The tail end of Reynolds Avenue — the two-block stretch north of Spruill — is an unlikely place to find a five-course chef’s tasting menu. But we live in unlikely times.
On the right side of the street — just before the concrete “road closed” barrier and the grassy vacant lot beyond — Maya del Sol Kitchen shares a strip of low-slung buildings with a Peruvian chicken joint and a rival taqueria. The restaurant’s daytime hours are sparse — lunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, plus Sunday brunch. The evening hours are even sparser: a reservation-only seating at 6 p.m. and another at 8 p.m. each Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Swing by during the day and you’ll find a barebones taco shop. The menu, scrawled on a dry erase board, changes daily. It’s anchored by a core set of familiar items — tacos, burritos, tortas — but there are usually a few less common options, like tamalotes or nopales with chorizo. Most come with a drink included — a bottled soda you grab yourself from a reach-in cooler.
Tim Weisenmiller serves customers during lunch at Maya del Sol Kitchen on May 18, 2022, in North Charleston. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
Two tacos with rice, beans and a drink ($13.50) make for a substantial lunch, but after the first bite you may wish you’d opted for the three-taco combo — or maybe the four. The tortillas, hand-pressed in-house, have a rich corn flavor and soft, pliant texture, and they’re filled with an array of savory meats.
The barbacoa stands out in particular, with fine, meaty strands brimming with juice, and the orange-tinged shredded chicken is noteworthy, too. With both, the juicy flavor is accented by the snap of minced onion and the floral finish of cilantro.
The carnitas are a bit dry, but that’s nothing a squirt of bright green tomatillo salsa can’t fix. With plenty of heat tucked underneath, the salsa’s sharp, acidic bite brightens everything from the tacos to the street corn, a simple blend of yellow kernels with mayo and white cheese crumbles that meld into a thick gooey sauce.
That tomatillo sauce embodies the essence of Maya del Sol. There’s nothing fancy or “elevated” about it; just a serious from-scratch sensibility, with flavors just a little deeper and more vibrant than one would expect.
Pork Guisado torta served at Maya del Sol Kitchen on May 19, 2022, in North Charleston. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
That’s the case with the pork guisado torta ($14.50), too. A warm oblong bun, pillowy soft and lightly toasted on the flattop, is filled with fine shreds of stewed pork in a savory orange sauce. Its spiciness is offset by a cool layer of creamy guacamole, and shredded lettuce and diced white onion add just the right amount of crunch. It’s an admirable sandwich.
A few Dia De Los Muertos paintings and a red sombrero hint at a Mexican theme, but the setting is more akin to a workaday diner. No tables, just a long counter with 20 stools. The entire kitchen, such as it is, is right there behind the counter, with a small flattop and a four-burner stove beneath a stainless steel hood. A brightly painted pig perches atop a rack of wire shelving loaded with jars and tubs of sauces and spice — pantry as décor.
The fact that one can characterize the lunch fare — tortas, tomatillo salsa, barbacoa tacos on soft corn tortillas — as “familiar” shows how much local palates have expanded since chef/owner Raul Sanchez moved here a decade ago from his native Chicago. Reviews of his first restaurant, the short-lived Raul’s Taqueria and Mexican Grill on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston, were glowing, but the reviewers felt obliged to warn that the tacos had neither hard shells nor ground beef filling — and to toss in a few vaguely titillating wisecracks about lengua (tongue).
Mexican Street Corn served Maya del Sol Kitchen on May 19, 2022, in North Charleston. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
That was already starting to change by the time Sanchez moved over to Park Circle in 2013, where he operated Raul's Maya del Sol until 2016. He followed that with a stint at the downtown chef’s table restaurant R. Kitchen, where he sometimes served his Mexican-influenced specialties as a lunchtime pop-up.
Sanchez launched the new version of Maya del Sol in January 2021 (dropping the Raul and adding the Kitchen), and the original plan was to offer just the multi-course evening tasting menu plus a Sunday brunch. The three weekday lunches were added a few months in.
The daytime selection might be termed “Raul’s Greatest Hits.” Old favorites like rosemary pancakes ($10) are back for brunch, alongside breakfast burritos ($10) and chilaquiles steak and eggs ($17). Carne en su jugó — a half-stew/half-soup of tender marinated beef in a complex, savory broth — makes regular return appearances, too.
The evening dinners, though, are the real focus. They were inspired, in part, by Sanchez’s time at R. Kitchen and also by his desire to serve an array of dishes, including old family recipes, that don’t fit into the expected format for a Mexican restaurant. Many of the plates straddle the line between comfort food and fine dining: Pot roast with mole, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and street corn, beef tenderloin with Brussels sprouts and cilantro jalapeño chimichurri.
Sanchez has shaken things up in recent months by throwing in some themed dinners every few weeks, like Italian, French and Moroccan. I happened to snag a seat during “Huitlacoche Week,” when the entire menu was given over to corn fungus.
Huitlacoche is a puffy black and gray fungus that feeds off immature corn ears during the rainy season. Some daring Aztec discovered centuries ago that, like truffles and mushrooms, it may look a little gross but is oddly delicious. I was intrigued to see how Sanchez might incorporate it into a five-course dinner.
I was also curious to see whether there would be a transformation in setting at night, and there really isn’t. The “chef’s table” is the same long counter where you sit at lunch. There are no placemats on the bartop, just silverware rolled in a black cloth napkin, a stemless glass for wine and a plastic cup to fill with water from a glass carafe. Sanchez and his sous chef, Tim Weisenmiller, do swap their lunchtime T-shirts for black chefs’ coats, and they not only plate each of the meal’s five courses at the center of the counter but also hand them to each guest and pour the paired wine.
For me, the best dishes incorporated huitlacoche’s pungent, earthy flavor as a background note instead of putting the blackened kernels front and center. Things started off strong with a square glass dish containing what looked to be a thin black bean soup but was actually cream of huitlacoche. A testament to the fungus’ mushroom-like thickening properties, the soup contained no cream and no black beans. That truffle-like flavor — earthy and rich — really shone through, especially against the crisp corn crunch of a few fried tortillas strips.
The middle courses paled a bit in comparison. Spirals of tender pasta tossed with gray huitlacoche “cream” reiterated the thickening magic (no dairy was in the mix here, either), but a few tiny shrimp and whole huitlacoche kernels spooned over the top weren’t enough to complete the dish.
Maya del Sol Kitchen is open for lunch and dinner on Reynolds Avenue on May 18, 2022, in North Charleston. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
A quesadilla is perhaps the most common huitlacoche preparation, and Sanchez gave his a few cheffy touches, nestling the half moon of blue corn tortilla inside a triangular plate and finishing it with zigzags of white crema and crumbled cheese. The filling folded inside — a sort of greenish-black stew of chopped huitlacoche and yellow corn kernels amid gooey strands of melted white cheese — was surprisingly mild and unobtrusive without much of an earthy boost.
The plate was rescued by an unexpected hero: a single bright green epazote leaf laid atop as garnish. Its pungent, astringent fragrance really opened up the flavor and added a needed top note.
The meal finished strong with a blue stoneware plate bearing a single chicken leg enrobed in dark brown mole. Beneath that savory blanket, the dark meat was silky and rich. It was accompanied by a sort of stir fried rice with a few kernels of huitlacoche and yellow corn, but that was outshone by a few halves of charred, slightly crunchy Brussels sprouts. Sanchez is reputed to use 75 different ingredients in his mole, and I guess it was 76 that night, since he incorporated huitlacoche, too; though amid all those other vibrant flavors, it was sort of hard to tell.
Sanchez even incorporated the corn fungus into dessert: a Mexican lava cake baked in a small aluminum foil pan and glazed with a bittersweet black Oaxacan mole. It was hard to discern how much the huitlacoche was responsible, but the cake was only mildly sweet — in a good way — with a rich, spicy bite, and it capped off the night splendidly.
I may not be 100 percent sold on huitlacoche as a main attraction (a little corn fungus, I’ve concluded, goes a long way), but I very much like the evening format at Maya Del Sol. It’s a chef’s tasting menu stripped down to the absolute bare essentials. No long, practiced spiels from servers about what the next course is going to be, no razzmatazz with caviar or shaved truffles. The wines paired with each course aren’t even identified, just poured into the same glass as the prior one.
But where else can you eat like this? And for $65, including wine? The experience may not overwhelm the senses with over-the-top excess, but it certainly intrigues and surprises.
These days, as Charleston’s skyline is steadily transformed by gleaming new hotels and high-rise apartments, the cooks pushing culinary boundaries and challenging conventions seem to be increasingly moving up the peninsula away from downtown. Increasingly, when I set out to sample something fresh and exciting, I find myself heading toward one of the spokes radiating out from Park Circle, and I suspect many more will soon be doing the same.
Photos: Vibrant flavors found in scratch made fare at Maya del Sol Kitchen
Maya del Sol Kitchen on Reynolds Avenue is serving up flavorful lunches and multi-course evening tasting menus created by Raul Sanchez.
Mexican Street Corn served Maya del Sol Kitchen on May 19, 2022, in North Charleston. Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
