How does a new Charleston barbecue restaurant stack up against the competition? (2024)

This is the second time in as many years that I’ve reviewed Palmira Barbecue. Two summers ago when I visited its original home inside the Port of Call food hall, I declared that “a significant new player” had “arrived on the local scene, and in a most unlikely location.”

I was particularly impressed by owner/pitmaster Hector Garate’s tender, smoke-infused beef cheeks and chopped whole hog barbecue, which proved with one juicy bite to be the real deal.

Since the food was so good, I didn’t harp much on the obvious limitations of the setting. Ordering from a flat-screen display at a food court-like counter didn’t offer much of a craft barbecue experience. Neither did eating it at a spartan cafeteria-style table inside nor out on the big patio while packs of tourists ambled by on Market Street. On top of all that, Palmira’s pits were way up in Dorchester County, so the meats had to be trucked downtown each day.

Still, it bemused me to think that a herd of Ohioans seeking fried green tomatoes might stumble into the Port of Call courtyard and wind up eating genuine whole hog barbecue with hash and rice on the side. “That’s the kind of barbecue future I can heartily endorse,” I wrote, “and I’m excited to see what lies ahead for Palmira.”

What lay ahead, it turns out, was Garate’s departure from Port of Call in November 2022 and a period of wandering in the wilderness, popping up in local beer gardens and at collaborations in far-off lands like Brooklyn and Houston. He quickly found a site for the next iteration of Palmira Barbecue — the low-slung brick building on Ashley River Road that once housed the Sunflower Café — but the buildout took more than a year.

The new restaurant opened at the beginning of February, and it’s even better than I expected.

The first Palmira review delved into Garate’s backstory, his close working relationship with Marvin Ross of Peculiar Pig Farm and his handcrafting his own pits. I won’t retread that ground here. What’s different now is that that those handmade pits are installed in a new cookhouse just a few feet from the back door to Palmira’s kitchen.

From start to finish, the dining experience is much improved, too. You enter through double glass doors and order at a long serving counter. The meats are sliced to order, and the cutters cheerfully guide you as you choose between beef cheeks and ribs (my advice: get both) and calculate how much is a reasonable portion. (Err on the side of way too much. Barbecue freezes well.)

There are plenty of two- and four-top tables with comfortable padded chairs in the long dining area. It’s a proper barbecue dining room, too, with dark-stained wooden floors, wainscoting fashioned from reclaimed plate steel and lots of framed pictures of Garate cooking alongside eminent pitmasters at various events.

Perhaps it's the proximity of the pits or because the meats are sliced right in front of you, but as impressive as Palmira’s barbecue was two years ago, it really knocks my socks off now.

The barbacoa, for instance, is totally dialed in ($15 per half pound). It’s still served atop a fried tortilla and dusted with cotija like in the food hall days, but now the smoky shards of chopped beef are compressed into a neat ball, drizzled with thick orange sauce and finished with pink pickled onions and fragrant bits of cilantro. The first bite delivers a crunch from the tostada followed by a surge of juicy, tallow-rich beef, then the fruity tang of the sauce and the onions. It’s one heck of a barbecue bite.

That and other standing meat options include beef cheeks, whole hog, house sausage and pork ribs. They’re joined by rotating daily specials, which recently have included pork steaks, guava-glazed burnt ends, lechón porchetta and Puerto Rican rib tips served over rice in a fragrant orange gravy.

Beneath their shiny glaze, the rosy pork ribs ($12 per half pound) have a firm, smoky chew. Beef cheeks ($15 per half pound) are still a fairly uncommon barbecue cut, but I expect that to change as more aficionados try Palmira’s. Beneath a dark crust of smoke and black pepper, the collagen-rich beef is transformed by slow heat into silky, tender morsels that almost melt on the tongue.

For me, though, the measure of a great barbecue restaurant is not that it has one or two admirable specialties but that everything on the tray — the meats, the sides, whatever bread or pickles are tossed in for free — is consistently top-notch. Palmira easily checks that box.

The regular lineup of sides is a veritable Murderers’ Row (each $5 small, $10 medium and $16 large). These include bright yellow mustard slaw and gooey mac and cheese topped with golden-brown bread crumbs. The Puerto Rican beans have a bright orange hue and rich mellowness from their long, slow simmering with sofrito and smoked meat. They’re among the best beans I’ve had in a barbecue joint.

Palmira’s collards are perfectly tender, and the dark green shards are accented with a few cubes of pork and just enough red pepper flakes to add a mild layer of heat. What makes the greens truly remarkable is their pot liquor, which has a sharp vinegar tang balanced by a beguiling sweetness that makes each bite sparkle. They’re among the best collards I’ve had in a barbecue joint.

And then there’s the hash and rice. The thick, brown gravy is all umami, savory and a tad spicy on the finish. In true nose-to-tail spirit, Garate’s version starts with the heads of the hogs that he butchers for his pits. He gives those heads a good smoking before shredding the tasty bits and putting them in the hash pot. It’s among the best hash I’ve had in a barbecue joint.

Palmira’s sausage game is strong, too, and the flavorings go far beyond the usual suspects of cayenne and paprika or jalapeño and cheddar. The house sausage ($14 per half pound), sliced and finished with onions and pickled mustard seeds, has a fine snap to the casing and a subtle accent of floral spices. It’s joined by a rotating cast of Texas-meet-Puerto Rico mashups like the pionono, which grinds beef cheek trimmings with sweet plantains and gouda.

Though everything on my fully loaded tray was text-a-friend good, one item kept drawing my fork back again and again. The beef cheeks and the barbacoa hit big upfront with their bold beefy punches, but the subtle perfection of Palmira’s extraordinary chopped whole hog wins out in the end.

Garate’s not a flipper. He cooks his pigs skin-side down the entire time, like Marvin Ross taught him. He seasons them with salt and, in a Puerto Rican touch, an aromatic sofrito mop, then lets them simmer 12 full hours on the pit. Once pulled and chopped, the long, tender strands brim with smoky juice and get a little extra kiss from Pee Dee-style vinegar and red pepper sauce. It’s world-class whole hog.

When I interviewed Garate last summer about his plans for his new brick-and-mortar location, he noted another drawback to his old food hall spot that I hadn’t considered. Being in heart of the City Market downtown drew a lot of walk-in customers, but he couldn’t convert them to regulars. “You’re a tourist,” Garate told me, “You try it, and you’re like, ‘This is the best barbecue I ever had.’ But then you leave, and you maybe come next year.”

For his new location, he told me, “I wanted something that had a neighborhood feel,” and he felt the communities along Highway 61 would prove a fertile source of regular guests. At the same time, he invoked legendary barbecue destinations like Snow’s in Lexington, Texas, and said he hoped to create “a tourist kind of attraction … a real barbecue place that’s down to earth, not super fancy and just speaks barbecue to you.”

It’s a tricky balancing act, but I think he might just have pulled it off. I knew Palmira had promise the moment I tasted that whole hog and those beef cheeks two years ago, and I declared it then to be one of the best new barbecue joints in the South.

Now that Garate has found a fitting venue for his expansive vision, I can drop the “new” qualifier and declare it to be one of the very best barbecue restaurants in the country.