Like I mentioned earlier, we went to R Kitchen for dinner the Friday night of Meg’s bachelorette weekend in Charleston.  The meal was so incredible that I felt like I needed to post about it, and one sentence in her weekend recap wouldn’t be sufficient.

First of all, you’d never guess that R Kitchen is this restaurant that is booked for dinner months in advance by the looks of it from the outside.  It looks like a plain ole Charleston house on Rutledge Ave, across from Fuel. Oh, looks can be deceiving…

Since it’s a small place, they only have 16 seats in the restaurant and will have 3 seatings for dinner each night. Yup, only 48 people eat there a night.  Katie made our reservation after we went there on the culinary tour, knowing Meg would love a new place, and we wanted to try their dinner.  Every night they serve a different 5 course menu and it’s influenced by the local ingredients they source from the area, and and diner allergies (*raises hand*).

Everyone meets on their back patio, then they take you to your table, making sure everyone is comfortable where they are.  We had the exact number to sit at their bar area, which has the perfect view of their kitchen, and we enjoyed talking to the chefs during the meal.

Okay, onto the food… Our first course was a black bean soup.  The beans had been simmering in some spices so it had more of a kick than I anticipated, but I cleaned my bowl.  A nice start to ease into the next 4 courses..

Course #2: Lentil salad with avocado and tomato.  I’m sure right now my mom is reading this thinking no way Kelley ate that and liked it.  Guys, I’m growing up — I eat lentils.  This was unlike any dish I’d had before, and I probably would have never ordered it off a menu, but I really liked it.  The perfect bite included the lentils, some avocado, and running that through the tomato sauce.  Clean plate #2.

Course three was a basil pesto gnocchi with mussels.  The words pesto and mussels are red flags for my allergies, but they don’t use tree nuts in their pesto (yay!), and Lauren and I had some local veggies on top of our gnocchi instead of the mussels.  Food allergy win.

Does anyone not like gnocchi when it’s cooked perfectly? This dish was my favorite of the night.  You have the gnocchi, with a kinda creamy sauce, and veggies on top.. ahhh. Filling, but not heavy, which is good considering that we had 2 courses left.  Also, I heard the mussels were delicious too.

Course #4: Stuffed chicken with mushrooms.  I believe there was some rice and maybe a vegetable in the stuffed part of the chicken?  Whatever it was was good!  The chicken skin was a little bit crispy, then you had the broth, stuffing and chicken with other textures and tastes.  Clean plate #4, sense a theme?

The last course of the night was a lamb meatloaf, that I forgot to get a picture of.  Preface: I didn’t grow up on meatloaf, so it always kinda scares me for some reason.  The lamb meatloaf was really tasty and eased my meatloaf fears, but the sauce they had with it was too hot for me.  Water and more meatloaf sans sauce cleared the spice!

I’m almost nervous to write about this place and talk about how much we all enjoyed the meal because it’s already hard to get a reservation… but it really is worth making a reservation early.  I’ve already told Hunter I’m picking a random night and we’re doing date night there.

Oh and the good news? They’re opening a spot in West Ashley, so there will be 2 spots to get your grub on at.  Cheers to another great local restaurant!