

And of course eat. And eat. Man, did I eat. Those three days in that food-obsessed city quickly turned into a short-order tutorial into the glorious mysteries of Southern cooking. Lesson one: When south of the Mason-Dixon line, forget about vegetarianism. At a lunch catered by Kitty's Fine Foods -- a soulful institution that locals affectionately shorthand to Miss Kitty's -- it was obvious that the husky flavor of pork was the backbone behind stewed collards. There were smoky chunks of ham hock floating amid the pool of nibbly butter beans, and I'm fairly certain I tasted a mellow pork foundation in a hearty hominy stew.

My next epistle concerned iced tea, and it came the following morning at the no-frills Martha Lou's Kitchen, over my fried-bologna-and-scrambled eggs breakfast: When confronted by the inevitable "Sweetened or unsweetened?" question -- and in the Low Country, this happens as frequently as shoppers hear "Paper or plastic?" at Lunds -- always go with the latter. Not that it really matters, as "unsweetened" often is still so vastly sugary that a few swigs could probably trigger the onset of Type 2 diabetes.

But there was nothing counterintuitive about the locally caught shrimp, which is treated with reverence in restaurants all over town. Inside the faux-retro warmth of Hank's Seafood, zaftig shrimp were the centerpiece of a sweet-hot curried rice dish finished with coconut and flecked with bits of red pepper. A few blocks away at FIG (which stands for Food Is Good), chef Mike Lata was feeding his admiring throngs plump, snappy shrimp tossed with a warm sauté of thinly sliced radicchio and pancetta. Out in the 'burbs at the Red Drum Gastropub, sizzling shrimp glazed with a gutsy garlic-herb butter started my meal off with a major bang.

My peak shrimp experience -- outside Bowens Island, of course -- was at the Hominy Grill, a narrow, bustling storefront where I lucked into the last table just as a long line of hungry Charlestonians began to line up outside the door. Here the hefty shrimps were sautéed with bacon and tender green onions -- what a winning combo -- and served over grits, another Low Country staple for which I quickly developed a major obsession. I carry the memory of that meal with me like a carefully folded snapshot tucked inside my wallet: the tender biscuits drenched in butter, the firm, chartreuse tomatoes hiding under their hot, crunchy breaded coating, and the splendid, citrus-kissed buttermilk pie groaning under the weight of thick whipped cream.

An appetizing market

The next morning I awoke at sunrise -- dreaming, I swear, of grits. I raced out of my meat-locker-like air-conditioned room and hoofed it to the farmers market, held in gracious Marion Square in the shadow of the original home of the Citadel, the city's famous military academy. It was a steamy morning, and the square's cobblestones looked slick with moss. I yawned my way through the obligatory arts and crafts displays, but I sure enjoyed browsing the glorious array of just-picked vegetables and fruits, which appeared exotic by Minnesota standards: Ziploc bags stuffed with pale green butter beans and black-eyed peas, piles of okra, gnarly sweet potatoes, big baskets of muscadine grapes and blush-covered plums, tables covered in small hills of still-wet peanuts, a dizzying variety of ripe figs.

But what really stopped me in my flip-flops was the Food for the Southern Soul stand, where a friendly vendor was handing out samples of insanely creamy grits that had been grown and ground at a nearby farm. After one taste I spontaneously uttered something stupid like "Wow," and the woman behind the counter just smiled and pushed another little paper cup across the top of her table. It worked: I hauled out my wallet. To my lasting regret, I bought a 2-pound bag; I should have sprung for the 4-pounder.

Walking amid mansions

When I wasn't eating, I was walking, because compact Charleston is a pedestrian's dream. The history major in me loved every second of the fascinating self-paced audio tour of the Aiken-Rhett House, a magnificent brick pile that dates to 1818. Ditto the 18th- and 19th-century American portraiture inside the lovely, small-scaled Gibbes Museum of Art. After window-shopping the antique stores that dot one end of King Street I headed, map in hand, into the city's remarkable historic district, and happily lost myself in the splendor of its seemingly endless supply of lovingly preserved mansions and churches.

Despite the energy-sapping humidity, I spent several hours soaking up the elegant architecture, the elaborate gardens, the lushly canopied streets, the overwhelming grace of it all; why doesn't the rest of the United States look this good? Every few blocks seemed to reveal a slightly different micro-climate, and my increasingly overheated self definitely preferred the breezily refreshing sea air that was cooling the Battery, Charleston's ultra-high-rent district.

It was a scorcher of an afternoon, and eventually I realized that if I didn't put the brakes on my impatient Northerner's gait, I was going to expire from heatstroke. I slowly made my way back to the commercial heart of town, relieved to turn a corner and spy the familiar green and white Starbucks logo. Salvation. Before I even finished telling the barista of my near-emergency need for a tall glass of iced tea, I predicted her response. Sure enough, in a thick, beguiling drawl: "Y'all want sweetened?" she asked. "Or unsweetened?"

Rick Nelson • 612-673-4757