Eating well in Charleston wasn't always easy. This made no sense, since the South Carolina Lowcountry has always been rich in natural resources—seafood, game, and some of the best-tasting vegetables in creation. Yet it's only in the past twenty years that chefs have taken full advantage of the local bounty.

In the course of a week dedicated to serious guzzling, I sample more than twenty restaurants. A few, much-praised elsewhere, strike me as food factories resting on their laurels, but the majority live up to the hype. Lowcountry cuisine has become something of a cult, and the emphasis, as it should be, is on regional specialties: she-crab soup made with orange roe and a dash of sherry; frogmore stew, a spicy cauldron of shrimp, crab, corn, and hot sausage; various incarnations of oyster; creamy Carolina Gold rice pudding; and, almost everywhere, shrimp and grits.

For high style, nothing I try beats the crabmeat and fried green tomato appetizer, followed by pork osso buco and cracklings over wild rice, at Robert Carter's Peninsula Grill. Mike Lata's Fig is less fancy, with a focus on fresh ingredients and careful cooking rather than high jinks, but dishes that may appear prosaic on paper—hanger steak with caramelized shallots, say, or sides of winter chard and pan-roasted cauliflower with mustard butter—are startlingly good in the mouth.

Then there's Robert Stehling's Hominy Grill, a restored barbershop that quickly becomes my clubhouse. It looks like a coffee shop, dishes up food that raises comfort grub to art, and stays open all day. If the day in question were my last on earth, I can think of few better ways to spend it than to tank up on ginger pumpkin bread or a high-rise biscuit with country ham and mushroom gravy for breakfast, shad roe with bacon and mushrooms at lunch, okra and shrimp beignets for dinner, and then defy the grim reaper with a heaping helping of buttermilk pie at checkout time.

The local habit is not to settle for one destination a night but to sip and graze for a spell, then move on and start over. As a result, you may see the same faces three or four times in the course of an evening. "Everyone knows everyone," a bartender tells me. "We all come from somewhere else, we've all worked in the same joints, we're all in each other's back pockets." And he explains the ritual of the fifty-dollar bill. "Every night after I get off work, I'll drop by a different restaurant, have a couple of drinks, and leave a fifty-dollar tip. My girlfriend can't believe it. 'You left a fifty-dollar tip?' I tell her, 'Wait till tomorrow.' Sure enough, the next night, the barman from that restaurant comes into my place, has a couple of drinks, leaves a fifty-dollar tip. In a month, the same bill will circulate through half the bars in town."

Each day, my ramblings end at the intersection of Meeting and Broad streets, sometimes known as the Four Corners of the Law because it embraces St. Michael's Church (God's law), City Hall (municipal law), the Court House (state law), and the U.S. Post Office (federal law). As a grouping, they have a spaciousness and grandeur worthy of St. Petersburg, and I park my carcass outside the post office. It's the turf of Gullah women, descendants of slaves brought from West Africa, who sell intricately braided baskets woven from sweet grass, pine straw, bulrushes, and palm leaves.