This February, Basic Kitchen hosted NYC restaurant The Fat Radish (Basic Kitchen co-owner Ben Towill opened the spot in 2010, but had since left the restaurant) for a Friday night bar takeover and a Saturday evening four-course dinner crafted by executive chef Nick Wilber. At the time, Towill said of the pop-up event: “When we opened The Fat Radish 9 years ago, one of the most exciting things we did were pop-up events. We did them all over the world — in Paris, Rio, Tel Aviv, to name a few. And while I am no longer a part of the restaurant, we are definitely still great friends and I love what they are doing.”


Such great friends, in fact, that Basic Kitchen decided to permanently collaborate with the Fat Radish team — Nick Wilber now serves as executive chef with Natalie Freihon taking on daily operations alongside current GM Kellie Holmes.

Towill had been serving as executive chef since April, when chef Air Casebier announced she would be stepping away from the project for personal reasons. Now, with a solid team in place, the restaurant is gearing up to “overhaul and expand the dinner menu, drawing on Wilber’s expertise in working with seasonal, local ingredients.”

Basic Kitchen’s current dinner menu features items like their popular bowls and salads, along with chicken, lamb, and wreckfish entrees. No word yet on what the Fat Radish team will bring to the dinner tables, but Wilber’s February pop-up gave us a taste. Courses included dishes like radishes with olive tapenade, bitter greens with caramelized sherry vinaigrette, beet cured local fish crudo, roasted lamb saddle, celery root pot pie, and butternut squash and apple eton mess.

In a press release Friehon says, “When my team came to Charleston earlier this year to produce The Fat Radish pop-up, we fell in love with the energy of Charleston. I had been interested in expanding to the South for a while, and this solidified it…Basic Kitchen is a perfect fit for us because of Ben and Kate’s fun narrative and their relationship to The Fat Radish; as well as the fact that the ethos we all share is inline…Our goal is for Basic Kitchen to be a restaurant that really fits into one’s lifestyle — a restaurant one can visit a few times a week and feel nourished and cared for while enjoying delicious food, wine, and cocktails all with a focus on sustainability.”

Towill says in the release, “One of the primary goals of Basic Projects has always been to find and collaborate with the absolute best partners, those that are experts in their respective fields…I am extremely passionate about the concept of Basic Kitchen and am confident that this team is the absolute perfect group to further execute it.” 



The Towills will continue to offer creative input “in order to keep it in line with their original concept of a beautiful space that offers honest food that’s good for you, and that gives you energy to pursue the things you love.”

[location-1]

Help keep the City Paper free.

No paywalls.
No newspaper subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations from downtown to North Charleston to Johns Island to Summerville to Mount Pleasant.

Help support independent journalism by donating today.