As we look ahead to a new year, I thought it’s time to push back from the table and reflect on my most recent year of dining in and around Charleston — a review of reviews, if you will.

I opened the year in North Charleston on the banks of the Cooper River at MOMO in Riverfront Park, and I closed it out downtown at Beautiful South, the new restaurant from the owners of the Kwei Fei that’s inspired by the foods of southern China. In between there were plenty of delicious, unusual and very thought-provoking meals.

There doesn’t seem to be any one playbook for Charleston restaurateurs these days. The cuisine is all over the map, quite literally, incorporating flavors and traditions from around the globe.

In some cases (Sorelle, Beautiful South, Lola Rose), chefs draw inspiration from travels overseas. In others (Pink Bellies, Kultura, La Bonne Franquette), the offering is based upon the owners’ own culinary backgrounds. Some of those exotic flavors are not even from very far away, like the fried collards and air-dried country sausage at Lenoir, reflecting chef/owner Vivian Howard’s eastern North Carolina roots.

Back in 2022, I observed that the radius of good dining in Charleston had expanded dramatically, with fine dining preparations and bold international flavors flourishing far from the old downtown restaurant rows. More dots were added to the map this year.

La Bonne Franquette brought traditional French fare to West Ashley. In North Charleston and West Ashley, the taquerias inside two El Molino Supermarket locations deliver an array of tempting tortas and tacos on house-made tortillas. In the northern reaches of Mount Pleasant, Lola Rose wowed me with its upscale coastal Mediterranean dishes.

Suburbanites eager for a bang-up meal can still drive to downtown Charleston if they want, but they no longer have to.

Yes, there were quibbles. I always have quibbles: the dearth of tablecloths, inhospitable reservation systems, guests who bring small children into restaurants where nothing is designed for small children. I’m kind of over chili crisp, too.

On the positive front, QR code menus seem largely a thing of the past in Charleston. I’ve been very impressed by the consistently high level of restaurant design work, too, whether it’s stylish logos or artful glassware or tightly coordinated color schemes.

Perhaps the most clever touch I encountered is the cocktail menu at Southbound, a slim, leather-bound volume modeled on mid-20th century bartender guides.

Amid all this variety and style, there’s a strong undercurrent of culinary nostalgia. At Heavy’s Barburger, the beefy double-pattied smashburgers and hand-battered onion rings (not to mention the classic rock thumping from old-school cabinet speakers) invoke a decidedly ‘70s vibe. The prime rib and wedge salads at The James, the new James Island restaurant from the group behind Husk and Minero, harken a decade further back to the era of rare beef and martinis.

Even Rancho Lewis, as unique as it is on the Charleston scene, is in many ways a throwback, for it pays homage to the food of owner John Lewis’s native El Paso, Texas. Many of the dishes and decorative elements are modeled after the highly themed beef-centric restaurants like Cattleman’s Steakhouse that Lewis recalls from his youth.

Most of the restaurants I reviewed in 2023 are fairly recent arrivals, but I did stop off to revisit a few longtime leaders of the downtown fine-dining pack — namely Husk, FIG and Charleston Grill. Each has undergone various renovations over the years, but in terms of format and culinary style, they still hew fairly closely to the models staked out in 2010, 2003 and 1989, respectively.

Husk seems to have changed the least. Being of a nostalgic bent myself, I was surprised to find it seeming the least exciting of the three. It’s still a good restaurant, for sure, but it no longer sits in the top ranks of my “must try” recommendations for out-of-town visitors. I suppose it happened slowly but steadily, but Charleston’s dining scene has evolved greatly over the past decade, and restaurants that don’t keep easing forward risk getting left behind.

Charleston Grill has, in my judgment, pulled off the tricky balancing act of maintaining a high standard of hospitality and elegance in an ever more-informal age. (I still chuckle when I see the restaurant’s Resy page, which recommends guests wear “polished casual attire” and clarifies that “baseball caps, beachwear and athletic wear are not permitted.”) With a deep wine list and unobtrusive live jazz, the Grill is still at the top of my list for a big celebratory night out.

I will admit that I returned to FIG with low expectations, though I’m not sure why. I ended up being blown away. The dishes don’t seem radically different than in the past. Some, like the chicken liver pâté and nine-vegetable salad, have been on the menu for years. There’s not a note out of place on any plate, though, and now the entire dining experience seems to have reached the same high level as the food — the wine, the cocktails, the service, the new all-red décor in the dining room, which feels more spacious and comfortable than earlier iterations.

FIG shares a kindred culinary philosophy with the most impressive newcomer on the scene, which is Vern’s. There, chef Dano Heinze also starts with fresh, top-quality ingredients and treats them simply but with very meticulous technique. Whether it’s tender escargot enrobed in buttery tarragon sauce or a flawless roasted chicken with brown butter jus, the plates are simple but entrancing.

Two decades ago, Charleston’s cuisine was still defined by sub-regional specialties like shrimp and grits, she crab soup and Hoppin’ John. National acclaim came as our restaurants shifted to more of a pan-Southern cuisine that leaned into the country drawl: cornbread, bourbon, country ham, pickled ramps.

These days, Charleston’s style seems much more refined and cosmopolitan. Almost none of the newer restaurants I visited this year (Lenoir being a notable exception) claim much of a Southern identity. Instead, fresh local seafood has stepped to the forefront as the city’s most defining culinary feature.

I grazed on a seemingly endless parade of crudo and ceviche this year, but I never tired of it. Perhaps that’s because pristinely fresh fish offers such a clean canvas for chefs’ creativity. Witness the garnet-hued slabs of tuna sparkling with mango vinaigrette at Charleston Grill or the smaller squares of yellowfin at Lola Rosa with the odd but compelling combination of grapefruit, green olives and fennel.

The raw shellfish game is strong, too. The raw bar at MOMO at Riverfront Park offers gleaming oyster towers, and at La Bonne Franquette you can work up to your cassoulet or daube Provencal with a dozen on the half shell with mignonette on side.

Out on Sullivan’s Island, the Longboard has a separate Oyster Happy Hour menu that bridges the gap between lunch and dinner. Alongside the requisite raw bivalves and peel-and-eat shrimp (local Tarvin shrimp, of course), there’s hand rolls and poke bowls, too.

Perhaps most striking in the seafood category is 167 Sushi Bar on East Bay Street (not to be confused with its elder sibling, 167 Raw on King Street). Half sushi bar and half izakaya, it features elaborate rolls with nuanced flavors and a rotating slate of nigiri and sashimi. The latter sometimes includes fresh local catch like vermillion snapper or black sea bass, which can certainly hold their own alongside more traditional sushi fish flown in from thousands of miles away.

That fresh fish is served alongside more land-based fare like duck fried rice and soft barbecue bao buns filled with roast pork and plum barbecue sauce. Such a melding of far-off flavors with fresh local ingredients seems emblematic of the current moment in Charleston dining.

With just 24 seats, 167 Sushi Bar has a tiny footprint. And that points to what I feel is a strong and still unresolved tension in the current dining scene. Should we be going big or staying small?

The year 2023 witnessed the arrival of two much-anticipated large-format restaurants, Southbound and Sorelle. Both occupy stunningly renovated settings, Southbound in an old 19th century house and Sorelle in a complex of three commercial buildings on Broad Street. Both put fire front and center with big wood-burning ovens, Southbound doubling down with a massive wood-burning grill, too. Both got local diners buzzing over the scale of the investment and whether we would see even grander and more elaborate venues in the future.

But bigger isn’t always better. While I had some splendid plates at both Sorelle and Southbound, many seemed too brash or lacking in subtlety. Both restaurants have a lot of promise, though, and I look forward to checking back in down the road once they have a little more time to settle into a groove.

In the end, it wasn’t the flash and sizzle that left the biggest impression this year. Instead, it was the ever-burgeoning array of culinary styles. If you book a room at the Hyatt Place on Upper King Street, you can stroll across the street to Pink Bellies and dig into vibrant Vietnamese bowls with punk rock flair. Just around the corner on Columbus Street awaits an array of Hong Kong-style siu mei and splendid scallion oil noodles at Beautiful South. Stroll three blocks down Spring Street and you’ll discover the vibrant colors and flavors of the Philippines at Kultura, which include bold purple ube in Halo Halo cocktails and warm, ginger-tinged arroz caldo accented by chili oil and trout roe.

My “to visit” list certainly didn’t get any shorter over the course of 2023, for restaurateurs keep insisting on opening new places. Looking ahead, my dance card for the upcoming months includes new ventures from longtime local players as well as from recent arrivals from other cities with very impressive resumes. The flavors span five continents (no Australian cuisine … yet), but they lean heaviest toward countries around the Mediterranean.

Some are tucked away in renovated single houses and old commercial shops, but others occupy expensive ground-floor spaces in gleaming new office towers. I still can’t say which of those venues hold more promise for Charleston’s culinary future, but I am looking forward to even more variety — and plenty more to chew on — in the year that lies ahead.