Which Charlotte-area spot made GQ’s list of the country’s best new restaurants?

When national food writer Brett Martin speaks, the food world listens. On Monday, he spoke, with a deeply written piece on the best new restaurants in the country, and a new Charlotte-area restaurant made the list.

In an audacious move, Martin said the two best gumbos he had while researching the story were in Seattle, at Edouardo Jordan’s acclaimed JuneBaby, and in Cornelius, at Hello Sailor:

“The food riffs on the kind of dishes you might have gotten at the building’s previous incarnation as a dockside joint called the Rusty Rudder: crab dip spiked with pimiento cheese and crusted with brown-butter bread crumbs and benne seeds; fried bologna on a roll topped by a near solid caul of poppy seeds; soft serve for dessert. If the haute college-food-hall presentations sometimes veer toward too cute — ribs and shrimp calabash arrive on a tiny cafeteria tray — tastes like that of the gumbo make you forgive a lot: shrimpy, slippery, deep and inky as the water of the quiet lake outside the wide picture windows.”

Hello Sailor is the second restaurant by Joe and Katy Kindred, owners of Kindred in Davidson, which has gotten national notice. So far, though, Hello Sailor, their take on a traditional Carolinas fish camp in a mid-century-meets-Palm Springs setting, has been overlooked, despite the addition of a well-known Charleston chef, Craig Deihl, as chef de cuisine. It didn’t make the cut for this year’s list of Best New Restaurants for the James Beard Awards.

The restaurant, which has a lakefront setting that includes outdoor seating (that part just opened this weekend) and docks where boaters can arrive by water, opened in January after an ambitious remake to the building that used to be the Rusty Rudder.

This story was originally published April 23, 2018 at 10:53 AM with the headline "Which Charlotte-area spot made GQ’s list of the country’s best new restaurants?."