RESTAURANT NEWS | SOUTH CAROLINA

The Team Behind Husk Opens Cheeky in Downtown Charleston

Neighborhood Dining Group's newest Charleston restaurant pairs a three-tier seafood tower and handmade pasta with mini cocktails, highballs, and a room built for lingering.

CHEEKY | MAP | INSTAGRAM

By Eric Barton
9:15 a.m. ET, Oct. 12, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

The seafood tower at Cheeky isn't a polite arrangement of shrimp on ice. It's three tiers tall: oysters and crudo on ice at the bottom, a fried misto of calamari, clam strips, peppers, and squash in the middle, and hand-cut fries on top, with room to add Kaluga caviar if the table's feeling generous.

Cheeky opened Sept. 30 on Meeting Street in downtown Charleston, the newest restaurant from Neighborhood Dining Group. The group already runs Husk and Marbled & Fin in the city, and Cheeky gives it a second seafood restaurant alongside Delaney Oyster House, this one built in a contemporary room rather than a historic house. Designed by MB Within, the space holds a 122-seat dining room, an 18-seat bar, and a 32-seat patio, with open-air windows facing the street.

Crudo

Chef Gabriel Lindsey has cooked in Michelin-starred kitchens and at Husk, and his menu takes Charleston's coastal pantry as a starting point rather than a boundary. It begins at the raw bar, with bluefin toro sashimi, tuna tartare, and snapper carpaccio under paper-thin cucumber.

There's a build-your-own hand roll, and handmade pastas that include a mussel gemelli with lamb merguez, soft herbs, white wine, and chile, a dish that traces back to a pasta station Lindsey worked early in his career, and a lobster spaghetti. The larger plates run to Ora King salmon, miso yellowtail with honeynut squash and chanterelles, and steamed halibut, with sides like charred cabbage with chili crisp for the table.

Jessica Backhus leads the beverage program, and it's built for grazing. The “cheekies” are nine mini cocktails, starting with an $8 espresso martini, sized so a second round isn't a commitment. Full-size drinks include a tiny frozen yuzu margarita and a miso old fashioned, and a pair of Suntory highball machines pours behind the bar. The cocktail list is organized by sheets, from Well Behaved up through Loosening Up and Feeling Cheeky to Mischief, which tells you most of what you need to know about the room's intentions.

Martini service

Lindsey has said he wanted the cooking to feel thoughtful and well-executed without taking itself too seriously, and that balance is the point of the place. Cheeky is polished, but it's pitched at the kind of night where a quick drink turns into dinner and nobody's watching the clock.

Miso clam chowder

Cantabrian anchovy toast

Charleston has no shortage of serious seafood restaurants. It's had fewer that treat an ordinary weeknight like a small occasion, and that's the gap Cheeky seems content to fill.