You can spy the colorful orange and green neon signs in the Beautiful South window from way down the block. As you get closer, your nose is struck by the sharp, tempting aroma of wok oil, garlic and ginger, which puffs out over the street from discrete exhaust vents. For diners like me, that’s the most effective form of advertising, conjuring up olfactory memories of New York City and Hong Kong sidewalks.

But, as the name suggests, the restaurant is right here in the South — in downtown Charleston, in fact, on the newly remade block of Columbus Street between Meeting and King. The cuisine is inspired by a different South, though, that of Hong Kong and the southern regions of China.

Long, tender egg noodles ($23) are stir fried with local Tarvin shrimp (tails still on), sliced snow peas and just enough rich, slightly sweet XO sauce to give them a glossy sheen. Much sweeter is the thin pool of fish palm syrup that awaits beneath the Teochew-style oyster omelet ($15), an odd but pleasant contrast to the fluffy egg and the briny bursts of plump oysters tucked away inside.

Some of the simplest dishes are the most impressive. A tangle of splendid scallion oil noodles ($11) are unexpectedly cool but absolutely delicious, slick with a dark soy sauce and topped by a small pile of scallions cooked down to crisp, brown slivers.

Beautiful South is the second Charleston venture from David Schuttenberg and Tina Heath-Schuttenberg, the owners of Kwei Fei. Both restaurants draw inspiration from the cuisine of China, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Kwei Fei is out on Maybank Highway in the small restaurant space adjoining the Pour House, Charleston’s long running music club. Beautiful South is downtown in a ground floor retail space in Courier Square, the gleaming new brick and glass headquarters of property developer Greystar.

Kwei Fei is decidedly funky, with sturdy wooden tables, yellow metal chairs and paper lanterns hanging from the black drop ceiling tiles. Beautiful South is sleeker and more upscale, with high ceilings, exposed concrete walls accented with shiny blue tile and a long, slightly curved bar with orange capped stools. In the two low-lit dining areas, the slim cylinder of a pendant lamp bathes each table in a circle of bright yellow light.

The food is very different, too. Kwei Fei’s offering is unapologetically “loud and hot.” There’s a little pepper icon next to each spicy menu item, and 19 of the 20 dishes have an icon (including the lone dessert). The plates at Beautiful South dial the Scoville units way down, but the flavors are still big and bold.

In addition to Hong Kong and southern Chinese specialties, there are upscale takes on now-traditional Chinese American restaurant fare. Among these is crab “Rangoon” ($15), with the Rangoon part in quotation marks. Perhaps that’s because the dish, which by all accounts originated in the Trader Vic’s tiki bar chain, never came within 5,000 miles of Rangoon (now Yangon, Myanmar).

Or it could be because Beautiful South’s version is thoroughly deconstructed, with the gooey white crab in its own bowl and the wontons fried separately and served like tortilla chips for dipping. Such a luxurious blend is much better served cool and pristine on the side instead of stuffed inside a wonton and curdled by deep fryer heat.

The less deconstructed spins on American takeout favorites — sweet and sour pork tossed with pineapple, onion, and bell peppers ($19), stir fried beef and broccoli in oyster sauce ($21) — gain less from the elevation. Tender chunks of General Tso’s chicken ($21) have only a light coating of batter, and the thin brown sauce is subtly sweet and slightly spicy, not thick and gloppy. At the end of the day, though, they’re still just sweet chicken nuggets with broccoli.

At lunch, the menu is headlined by a section of siu mei, those roasted meats one sees arrayed in gleaming glass cases in Hong Kong shop windows. There’s one of those display cases just to the left as you enter Beautiful South, with big slabs of roasted pork belly and a trio of smoke-browned ducks, heads and crooked necks intact, hanging by hooks beneath the bright light.

The ducks, it turns out, are plastic display models (for now, at least, there’s no roasted duck on the menu). The pork belly, though, is very real. The siu yuk ($17) presents five big chunks of it nestled alongside steamed rice, baby bok choy and a white ramekin of hot mustard.

Whether you go for chopsticks or a knife and fork, the pork is literally hard to eat, for the beautifully browned skin delivers a jaw-rattling crunch upon first bite then turns quite chewy. Beneath that stout jacket, though, the mild white meat brims with five spice marinade. The sinus-clearing mustard is perhaps too bold a partner for the pork’s subtle fragrance, but it’s splendid on the tender, slightly bitter bok choy.

The real star of the siu yuk case isn’t roasted but braised, and that’s the si yao gai chicken ($23). The bird itself is quite lovely: tender, juicy, with a subtle ginger bite. The breast and thigh are carved into one-inch slices, and they’re topped with long strips of mushroom conserva that are almost as meaty as the chicken. What really makes the dish, though, is the pool of dark soy broth at the bottom of the bowl, which is simultaneous sweet and tangy and brimming with mysterious dark flavors.

Sauce makes the pork dumplings ($9), too, taking them from good to great. Thin, brown and dappled with tiny droplets of oil, the sauce is brightly acidic and just a little bit sweet — the perfect counterpoint to the firm bite of the dumpling shell and the dense, smooth pork filling.

By themselves, the soy sauce chicken and pork dumplings would be reason enough to visit Beautiful South, but there are plenty of other things to like, too, especially the small details.

A white stoneware bowl awaits atop a napkin and a plate at each place setting, and a white cylinder in the center of the table holds a raft of paper-wrapped chopsticks and a few sturdy forks and knives. The water glasses are low and stubby, and short, wide-flared blue and white cups are delivered alongside a clear glass pot of fragrant hot jasmine tea ($12).

Two decades ago, cocktails were afterthoughts in most South Carolina restaurants. These days, a creative list is not only expected but has become part of the overall theme. I can only imagine the hours our local bartenders must spend just working on names.

At Beautiful South, they’re the handiwork of beverage manager Lily Cantral. The Coy Mistress ($14) is intriguingly billed as a “tiki drink for the Alps,” blending bourbon with apricot, coconut, and Braulio, an amaro from the Italian Alps. The Charmer ($15) puts an unusual spin on the Manhattan, mixing cognac, banana, cucumber and green Chartreuse. Against all odds, the combination turns out to be sweet and delicious.

The Sea Drinking Cities ($15) takes its name from a Josephine Pinckney poem. It’s a silky blend of duck fat washed rye, falernum and pineapple rum. An unexpected sparkle of salt in each sip makes for a compelling tropical take on an Old Fashioned, and it definitely evokes the sea.

On my last visit to Beautiful South, I leaned back against the tweed-backed banquette and tried to fit it all together — the American takeout classics mingling with siu mei meats, the tiki bar flavors of rum and falernum splashing up against the foot of the Alps.

Sea-drinking cities, Pinckney writes, “never lose longing for the never-knowns … They welcome ships, salt-jeweled venturers that up over the curve of the world are blown … And in the evening let them go again.”

It seems we are still longing for the never-knowns, and Beautiful South delivers them with energetic and upscale style.