Culinary inspiration can come from anywhere: from a trip through the farmers market to the picturesque view of the Perdido Pass.
Perdido Beach Resort Executive Chef Brody Olive finds inspiration …
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Culinary inspiration can come from anywhere: from a trip through the farmers market to the picturesque view of the Perdido Pass.
Perdido Beach Resort Executive Chef Brody Olive finds inspiration everywhere, including from the views from one of his restaurants. It’s the expansive coastal scenes from Voyagers that inspired Olive’s winning dish at the Great American Seafood Cook-Off.
Olive has been at the helm of Perdido Beach Resort’s culinary program since 2016, but his culinary career started in high school.
Raised in Newnan, Georgia, Olive comes from a huge family where everything revolved around food. His childhood involved climbing apple trees, camping and fishing at Smith Lake and front porch sitting.
Olive’s first culinary job was as a dishwasher at Cracker Barrell, but it didn’t last long. He followed his high school friends from kitchen to kitchen and found he had a knack for it. After high school, he headed to Charleston, South Carolina, to attend Johnson and Wales University.
Every chef has a culinary journey, and Olive’s took him to Birmingham after college. He credits Chef George Reis and Ocean Restaurant for his professional training. After nearly five years, Olive visited the Alabama Gulf Coast and never left.
He was on the team that opened several restaurants in the area before moving to a large resort brand to head their culinary program. When the opportunity to head Perdido Beach Resort’s culinary program was on the table, Olive jumped at the chance to get back into the fine dining space.
Perdido Beach Resort has five dining concepts and a large catering program. Voyagers, one of the five restaurants, is the oldest fine-dining restaurant on the coast. Olive said when he arrived, Voyagers was tired and ready for a refresh.
Olive brought his focus on using the best and freshest local, seasonal ingredients to Perdido Beach Resort’s entire culinary program, but it shines most at Voyagers.
When asked what first-time diners should expect at Voyagers, Olive said, “Don’t be in a hurry. Sit back, relax, and let us take care of you.”
The waitstaff are career hospitality professionals who have been at the restaurant for 10 years or more. Olive said they anticipate the diner’s needs and make the experience the best possible. The view of the Gulf and top-notch meal doesn’t hurt either.
When it comes to the menu, you will always find high-quality cuts of protein and seafood, but it is the accompaniments and side dishes that rotate. Olive said his favorite is when local sweet corn comes into season and he can put the pork belly creamed corn on the menu. He also loves tomato season. He celebrates the first heirloom tomatoes of the season with a staff meal of BLTs.
Olive and his team put a lot of thought and testing into new dishes. When asked if there is a dish on the menu he would like more people to try, he answered “Yes” quickly.
“Currently, I have a salad that is really awesome that I love that is not there yet,” Olive said.
Olive has wanted to reinvent the Voyagers Wedge Salad for a while, and he had an idea but it resulted in the creation of an entirely new salad. The wedge remains much to his chagrin.
“I had this idea of a savory roasted tomato panna cotta and hiding everything inside the baby iceberg lettuce, which spawned into a whole new salad,” Olive said with a laugh. “It’s the way this goes. It is relatively new. We started messing with it for the late fall and early winter dinner menu.”
The tomato and arugula salad is comprised of a roasted tomato panna cotta, “Lettuce Heads” baby arugula, burrata, crispy bresaola, Calabrian chili pesto, ciabatta and white balsamic pearls.
“It is a very pretty salad with a lot of different stuff happening. Sometimes, I have found my wordsmithing of salads, the play on words, can be a little intimidating for folks,” Olive said. “Before we completely abandon something really tasty, sometimes it is figuring out the best way to wordsmith it for your guests and servers to be able to metabolize it better.”
It is not always his wordsmithing that may garner questioning looks from diners but his selection of ingredients. In June 2023, Olive won the Alabama Seafood Cook-Off with a dish inspired by the Perdido Pass he sees every day. He wanted to create a dish with Alabama Gulf seafood that could be found along the Pass. To push the envelope, he decided to use proteins most see as fishing bait.
“Everything in the dish was harvested from the seawall to the end of the jetty. The pursale is a little succulent that grows all along the Gulf Coast that we pickled as our vegetable-type component. We really focused on packing in three different Alabama seafood components with the Gafftop catfish, bay shrimp and the mole crabs,” Olive said. “The only goal here was to see if this idea would float. It was one of those where it was either going to be really good or really bad.”
To win the Alabama title and ultimately the national title, Olive prepared Gafftop catfish smoked over scrub oak, flash-fried mole crabs with Gulf shrimp horseradish cream, pickled purslane and smoked paprika coral tuile.
It was not Olive’s first time competing at the Annual Great American Seafood CookOff in New Orleans. In 2017, Olive won the Alabama Seafood Cook-Off but came up short for the national prize.
Unlike some chefs competing who could source their proteins from fishmongers, Olive had to harvest all but the bay shrimp, which he picked up at the local bait shop. Early in the morning of departure, he was on the beach raking mole crabs (you may know them as sand fleas), harvesting the pursale and catching the catfish.
“I had five-gallon buckets full of Gulf water to keep everything alive because we had a two-day span,” Olive said. “We arrived Friday and didn’t compete until Saturday, so I had to keep everything happy before they met their fate.”
Olive and his sous chef, Luis Silvestre, arrived in New Orleans Friday for the kick-off party where they met the competing chefs for the first time and drew for competition order. Olive has a history of drawing No. 1 in competitions, but this year he got the last slot. The same slot as the 2023 Alabama Seafood Cook-Off.
“Our wives were like, ‘It’s a sign,’” Olive laughed. “But having to sit around and wait is an arduous task. Watching everybody start and compete.”
To keep themselves occupied and to pass the time Saturday, Olive and Silvestre walked around the food show and visited vendors.
When their time to compete arrived, the Alabama team dialed in. When they opened the coolers, they started to garner attention from the masters of ceremonies, Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser.
“When we started opening coolers with shrimp jumping out of them and sand fleas moving around, we got a lot of attention. The lieutenant governor had to come over and had to see what was happening,” Olive said. But the judges kept a poker face despite the commotion.
“We thought we crushed the dish and completed it the way we wanted to,” Olive said. “We didn’t forget any components as we finished, the clock management was good, and we never got too far ahead of ourselves or behind the clock.”
Much like a beauty pageant, the top three competitors were named with no indication of who won the top prize. Third place was called, and Olive said he thought they may end up with second place.
“When they called second place, I leaned over to Chef Luis and said, This is it. They are going to call us. It is ours,’” Olive said. “It was awesome when they did call my name. We had like 25 or 30 people in the crowd that came over for it, family and friends, and, as they say, the crowd goes wild. My wife probably deafened a few eardrums beside her. It was fun.”
When he was presented with the crown and cutting board shaped like the United States by Nungesser, Olive took the moment to offer a ‘Roll Tide.’ Olive laughed when retelling the story.
Olive said he is thrilled with the results. He will no longer compete in the seafood competition and will finish out his reign by crowning the next champion in New Orleans this summer. For now, the crown and cutting board hang in the dining room of Voyagers, and he sometimes gets photos sent to him by regulars wearing the crown when he is not in the restaurant.
The win has brought a lot of attention to Perdido Beach Resort, Orange Beach and the area in general. Olive said they have seen an increase in new diners who found their way to Perdido Beach Resort due to the publicity.
“Voyagers is tucked away and hidden,” Olive said. “There are still folks that are discovering us and what we do, so we saw a number of first-timers coming through because of that win.”
Editor note: This article was originally published in the Winter 2024 issue of Beachin' Magazine, a quarterly free publication of Gulf Coast Media. Pick up a copy at racks around the island, at our office, 901 N. McKenzie St., Foley, or read it here: link to e-edition.
