Brasserie La Banque: Seafood, Steak, and a Very Strong Closing Argument.

Brasserie La Banque has been one of my Charleston favorites for a while, but there is a difference between having a good dinner at a restaurant and taking a large group of friends, ordering your way through a significant portion of the menu, and seeing whether the restaurant can still deliver. On this visit, Brasserie La Banque did.

This was a big dinner. We covered the seafood tower, steak tartare, heirloom tomatoes, gnocchi, the duck, the steak frites, the wreckfish viennoise, the summer vegetable melange, pommes frites, cocktails, wine, and almost the entire dessert menu. That kind of ordering gives a kitchen very few places to hide.

Start With the Seafood

The seafood tower was exactly what a seafood tower needs to be: exceptionally fresh and delicious. With a presentation like this, elaborate preparation is beside the point. The quality of the product has to carry it, and it did. Everything tasted fresh, clean, and worthy of being the centerpiece at the beginning of a meal. There was also an unexpected standout tucked into the tower: the smoked fish rillette, made with house-smoked whitefish, smoked salmon roe, dill, and cucumber à la crème. I don't typically like rillettes. They can be too rich, too dense, or simply too much when there is an entire meal ahead. This one was none of those things. It was light, fresh, and delicious. The smoked fish had plenty of flavor without becoming heavy, and the cucumber à la crème, dill, radish, and chive gave it the freshness it needed. Even surrounded by pristine seafood, it distinguished itself. It was one of the nicest surprises on the tower.

The steak tartare, unfortunately, was the notable disappointment of the evening. I have loved previous versions at Brasserie La Banque, which made this one particularly frustrating. The chickpea preparation underneath was simply too assertive and overwhelmed the beef. Tartare should taste first and foremost of excellent beef. Everything else on the plate should sharpen or complement it, not compete with it. Here, the balance was off, and I found myself wishing for one of the previous iterations.

The heirloom tomatoes were fine, but they did not leave much of an impression.

The Surprise of the Night

The gnocchi was one of those dishes I did not necessarily expect to be talking about the next day. I was wrong. It was surprisingly delicious and generously packed with fresh crab and corn. Those ingredients could easily have produced something heavy or overly sweet, but instead the dish worked beautifully. The crab was not a token garnish. You could actually taste it, and there was plenty of it. The fresh corn made sense alongside it rather than overwhelming it. Served with capers, brown butter, summer squash, lemon, and fresh herbs, it was surpisingly delicious. In a meal containing much flashier choices, the gnocchi quietly became one of the standouts.

Where a Brasserie Has to Deliver

There are certain things a French brasserie simply has to get right, and steak frites is one of them. Brasserie La Banque did. The steak itself was spot-on, but the sauces were what completed it. The flavors were exactly where they needed to be. And the pommes frites were excellent: crisp, properly seasoned, and exactly what I want alongside a steak like this. This was not an attempt to reinvent steak frites. It was a restaurant understanding the assignment and executing it properly.

The wreckfish, which was the market fish that evening, was another success. It was fresh and flavorful without unnecessary complication. Good fish does not need a kitchen to perform acrobatics around it, and Brasserie La Banque let the quality of the fish come through.

The summer vegetables were also tasty and well prepared.

The duck was perfectly okay, but in a meal with several genuinely memorable dishes, it was not particularly interesting. Nothing was wrong with it. There simply wasn't much about it that made me want another bite instead of returning to the steak, gnocchi, or fish.

And sometimes that distinction matters. A good restaurant should not be judged solely by whether anything was technically wrong. At this level, I am looking for dishes that give me a reason to come back. The steak and gnocchi certainly did that.

Save Room for Dessert

This is where Brasserie La Banque became much more interesting. Pastry Chef Ashley Cardona's desserts were fantastic across the board. (Her move from Circa 1886 earlier this year was a huge boon for the Indigo Road group.) We apparently decided the responsible course of action was to order everything except the profiteroles, which gave us a pretty good opportunity to test the pastry kitchen rather than judging it from a single dessert. There wasn't a weak one.

I admit that I initially pouted when I discovered that the pistachio and red currant crepe cake I had loved previously had disappeared with the season. Its summer replacement was a peach crepe cake with almond mascarpone cream, compressed peaches, and salted honey sauce. I was prepared not to like it as much. It very nearly proved me wrong. The peach version was excellent and came remarkably close to its predecessor. More importantly, the strength of the desserts across the table made clear that my affection for the earlier crepe cake had not been a one-off success. Brasserie La Banque has a pastry program worth paying attention to.

The lemon and pistachio opera cake, croissant bread pudding, and chocolate and raspberry petit gâteau joined the peach crepe cake on our table, and the desserts were fantastic across the board.

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When four very different desserts all succeed, dessert is no longer an afterthought. It is one of the reasons to eat here.

Service Matters

Rebecca took excellent care of us. That deserves more weight on a night like this than it would during a simple dinner for two. We were a group of loud, fussy, mostly lawyers (and lovely people who tolerate us) ordering all over the menu, sharing dishes, drinking cocktails and wine, moving through multiple courses, and eventually attacking nearly the entire dessert menu. Rebecca handled the table beautifully.

The cocktails were also a hit with the group, while I was kept happily supplied with plenty of unsweetened iced tea. It is a small detail, perhaps, but one I appreciate. A restaurant should be able to take equally good care of the person enjoying cocktails and the person who does not drink alcohol. Brasserie La Banque did it with style and grace as it has across all of my visits.

The Verdict

Brasserie La Banque did not serve us a flawless meal. The tartare needs reconsideration, particularly that overwhelming chickpea component. The heirloom tomatoes were forgettable, and the duck was good without being particularly compelling. But perfection is not the standard for deciding whether I want to return to a restaurant. Consistency, hospitality, product quality, and enough genuinely excellent cooking to make me want another reservation are. On those measures, Brasserie La Banque delivered yet again. The seafood tower was beautifully fresh, with a smoked fish rillette good enough to win over someone who generally doesn't care for rillettes. The steak and its sauces were exactly right, with excellent pommes frites alongside them. The crab-and-corn gnocchi was an unexpected star. The wreckfish showed off good product without getting in its way. Rebecca provided excellent service to a demanding table. The cocktails pleased the group, and my unsweetened tea never seemed to run dry. And then the pastry kitchen provided a very strong closing argument.

Brasserie La Banque remains firmly in my Charleston Top Five when folks ask me for a recommendation.

And apparently I now need to stop pouting whenever they change the crepe cake.