Choosing "the best" in anything can be difficult. Nowhere is this more true than in the restaurant business. Ask any 10 people to name their favorite restaurant and you'll likely get 10 different answers and as many different reasons for those answers. We are faced with the task of naming what we feel to be the standouts in our already outstanding dining scene.

While many guides tactfully have avoided naming hard-and-fast "winners," we have, in a few categories, named "winners," things we feel are simply deserving of the title (and passed on doing so where it was just too close to call). As they say, it is an honor just being nominated, and, due to the subjective nature of the task at hand, ultimately this guide is just the opinion of two critics who have spent the past six years relentlessly examining Charleston dining.

The restaurant business is at once a ruthlessly competitive, backbreaking effort and a family of sorts of which all who have washed a dish or waited a table are members. This guide represents our salute to the best of the best, which we hope all will read with the understanding that we wrote it always wishing there were more room in which to recognize more of them, the restaurateurs and employees who, every day, through dedication and boundless hard work, make the Lowcountry such an excellent place in which to dine.