If you caught Charleston Wine + Food’s Pecha Kucha in March, you know who Ben Towill is. The British chef and restaurateur might be most familiar to readers for his New York City restaurants Fat Radish, The Leadbelly, and The East Pole. Today Towill resides in Charleston and for the past couple of years has mostly made the news for projects with his interior designer wife Kate Dougherty, who co-owns design firm Basic Projects with him. Together the two have been making Charleston property porn the likes of which we’ll never be able to afford and only had a few close calls with local F&B. In 2015, The Dewberry said Towill was going to develop the hotel’s restaurant, but that fell through.
But we got a teaser of a possible Towill-run Charleston restaurant project at Pecha Kucha. During his talk — which focused on how everyone should just throw caution (and, for all of us regular folk, our jobs?) to the wind and travel at will — that he was working on a new Charleston restaurant called Basic Kitchen. Sadly, Towill revealed no further details about the restaurant and hasn’t returned our emails.
However, we do have some intel on Towill’s other restaurant project. Towill and his brother Alex have recently remodeled the Ferry Boat Inn, an old Cornwall pub, and it got the Wall Street Journal treatment yesterday.
In the story the brothers relay how, growing up in Cornwall, they loved The Ferry Boat Inn, “a cherished institution where locals and visitors had gathered for more than 300 years,” WSJ reports.
So, “when the Ferry Boat came on the market out of nowhere last year,” Alex says in the story, “our dream of a family business just fell into place.” The brothers, along with their wives, have retrofitted the spot into a chic restaurant.
A Ferry Boat Inn menu on Facebook advertises seaside comfort food like fish and chips, moules frites, as well as a burger and butternut and sweet potato soup. And if the pictures of the property are to be believed, it looks charming AF.
Which is all to say, give us the details on the Charleston restaurant, Ben. Inquiring minds want to know.
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