Le Chick is Coming to Chucktown
Clucking it up on Upper King
Posted September 12, 2021
09-12 2021
The face of Upper King Street continues to shift toward high-end retail and national restaurant chains. This week Charleston Commercial, a local real estate group, announced that it had brokered the sale of the three-story, 9,000 square-foot building at 437 King Street to a Miami-based restaurant called Le Chick for just under $6 million.
Le Chick bills itself as “an up-scale casual dining/bar experience for those seeking flavorful comfort food and craft cocktails.” The restaurant’s backstory is rather curious, too.
The company’s two founders purportedly “travelled all around the world searching high and low to produce the best . . .”
I’ll pause there. Can you guess? The best bouillabaisse? The best Mongolian budaatai huurga stir fried rice? Nope. They were seeking out the best burger.
One would think that people needn’t leave the country that invented the hamburger to figure out how to make the very best one in the world, but I guess they do. The pair stumbled across their ideal incarnation at Rotisserie Amsterdam, a Dutch “hotspot” that specializes in burgers and rotisserie chicken.
Not having been to the Netherlands, I can’t attest to the overall quality of the burgers at Rotisserie Amsterdam, but Snoop Dogg endorses them, so that’s got to be worth something:
Le Chick christened its signature burger with the same name as its counterpart at Rotisserie Amsterdam: the “Royale With Cheese.” (I’m thinking Rotisserie Amsterdam may have borrowed that from somewhere else, too.) In Miami, the double 3 oz. patty burger is priced at $18, including your choice of fries, spiced sweet potato fries, or coleslaw. No word yet on how it will be priced in Charleston, but $18 would put it near the very top of The Southeastern Dispatch’s forthcoming Cheeseburger Index™ (we’ll be posting that soon), just behind Oak Steakhouse’s house-ground CAB burger and slightly pricier than Little Jack’s and Husk’s.
So, good news, Charleston will finally be getting a good burger place, and, yes, there will be a bunch of other novelties rarely seen in these parts, like fried chicken, rotisserie chicken, deviled eggs (truffled, no less), street corn, and Brussels sprouts.
Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for it, since Le Chick Charleston isn’t slated to open until the end of 2022.
At the same time, Charleston Commercial announced that it has leased two other retail spaces on Upper King. 550 King Street, the former home of Revelator Coffee, will become an outpost of OddFellows Ice Cream Co, a small-batch ice cream founded in Brooklyn and now boasting four locations in New York City, one in Boston, and four more in Korea, for some reason.
Half a block further up, 564 King will soon be home to The Drip Lounge, an “IV hydration bar” promising to reinvigorate “anyone who may be a tad bit dehydrated or hungover from fun in the Charleston area.” I trust they’ll dig up some customers somewhere.
Progress marches on.
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About the Author
Robert F. Moss
Robert F. Moss is the Contributing Barbecue Editor for Southern Living magazine, Restaurant Critic for the Post & Courier, and the author of numerous books on Southern food and drink, including The Lost Southern Chefs, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, Southern Spirits: 400 Years of Drinking in the American South, and Barbecue Lovers: The Carolinas. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.