Charlotte Culture & Dining
MICHELIN restaurants and thriving museums
We were recently in Charlotte, North Carolina for a 5-day visit. Charlotte has been a part of Dan’s professional life since 2008, when he helped launch EveryBlock Charlotte. It’s a cosmopolitan banking center in the Upper South—all the dining, museums, and street life we want, finished with a softened Piedmont lilt.
Let’s start with dining. For the first time this year, the MICHELIN Guide recognized restaurants in the area, and we ate at two: Lang Van and Rada.
Rada also made The New York Times’ list of the best 50 restaurants in America this year. What we ate was sublimely delicious, and SL discovered a wine grape she’d never heard of, Petit Manseng—which was made into a terrific wine from Virginia.
We also hit up La Belle Helene, a sprawling and lovely French bistro, as well as Church and Union, which fascinatingly has a ceiling hand-painted with the full text of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
The city of Charlotte has three art museums, all within view of one another: The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, The Mint Museum (”North Carolina’s First Art Museum”), and The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African- American Arts + Culture. All had some excellent exhibits, and some great pieces in their permanent collections. We’ll do a further deep dive into the art we saw in a later post, but it was great to see such thriving cultural institutions.
It’s worth noting that Dan saw the first “State of the Art” exhibit from the Crystal Bridges Museum at The Mint Museum, which led us to visit Crystal Bridges (and Bentonville, AR) twice, and on that second visit for the second “State of the Art” exhibit, we saw the work of the wildly talented Stacy Lynn Waddell, and added her (Untitled) Two Girls And Love, (see below) to our collection.
Smaller cities, have lots going on, and much to recommend them.