Halls Chophouse has been the Charleston steakhouse on King Street since 2009, and it's the kind of place that scores 4.8 on TripAdvisor and ranks in the top fifteen in the city because it does the fundamentals without a gimmick. The Hall family owns it - Bill Hall spent forty years running hotels and restaurants from Pinehurst to Pebble Beach before planting roots in the Lowcountry - and the house motto is "service before self," which shows up in the kind of attentiveness that makes a regular anniversary dinner feel special. The steaks are the point: the dry-aged strip is the dish people write about, the she crab soup is the one to start with, and the family-style sides are hearty enough to keep you at the table a while.
It's old-school savvy rather than trendy, which means the room is a little more traditional than some of the newer dining rooms downtown, and the price point matches. The real draw, though, is the Sunday gospel brunch with live music - it's the one thing that makes this feel less like a chophouse and more like a Charleston tradition. The Hall family also runs High Cotton and Slightly North of Broad, so if you want the same energy with a different menu, those are the places to go.
A guy at a bar down at Folly once told me: "You can get a better steak somewhere else, but you can't get one more expensive"