Southern Fusion : With caviar and fried green tomatoes on the menu, how can anyone ever get back to all that Spoleto arts stuff?

CHARLESTON, S.C. —  Edgy about hitting a 7 p.m. reservation at the city’s hottest new restaurant, we threaded our way down teeming North Market Street on a recent Saturday. Pedicab, auto and one-horse carriage traffic was heavy. The single-lane sidewalk was blocked by an emerging busload of bright-eyed couples clad in pastel hoop skirts, butternut gray Confederate-style uniforms and, in a few cases, high-top athletic shoes.

The undergraduates were headed toward a pre-prom feast in one of the old cotton port’s disinfected honky-tonks. But we had better things in mind: a quiet table in the dining room of the ultra-luxurious Peninsula Grill.

Droll Charlestonians have joked for centuries that their city occupies the narrow tip of land where the Ashley and Cooper rivers run together to form the Atlantic Ocean. The Peninsula Grill is thus properly, Charlestonly traditional--green velvet-lined walls, 19th century oil portraits, woven sea grass floor mats--yet so wittily conceived as also to feature beluga caviar served with fried green tomatoes and quail eggs and a cadre of actor/model waiters slick enough to step into anybody’s prime-time “Savannah” style soap with no advance warning.

The banquet spread before us over the next three hours included chef Robert Carter’s low-country oyster stew with baked grits cake, thumbnail-size Johns Island clams with smoked bacon, sweet corn and wild mushroom bruschetta, benne (or sesame) seed-crusted rack of New Zealand lamb with coconut-mint pesto, rosemary-and-lemon marinated chicken on roast garlic sauce, fresh-herb risotto, stewed collards with country ham and cream, coconut cake and roast banana souffle with warm chocolate sauce.

Over coffee (memorable, like almost everything else), a local observer remarked that the candle-lighted room was filled not with tourists but with mostly familiar faces, the majority paying strict attention to updated versions of the region’s native, if once-endangered, cuisine.

“But everyone--the big names from all over--will come through this place during the Spoleto Festival USA [May 23 to June 8],” she added.

No wonder. Rice, fresh seafood, French tradition and African ingredients such as benne seeds are the cornerstones of the low-country cooking now enjoying something of a renaissance. The distinctive local style was developed over three centuries in the townhouses, plantation kitchens and slave quarters of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. A rich amalgam of shellfish stews, corn (including corn sticks and the airy souffle called spoon bread), okra from Ethiopia and collards from the eastern Mediterranean, it is notable for blended African-Huguenot rice dishes such as Hoppin’ John, the bean-studded pilaf eaten for good luck on New Year’s Day.

Frequently cited by regionalists as a close second to the Creole cooking of New Orleans, low-country cuisine has been documented in books such as the Junior League of Charleston’s 1950 spiral-bound classic, “Charleston Receipts.” (With more than 670,000 copies printed, it is one of the best-selling regional cookbooks of all time.) Yet the city’s cooking survived well into this century as a hothouse species with no better chance of enduring than the aristocratic tradition of formal dinner at 2 p.m. served by full-time butlers.

During the last two decades, a number of influences including the Spoleto arts festival and the arrival of a band of ambitious, inquisitive, outsider chefs have transferred Charleston’s bounty from domestic kitchens to an increasing number of well-managed restaurants that please both the locals and the rising tide of visitors.

Spoleto Festival USA, founded in 1977 as the American branch of Pulitzer Prize winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s Italian-based Festival of Two Worlds (Menotti has since withdrawn from participation in the Charleston event), attracts singers, dancers, musicians, actors and the public for an annual, two-week round of artistry, choreography and revelry.

Like earlier editions, this year’s schedule offers indoor and outdoor performances such as Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck”; dancing by the San Francisco Ballet and Twyla Tharp at Gaillard Municipal Auditorium; Benjamin Britten’s “Curlew River” in the Romanesque Circular Congregational Church; the premiere of a jazz/film/bebop “Lulu Noire” at Sottile Theatre and, in the stylishly reconstructed Dock Street Theatre, a daily miscellany of chamber music, readings (Reynolds Price, Bob Shacochis) and conversations with artists (John Corigliano, Meredith Monk).

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Nearly all venues are downtown. Because the area is not only flat and compact but dotted with restored houses, churches and monuments (pick up a map at the Visitor Information Center at 375 Meeting St.), it is possible to eat agreeably before and after events. Formal dining as well as snack strolling--sandwich in one hand, libretto in another--are not only feasible but pleasurable ways to experience what may be America’s best-preserved 19th century city.

Stars of stage and screen are most likely to be spotted among the mobs at the ironically named restaurant Slightly North of Broad, referred to as “snob” even by its employees. (The city’s best residential addresses are said to be south of the city’s one-time axis, Broad Street, with commerce relegated to points farther north.)

The kitchen’s reputation draws anonymous mobs as well as Spoleto’s chamber music artistic director Charles Wadsworth and actors William Shatner, Sidney Poitier, Rosanna Arquette, Renee Zellweger and Tim Roth. The fabulously rehabbed warehouse near the monumental U.S. Customs House contains a West Coast mix of mirrors, motley fabrics, Oriental rugs and classy young staff. Unless you have a party of six or more and can reserve, be prepared to wait.

Chef Frank Lee’s Maverick Southern menu is a sly toss of Thai and Dixie ideas combined in ways that few could fault. Grilled local (that’s right, local) tuna steak topped with mustardy barbecue sauce, fried oysters, country ham and citrus sauce is chic, delicious fun. Ditto Maverick grits crowned with shrimp, scallops, more country ham and smoked sausage. Local blue crab cakes, a Southern vegetable plate and okra soup with shrimp complete the don’t-miss list. Though Asian dishes are less numerous than right after the restaurant’s debut in 1992, pad Thai noodles with pork, shrimp, egg, mung bean sprouts and fish sauce make warm-weather sense following a morning of sightseeing or an afternoon of music or gallery hopping.

Elliott’s on the Square, opened last summer by the same management team, is located in the newly refurbished (but dating from 1924) Francis Marion Hotel. Within walking distance of the Visitor Information Center, Gaillard Auditorium and other venues, there’s covered parking next door, a blessing for day-trippers and those with accommodations on the city’s outskirts. Elliott’s is also among the few first-rate establishments serving a more than perfunctory breakfast.

Hard to spot from the street, the restful yellow, brown and tan woodwork hideaway sports a handful of signature dishes worth seeking out. Try the seafood chowder containing fresh corn and tarragon, sausage and potatoes; spinach salad topped with duck, pine nuts and goat cheese and lemon pound cake with seasonal fruit compote.

Less formal fare--fried egg sandwiches and coffee, for instance--are sold from temporary stands across the street during the Saturday morning farmers market in Marion Square.

Even closer to Gaillard Auditorium (a mere stroll across the parking lot from the stage door), Saffron Bread Co. produces loaves and rolls for many of the city’s top restaurants. Open every day, it provides sandwiches, pastries, oversize cookies and low-country breakfast platters such as shrimp and grits with gravy and toast. At lunch and dinner, look for Middle Eastern fare: hummus with falafel, tabbouleh salad, baba ghannouj and braised lamb with eggplant, tomato and herbs.

Food obsessives, and even the merely interested, should graze through Hoppin’ John’s, the city’s culinary bookstore at 30 Pinckney St. Tucked into a corner building on a side street between Gaillard Auditorium and Dock Street Theatre, the shop is operated by low-country food magician and cookbook author John Martin Taylor (“Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking,” and “The New Southern Cook”). Besides copies of “Charleston Receipts” and other Southern standbys, the shop carries an astonishing range of culinary literature plus packaged benne seed wafers, bottled relishes, exquisitely flavored cane syrup, stone-ground grits, regional rice, coffee and other comestibles.

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Magnolias Uptown/Down South, on East Bay Street nearer Dock Street and the Circular Church, offers an exceptionally warm, soft and leisurely version of Southern hospitality.

Like Slightly North, Magnolias has become a taste-touchstone for visitors. In recent memory, Tom Berenger, Oprah Winfrey, Lee Majors, financier Henry Kravis, Sally Field, Jeremy Irons, burger-loving Dave Thomas (Wendy’s dad), Bruce Willis and Demi Moore have all visited Magnolias or sister restaurant Blossom Cafe, with which it shares the New Southern philosophy and a parking lot.

Chef Donald Barickman’s menus, like those at Peninsula Grill, Slightly North and other New Southern restaurants with good reputations (including Anson, Carolina’s and Poogan’s Porch), are seasonably long on updated coastal classics prepared from mostly local ingredients. Don’t miss pan-fried chicken livers with caramelized onions, sliced country ham and Madeira sauce. A side of field greens with Clemson blue cheese dressing and a basket of biscuits turns this appetizer into a light but substantial lunch. Same for blue crab cakes with chive hollandaise and steamed asparagus.

Fulton Five, a 40-seat hideaway off the shoppers’ main drag King Street (several more tables are set out on the rooftop patio in nice weather), draws consistent local patronage for Mediterranean-Tuscan cuisine, in part due to the soft-edge yet protective oversight of owner Silvia Meier.

Menotti often lunched there, Meier admits (dinner nightly except Sunday is the restaurant’s current schedule). Other big-name patrons she mentioned include Jimmy Buffett, Lauren Hutton and comedian Ben Stiller.

When Spoleto’s opera schedule was heavier, the German-accented Meier added, German singers used Fulton Five as a hangout.

Who wouldn’t want to? A bar near the front door displays delectable antipastos. Wine is poured into pressed-glass tumblers. Muted green walls, subdued gold fittings provide the genteel, upper-middle-class reassurance that sells in Charleston.

Like the Spoleto schedule itself, Fulton Five’s menu steers a quirky course between modern warhorses (a quite good tiramisu made by one of the waiters) and culinary frivolity (grilled tuna on arugula topped with chopped black and green olives, tomato and capers).

The menu’s risotto specialty--this is rice-eating Charleston, remember--was a surprising disappointment. Though the combination of fennel, stock and freshly grated Parmesan cheese worked well, I’d have liked the dish better had the tails been removed from the shrimp before they were added to the creamy rice.

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Two less formal spots should be enjoyed during shopping and sightseeing jaunts. Both are perfect for snacking and carryout.

A Broad Street bar referred to by locals as “Fast and French” (the actual name is Gaulart & Maliclet Cafe Restaurant) draws button-down lawyers from the nearby courthouse on weekdays. Tops for French-roast coffee brewed in press-and-pour glass pots, and for cold soups (broccoli, gazpacho) that can be enjoyed at the establishment’s long bar or taken away, it is also noted for French beer, baguette sandwiches, croissants and specials such as couscous and lamb stew. During Spoleto, the cafe stays open until midnight.

Celia’s Porta Via, hidden behind the new Saks Fifth Avenue store, custom makes sandwiches and picnic baskets, offers deli fare such as pasta salads, grilled chicken breast, cold cuts and cheeses and, in a second room, serves pasta and other Italian specialties in sit-down comfort.

My comfort, after a day of walking, nibbling and being entertained, is called Waterfront Park. The short, civilized stretch of boardwalks, wrought-iron and plank benches and urban-renewal open space lines the Cooper River shore a long block behind Magnolias and Slightly North of Broad. Far off to the right, Ft. Sumter guards the harbor’s opening to the Atlantic Ocean. To the left, but closer, the much-decorated Yorktown, a World War II aircraft carrier, rides out its retirement on permanent display at Patriot’s Point.

I hold a soft-shell crab sandwich, a rice-and-benne-seed cookie and a takeout cup of steamed Johns Island clams.

A cruise ship, headed for the world, bellows twice and wallows past. Emerging from the silence, a chamber music group somewhere back of me hits its stride, rehearsing an air by Britten or Stravinsky.

This, I suddenly remember, is what I like about the South.

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GUIDEBOOK

Charleston Choices

Where to eat: Celia’s Porta Via, 49 Archdale St.; telephone (803) 722-9003. About $4 for sandwiches, $2 to $6 for salads, $8 to $16 per person for picnic baskets.

Elliott’s on the Square, 387 King St.; tel. (803) 724-8888. Breakfast, $3 to $7.50, lunch entrees $6 to $9.50, dinner entrees $13 to $20.

Fulton Five, 5 Fulton St., off King Street; tel. (803) 853-5555. Dinner entrees $14 to $24.

Gaulart & Maliclet Cafe Restaurant, 98 Broad St.; tel. (803) 577- 9797. Soups $2 to $3, sandwiches $3 to $4, lunch entrees $5 to $7 and dinner entrees $8 to $13.

Magnolia’s Uptown/Down South, 185 E. Bay St.; tel. (803) 577-7771. Lunch and dinner entrees $8 to $20.

Peninsula Grill, 112 N. Market St.; tel. (803) 723-0700. Dinner entrees $15 to $24.

Saffron Bread Co., 333 E. Bay St.; tel. (803) 722-5588. Breads about $3, sandwiches $6, breakfast $2 to $5, lunch/dinner $6.

Slightly North of Broad, 192 E. Bay St.; tel. (803) 723-3424. Lunch entrees $6 to $10, dinner entrees $8 to $20.

Spoleto tickets and information: Tickets are still available for most performances. Spoleto Festival USA, P.O. Box 704, Charleston, SC 29402. Prices range from $10 to $40; tel. (803) 723-0402.

For more information: Charleston Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, Visitor Information, 81 Mary St., Charleston, SC 29402; tel. (800) 868-8118.

Visitor Information Center, 375 Meeting St. (does not take telephone calls from the public).