The New York Times recently published an article about a national cooking trend: tweezers. Normally used for delicate surgeries that grant life to the human body, these tools have come into the avant-garde hands of chefs who use them to delicately craft dishes that grant life back to conventionalized taste buds. What was once too gossamer to realize is now on high-end plates.     
Micromanaged cooking marks an ideological shift for the chefs’ paintings. As disparate tools like blowtorches invade the kitchen, Iron Chefs duke it out using an unimaginable combination of technology and taste. They turn an established ingredient into something scientifically crafted and artistically executed. Final products are wildly different sense explosions.     
Where do the chefs of Charleston, long reputed for platters of shrimp and hominy, fall into mix? Are they doomed to be lost in norms while the rest of the culinary world blossoms?
Not at all - in fact, Charleston is blazing paths of its own. Radar Magazine called Charleston “the coolest city in the South,” and the town’s chefs are revamping classics without losing the taste of what makes them classic. The city is becoming a mark on the map without losing its mark on history.     
McCrady’s Chef Sean Brock combines history with flexibility. The executive chef at a restaurant that served George Washington, Brock now uses a technological array on par with James Bond. From freeze driers to microscopic thermometers, Brock’s scientists break into the future to manipulate expectations. Even with “the toys in the kitchen,” they never lose track of what layers of “hyper-creativity” have modified: the food and what brought it here.     
Raised in Virginia and revered in Charleston, Sean Brock sees the tradition of farm-grown food as integral to the artwork he creates.
When I arrive, he is on the kitchen phone. Upon hanging up, he says, “I was asked ‘Are you serious?’ when I said I didn’t want to buy fish from Hawaii because it’s bad for the environment.”
“Ingredients from the back door” are a fixed variable in Brock’s modern “PIE” theory: the product, added with artistic ideas and scientific execution. Tradition is PIE’s guiding light. “We want to preach the gospel of Southern cooking,” Brock says. His brand of Southern cooking takes the food out of rigid dogmas and into a fresher set of tastes.     
The most successful restaurants in the area understand that the tampering of taste makes all the difference between mundane and modern. Chef Jason Ulak of Caviar & Bananas uses sensory associations and dish familiarity to serve a “neoclassical” dish. The blending of “ordinary and extraordinary” is the mantra of the bistro’s workings.      
Brock favors sitting down with a dish that people have “flavor memories” of, cutting apart each individual taste and seeing what each brings to the dish, and “plugging in new ingredients that will seem different and odd.” Though the dishes have gone through manipulation, they are presented as effortless.
“We don’t want to scare people or be too complicated,” says Ulak. Caviar & Bananas’ variable menu includes simple macaroni and cheese that is born again with the addition of refined black truffles.     
What they do, in effect, is not burning cookbooks; they simply mimic what people love. The result is something totally new and reviving.
“[Cooking] should be more than filling your belly,” says Ulak, who wants his clients to have “the one dish and never forget it.” These institutions adamantly believe in triggering the senses and never being static in their menus.      
Menus may not be written in stone, but the chefs and management of Charleston restaurants are committed to set their experiences in the memories of their clients. Perhaps it is the love of food and the desire for the extraordinary, and not the stereotypes, that make Charleston cooking work and bring the chefs of yesterday into the kitchens of tomorrow.