Today, Yelp (a website that features crowd-sourced reviews of businesses) announced its first list of Best New Restaurants in the South. Two Charleston restaurants, Xo Brasserie and Costa, made the list of 25 restaurants.
Xo Brasserie came in at number 14. According to the site: “Praise is piling up for the Cantonese and Sichuan dishes at this NoMo newcomer.” Xo Brasserie falls under one of Yelp’s four identified trends among the 25 featured restaurants, “global thinking.”
In an interview with City Paper earlier this year, Xo Brasserie owner Herman Ng said:
“I feel like Charleston’s missing the food you see in New York, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco … So [Xo Brasserie] kind of spawned from that thought of, ‘Man, I would love to be able to bring the type of cuisine it’s lacking.”
Vinson Petrillo’s Costa was ranked 17 on the list. Yelp invites guests to “Taste the best of coastal Italy, from Liguria to Amalfi and all the way to Sicily, at this popular Charleston newcomer.”
Last year Petrillo told City Paper that he would draw from his own Southern Italian roots at Costa: “We’re going to use local ingredients, but we’re also going to bring in some cool stuff from over in Italy and even a little off the coast of Spain as well.”
How lists happen
Yelp identified full-service restaurants that opened after Jan. 31, 2023, then ranked those spots, according to the site, “using a number of factors including the total volume and ratings of reviews between Jan. 31, 2023, and May 1, 2024.” Yelp also asked its community managers to help suss out top spots.
(Yelp community managers, by the way, are folks who “build relationships with small business owners and use their behind-the-scenes experiences to show other customers what makes small businesses so special,” according to the site).
While this is Yelp’s first official list of Best New Restaurants in the South, the website has been changing the game for restaurants — and the popularity of reviews — since it launched in 2004.
Last month Eater writer Jaya Saxena looked at Yelp’s effect on restaurants, 20 years after its debut. Saxena wrote: “Unlike other existing websites like Citysearch and Chowhound, Yelp seemed to split the difference between straightforward directory and nerdy, niche internet forum, where anyone had the power to bestow stars upon a business. It felt like nothing short of a sea change.”
While many folks remain divided on the concept of restaurant reviews (Saxena noted that former Eater NY critic Ryan Sutton did away with star ratings in his reviews, claiming that restaurant reviewing is as complex as arts criticism), the popularity of Yelp does not appear to be waning anytime soon.
Check out the full list of Best New Restaurants in the South 2024 here.
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