Today's post is old news as far as timeliness is concerned. But for Lee Ann and me, it was shocking news days ago when I made a routine online check into probably our favorite restaurant in Charleston, S.C., and learned that it had closed in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.
We have been to Charleston three times -- the first in April 2016, and the second and third times in 2017 just two months apart, early March and late May.
On each visit, we stopped at Jestine's Kitchen, which is known for its fried chicken and southern soul food. And we enjoyed our meals each time. I think Lee Ann made a clean sweep and ordered chicken livers all three times, while I went for the chicken the first and third time. When we stopped there in March 2017, Jestine's had a special on friend catfish (it was not on the regular menu), so being a catfish aficionado, I had that and was not disappointed.
Jestine's had been named for Jestine Matthews, who was born in 1885 and lived to be 112. She had cared for generations of the Strange family which had been operating the eatery up to the day it closed.
"With the quick onset of the scary pandemic, I have done everything from takeout to wearing a chicken suit to try and stay afloat," Dana Berlin Strange, the restaurant's final owner, said in a statement announcing the closing in June 2020.
"With a dash of this and a pinch of that, we were among the first to serve up Jestine's savory low-country cuisine to my hometown and, surprisingly, to a national following," Strange said.
I attempted to get a photo of the eatery's exterior only on the first visit, and as you can see from the lead-off image, I had some terrible luck with radically contrasted lighting, so I metered for the shade portion that showed the window facade and people in front of it. Sadly, that blew out the exposure for the foregound street and the roof.
But while putting together this post, it occurred to me that my current version of Photomatix enables me to get some help in that respect even with one frame of a photo (traditionally, Photomatix is used to meld the benefits of underexposed and overexposed images with that of a normal exposure to produce an optimum high-dynamic range image, aka HDR). So I treated the single frame you see above in Photomatix and got the image below:
The restaurant, she added, had been a way of sharing "the wonderful style of home cooking and the warm atmosphere that Jestine provided for generations of friends of family."
The Strange family told the full story of Jestine in its menus that diners could learn each time they sat down to eat at the eatery. I took a picture of the story page (below), although I obviously did not capture it in sharpness; I let the unattended depth of field difference get the best of me. But the same story is still available at the restaurant's website and it's easier to read there. Just follow the link in this sentence. Ahh ... if only Photomatix could perform miracles on depth of field snafus!
As much as Lee Ann and I really enjoyed Charleston on each of our visits, I can honestly say that my motivation for returning there now has dropped significantly with this news. That's how much I enjoyed Jestine's.
Here are links to photos I took at Jestine's with each of our three visits:
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