A dining room built around one printed menu a night

Fine American Taste opened on Meeting Street in 2012, in a storefront that had spent the previous sixty years as a hardware shop. We kept the tin ceiling and tore out nearly everything else.

How it started

Chef Eleanor Bassett trained in New York and Lyon before returning to South Carolina to open a restaurant on her own terms: a short menu, printed fresh each day, built entirely around what the Lowcountry farms and boats brought in that morning.

Twelve tables and a six-seat chef's counter have stayed the same size since the doors opened. What's changed is the menu, which turns over completely with the seasons and rarely repeats a dish two years running.

Why we publish the menu

A printed menu tells you what a dish is called. It doesn't tell you how it's made. We started writing out full recipes in 2021 so that a dish you loved at the table could be cooked again at home, not just remembered.

House principles

I
Season firstNothing stays on the menu past the week its main ingredient falls out of season.
II
Technique, not garnishA dish earns its place through how it's cooked, not how it's plated.
III
One printed menu a nightEvery table reads from the same sheet; nothing is quietly different off-menu.
IV
Written down properlyA recipe we publish is the one we actually cook, at true kitchen quantities scaled for home.

In the kitchen

The people behind the pass and this recipe archive.

Eleanor Bassett

Chef and owner

Writes the daily menu and still runs the pass most nights the restaurant is open.

Marcus Delacroix-Yun

Chef de cuisine

Oversees the line and translates each night's menu into the recipes published here.

Isabel Ferro

General manager

Runs the reservation book and the private dining calendar, and answers most messages from the contact page.