Occidental Grill, Charleston 1930s/1940s
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The Occidental, at Market Street near Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina, was one of the city’s earliest fine dining establishments.
It was mentioned in the 1912 edition of A New Guide to Modern Charleston, an historic travel booklet published by Walker, Evans & Cogswell, featuring more than a hundred pages of period local advertisements, architectural descriptions, maps, and visitor information for South Carolina’s coastal city.
Other restaurants mentioned in the guide from this era were The Palace Café and Riddock’s Arcade, which apparently catered largely to ladies.
According to the Charleston City Paper, elegant meals were primarily held in private homes until around the turn of the 20th century when this first period of restaurant fine dining in Charleston began.
Judging by this Art Deco menu cover that shows a jazz band and two scantily-attired dancers, a night at the Occidental Grill would have been quite the event. We believe the date of this menu would have been in the late 1930s or early 1940s.
To this day, Charleston continues to have a stellar reputation for fine dining, blending its deep-rooted Southern traditions with creative, modern cooking.
Many of these early fine dining restaurants are lost to modern memory and we do not know when the Occidental Grill closed.
The word Occidental was used as an adjective for countries, cultures, and people of Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Many cities, including Washington DC, had Occidental restaurants.
Each order includes a print of the interior menu.
All printed in USA.
