Restaurants in Travelers Rest

Shortfields sits on South Main Street in Travelers Rest, a comfortable spot for a weekday lunch or dinner that also opens early on weekend mornings for a slower start to Saturday and Sunday. Beyond the dining room, it runs as a catering operation, so the same kitchen that feeds walk-in guests can put together food for events and gatherings around the Upstate.

Three Oaks has built a local following on Southern home cooking: a home-cooked breakfast off the griddle in the morning, and a proper meat-and-three by lunch. You would not guess it from the outside. The cafe shares a building with a gas station on Geer Highway, and inside it stays plain and easygoing. You order at the counter, grab your own drink and silverware, and settle in, and the owner tends to check on tables himself. Fancy it is not, and nobody there is pretending otherwise. Mornings lean on omelets, pancakes, biscuits and gravy, and grits that customers single out. Lunch shifts to country-style plates: pot roast, country steak with gravy, and Southern sides like green beans and collards, plus a daily special people compare to a Thanksgiving spread. The kitchen caters too, from casual gatherings to weddings, at your place or theirs. If you are going big at breakfast, the Kitchen Sink Omelet is the one people talk about. Expect generous portions, honest prices, and the feel of eating at a neighbor's table more than a restaurant.

The kitchen builds a new three-course prix fixe most weeks around whatever the restaurant's own farm and neighboring Upstate growers are harvesting, so the menu shifts with the season rather than sitting still. Dinner runs three courses for $65, Thursday through Sunday. It occupies the old Williams Hardware building on Main Street in Travelers Rest, with a screened, heated porch that looks out over the Swamp Rabbit Trail. Live jazz plays on Thursday evenings and select Saturdays bring a bluegrass brunch, which gives the room the feel of a neighborhood gathering as much as a special-occasion table, though it handles both. Beyond the weeknight prix fixe there is weekend brunch, a full bar with a curated wine list and craft cocktails, and a Sunday chef's tasting that changes weekly, five courses with an optional wine pairing. Plant-based cooking gets serious attention, from a deep vegan lineup to a Plant Based Supper Club that runs a few times a year. The attached kitchen and market bakes bread to order and carries local produce and chef-prepared meals. Chef Adam Cooke, a 2020 James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef Southeast, leads the kitchen, and much of what comes out of it traces back to the restaurant's own 16-acre farm and named local growers like Bradford Farm and Barbee Farms.

Restaurant 17 sits at Hotel Domestique, the boutique hotel George and Rich Hincapie built into the Blue Ridge foothills a few miles north of downtown Travelers Rest. The dining room looks out toward the mountains, and the property carries the European-countryside feel the Hincapies brought home from years of travel and racing abroad. Getting here means leaving the Upstate's busier roads for a quiet stretch of Road of Vines, which is part of the draw. The kitchen, led by chef Haydn Shaak, works a seasonal menu rooted in the land around it, with a European and Mediterranean lean rather than anything fussy. Much of the plate is grown close by, drawing on Stage 22, the hotel's own farm along the North Saluda River, plus neighboring farms and nearby streams. Because the menu follows what is in season, it shifts through the year, so two visits months apart rarely look alike. That local sourcing is what reviewers keep returning to, along with a setting that stays relaxed rather than stiff despite the polish. If you go, leave time before dinner for a drink at the hotel's Bar 17; starting the evening there, then moving to the table as the light drops over the foothills, is how people who know the place tend to do it.