CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Along a side street, up some stairs, into a new, second-story lounge known as Madison's -- the cool kind of spot that makes you wonder if it was once somebody's loft apartment -- I find women in black spaghetti-strap dresses and men in blazers and shiny shoes slouching on couches and grooving to the sounds of some cats in the corner plucking on bass strings and blowing on the sax. Others are gazing at cigar boxes in a glass case that looks like a china cabinet, picking over a fat spread of crackers and cheese at the bar, shooting pool beneath crystal chandeliers while sipping brown booze in swanky rocks glasses they set on bar tables beside tiny, chic lamps -- the kind found at Pottery Barn -- that offer little more luminescence than one might expect from a night-light.
Banking and culture are hot as Charlotte strives to be cool
Down the block, around the corner, past windows adorned with candles in blue glass votives, I pony up to the bar at a place called Blue with an extravagant Art Deco-styled, marble-floored lobby of an office building at my back, a $10 martini before me, and a late-night, Mediterranean-inspired menu in hand: Moroccan pastry, fava bean puree, and white truffle oil are among the highlighted ingredients.
Across Tryon Street, the city's main thoroughfare, opposite the gray stone façade of a two-story art museum, I push my way through a crowd upscale enough to make me feel underdressed in a fleece vest and Nikes at the newly opened, red-walled, wood-paneled Zink American Kitchen to slurp down a dozen oysters, feast on the tuna petals of a sashimi flower, and gorge on a plate of boar sausage.
I had not yet made it to the 27th floor of a nearby building to try foie gras and tiger prawns while surrounded by glass skyscrapers at sunset, home to another new restaurant, Bentley's on 27 (Oriental rugs at the entry, blown-glass sculptures along the hallway to the dining room, walls of glass looking out on the city), once a private club frequented by the town's heavy hitters. Nor had I infiltrated the three-story nightclub a golf swing away named Menage that had a VIP room I read was once popular with the late NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt.
Still, I had been in town long enough to gather that Charlotte, a city with neither a river running through it, mountains all around, nor the sea nearby was developing a culinary identity -- and seemingly much more -- all its own.
