Restaurants throughout the nation have established up outside seating regions, occasionally grudgingly, in deference to municipal laws and buyer demand. Downtown Charleston chef Robert Berry has taken the format even more and produced what amounts to an en plein air kitchen area, with stations for prepping, cooking and washing up.
The centerpiece of the Cannonborough-Elliotborough job, designed to facilitate small-scale weddings or the relatives festivities related to grander affairs, is a wooden-fired oven.
Not like the Neapolitan ovens which have emerged as standard equipment at substantial-stop pizza joints, the oven that Berry and local ceramicist Fiorenzo Berardozzi are building is intended to be multifunctional. Berry will be capable to bake bread in it one working day and then shovel out the ashes to grill a goat along with it.
“There are infinite prospects,” states Berardozzi, who also built the brick oven at Husk. He makes his possess kilns to fire the tableware that is a beloved of Charleston dining establishments. “This is like a little something you see in the Italian countryside.”


Because the commence of the pandemic, a great number of food items-and-beverage gurus have fled the market, even though some others have resolved to keep on the route they have been pursuing prior to the public health and fitness and economic disaster, albeit with a mask on. Berry signifies a rare example of a Charleston space chef homing in on what he preferred very best about the business and reorienting his get the job done all around it.
Even now, he’s not the only 1. BJ Dennis, for occasion, immediately after several years of operating personal dinners and headlining situations this thirty day period declared he’s shifting to Bluffton to oversee the café method at a new specialty foods outlet and ally with a cooperative of Gullah-Geechee farmers.
“This is a restaurant with out all of the things I did not care for,” Berry suggests of the Moses White Guesthouse, which, as the identify indicates, also comprises an overnight rental residence. He ideas to quickly include a backyard with a chicken coop and apiary.


At dining establishments these types of as the now-defunct Pancito & Lefty, Berry could conclusion up expending evenings on the cellphone or in the dish pit when a worker didn’t show up for his change. By contrast, his present-day setup is intended to be “a one particular-man present.”
Berardozzi details out that running a fireside inspired by a two-10 years-outdated guide offers a lot more troubles than a modern automated kitchen area. He predicts Berry will have to cook in it 8 to 10 periods right before he will get a tackle on how the fire within just behaves.


By that issue, he guarantees, “you have a personal conversation with the foodstuff.”
And, if he lets his focus waver, the next-diploma burns to demonstrate it. As Berry acknowledges, stepping outside of the standardized cafe placing isn’t with out chance.
Reach Hanna Raskin at 843-937-5560 and adhere to her on Twitter @hannaraskin.
