Restaurants in Charleston, SC

In Charleston, the guide includes 1,197 places: 855 restaurants, 42 quick service spots, 108 cafes and 186 bars. Bars dominate the category counts at 174, with coffee shops and cafes at 109 and American restaurants at 84. Pizza follows at 59, and seafood reaches 56.

Listings here are 78 percent independent, and the 75.9 places per ten thousand residents is well above the 41.8 median across all cities.

930 listings are independent; the chains that show up most are Starbucks (22), Subway (14), Zenshi Sushi (12) and Jersey Mike's Subs (9).

In the Servestack Independent Restaurant Index, Charleston ranks #40 of 332 large US cities for the share of places that are independent.

Food in Charleston by cuisine

Own a restaurant in Charleston?

1,099 of the 1,197 places here (92%) list a website. When a guest searches for food in Charleston and lands on a delivery app instead of your site, the app takes a commission on the order and shows them your competitors. Servestack gives you your own ordering site with zero commission, POS sync and loyalty, and Studio makes the menus, flyers and posts to promote it. See what you would keep with the commission savings calculator, or browse the restaurant marketing guides.

Place data from the Overture Maps Foundation (overturemaps.org), which includes data from Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare, used under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licenses. Restaurants open, close and move; check with the restaurant before you go. Data refreshed 2026-10-11.