Specialty of the House

A look inside one of South Carolina's legendary soul food cafes.

Okra soup - a time-honored specialty of the house at Bertha’s

If you want to find the origins of Lowcountry cookin’, follow the chefs to Bertha’s Kitchen, 2332 Meeting Street, Charleston. This is not the Charleston of tourist brochures, with no rainbow-hued eighteen-century houses along the waterfront.  Here you’ll spend no more than $10.00 and use plates and flatware that are disposable, drink sweet tea instead of wine, and be located far from the city’s fabulous waterfront.  But the meals you’ll eat here are cooked by masters and are some of the South’s most delicious.

Bertha’s Kitchen is a Charleston soul food institution that’s been serving hot plates of collard greens, fried chicken, and lima beans since it opened in 1981. What started as a home-cooked operation on a single stove in a motel became a neighborhood restaurant powered by plenty of unconditional love, winning the James Beard Award for America’s Classic in 2017.

The teal-colored two-story cafe, trimmed in purple, is set in the working-class Union Heights neighborhood in North Charleston in what locals call the Neck.

This is a fry house where they don’t source expensive ingredients like grouper, or mahi-mahi. Their prices for a generous meat and three for 8 dollars is what they specialize in.  Whiting is the species of choice, cooked to order, and tasting as fresh as last night’s tide.

Vegetables and sides include favorites like okra soup, stewed lima beans, threaded with ham, and red rice with blackened sausage rounds. These dishes can be traced back to cooks whose ancestry dates back to Africa.  These are some of the most delicious and celebrated vegetable and sides in all of Charleston.

Berta’s is a place for curious eaters in search of the honest roots of modern Lowcountry foodways.

Okra, which first traveled to America on slave ships, is traditionally paired with white rice and was originally printed in the “Charleston Receipts” cookbook. Lots of okra is simmered with tomatoes and onions and a big piece of meaty beef shank. A bunch of carrots, celery, thyme, turnips, and cabbage is an acceptable addition to the pot according to cookbook author John Martin Taylor. Here is the recipe as originally printed.