Marc and Liz Hudacsko are neighborhood people. In an interview with Charleston City Paper earlier this year, Liz said that Berkeley’s is the kind of spot where she and Marc may see customers “two or three times a week, not once in a lifetime.”
The couple successfully transitioned their pop-up concept, We Flew South, to the Wagener Terrace brick-and-mortar in 2021. Now they’re looking to expand once again.
“We’re really all about our neighborhood, really about the people that work for us and the people that come to dine with us — we think it’s important to take care of them,” Marc said. “We wanted to be able to do that with our next restaurant [and] to do something that was the more grown up version.”
That grown up restaurant and bar is The Archer, a(nother) neighborhood spot with elevated fare and an adult vibe.
“We always envisioned doing something that was a grown up cousin of what we do [at Berkeley’s],” Hudacsko said. “It’s the place that’s super comfortable to come to a couple times a week if you want to treat it that way, or it can be a great special occasion place for you if that’s the way you want to look at it.”
The forthcoming restaurant has been popping up at Berkeley’s ahead of its opening and dishes have included items like short rib, scallops and chicken-fried grouper. Hudacsko wants guests to be able to enjoy these elevated eats later at night, too.
“I think there’s a place for that sort of watering hole [that has] great food as well,” he said. “Where I grew up, right outside of New York City, I spent a lot of time going to these great restaurants that were open late. … It was exciting and it was fun and you felt like you were an adult.”
Welcome to the (new) neighborhood
The Archer will be located at 601 Meeting St., the former location of Gale Restaurant, which shuttered in late 2023. The Archer’s location, on the ground floor of an apartment building that faces the entrance to the Ravenel Bridge, presents a different kind of neighborhood vibe than Berkeley’s.
Still, the location doesn’t concern Hudacsko too much. He points to the stretch of King Street that’s home to Melfi’s, Leon’s, Little Jack’s, Graft Wine Shop and more, as an example of a part of town that has become a foodie hotspot, long before it was considered a conventional go-to location for dining out.
“Charleston, while it’s a pretty established city, I think we’re still finding so much of our identity, especially as we move up the peninsula,” he said. “People live in parts of town that they didn’t used to live in and they travel different roads … this is a part of town that’s on the edge of what its potential is.”
Hudacsko sees a lot of potential in The Archer’s “really fun” food menu and its strong cocktail program — a departure from the beer and wine only offerings at Berkeley’s. The Archer’s food will be “elevated comfort food,” a natural expansion from Berkeley’s offerings of, as its menu proclaims, “sandwiches and supper.”
“One of our rules is, we don’t want you to get your phone and Google anything,” joked Hudacsko. “Our chef Paul Farmer (formerly of Three Sirens and Butcher & Bee) has really embraced this ‘comfortable classics’ but with a spin. And our bar program is doing the same thing, where we’ve got a couple of talented people on our team and they’re coming up with some things we’re really excited about.”
The bar program is curated by Jimmy Chmielewski, previously of Proof and Estadio. A recent pop-up at Proof featured cocktails like the Ambiguous Bird, made with rum, coconut oolong Campari, pineapple and lime and the Sake Spritz, made with Ginjo Sake, saline, charred lemon tonic and black pepper.
Building a second restaurant after the success of the first is always a daunting task — can the magic carry over into a new spot with a new audience? Hudacsko thinks the answer is in consistency — and a loyal fanbase.
“You have to build something great, and then people will find you,” he said. “Somebody said to me a while ago and it stuck with me, ‘If you stick to what you are, your tribe will find you.’ You don’t need everyone in the world to love your restaurant. You just need the people who love your restaurant to really love it.”
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