Xiao Bao Biscuit

Xiao Bao Biscuit runs its whole operation out of a converted gas station, which tells you something about the attitude before a single plate lands. The menu doesn't pick a country and stay there — it moves through Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Malay cooking without treating any of it as a gimmick. Pad kra pow, mapo tofu, okonomiyaki: dishes built to be split, meant to be argued over at the table.

That range is the risk and the payoff. A menu this wide could easily go shallow, hedging on six cuisines instead of committing to one. It doesn't. Each dish reads like someone actually cared about getting that specific plate right, not just approximating a region for a Charleston crowd that might not know better.

The name is a joke — there are no biscuits here — but the room isn't kidding around. It's the kind of place that makes people plan return trips to the city around it, and Michelin's 2025 selection backs up what the food already argues on its own. Go with a group and order everything.