I am a chef and first-generation Italian American from New York who moved to the South a little over two years ago. In “Searching for Italy in the South,” I'm on a quest to discover chefs who cook real Italian food, who have captured the essence of Italian cooking and are bringing the Old Country to the Lowcountry and beyond. For this first installment, I head to visit Jacques Larson at Wild Olive on Johns Island in South Carolina.
Historic Johns Island is the largest island in South Carolina, a short 20-minute drive from downtown Charleston. It’s a place known for its sophistication and laid-back ambiance, magnificent oak trees, beautiful beaches, golf courses, luxury resorts, and excellent restaurants. One of the best is Wild Olive Cucina Italiana, open since 2009.
Jacques Larson at the pass in his kitchen at Wild Olive.
Chef and owner Jacques Larson, who move to South Carolina from Iowa in 1996, places the utmost value on simple seasonal cuisine. He aims to source ingredients as locally as possible, transforming the bounty of the Lowcountry—the geographic and cultural region of coastal South Carolina—into artisanal variations of regional Italian classics.
"We live in the garden bed of Charleston and are privy to the area’s best and freshest produce," Larson tells me while standing in Wild Olive’s kitchen, preparing his housemade pappardelle using local, perfectly golden eggs from Storey Farms. He talks technique, stressing the importance of cooking the pasta al dente, still a novel concept in the South, where overcooked pasta is the norm.
Larson cooks his pappardelle in the pan with the rest of the ingredients for some time to make sure all the flavors meld together, creating what he calls "a homogeneous living thing."
The Pappardelle dish (here's his recipe) is a long-standing staple at Wild Olive, made with oyster mushrooms from White Marsh Farms, guanciale from Keepan Filion Farm cured in-house, arugula from Nelly Farms, and Parmigiano. The restaurant’s menu also features housemade focaccia, pasta dishes from ravioli to lasagna to baked penne, mains including grilled ribeye, veal scallopini, and chicken parm, and for dessert, of course, a tiramisu.
His recipes reflect both a childhood growing up in a New Jersey Italian-American family, and a career-influencing trip to the Piedmont region of Italy. "Italian cooking is simple but not easy," he says. "Italian cuisine is more emotional and cultural. Food in Italy is more of a lifestyle."
Wild Olive opened on Johns Island near Charleston in 2009.
Larson says that it was while working in North Carolina under the influential chef Jim Noble that he saw an opportunity to bring the Italian lifestyle and cuisine to a place known for incredible Southern American food but lacking a certain something. "One thing Charleston was missing was real Italian cuisine. Italian food is all about farm-to-table, and there is no better place to source locally than right here in our backyards."
I ask if he finds it harder to capture the essence of Italian cooking in New York, where he has staged at a few top restaurants, or in the South. "While there are plenty of wonderful farms up north in the Hudson Valley, the climate here in the South makes for longer farming seasons, so we always have access to the freshest ingredients that allow me to combine the flavor profiles of the Lowcountry with the simple yet refined regional ingredients and cooking style of Italy."
In Larson’s kitchen at Wild Olive, he stands over the stove, browning the garlic, rendering the guanciale, then combining the pasta, mushrooms, and arugula, effortlessly flipping the pan over and over. Lastly, he adds the pasta water, butter, and grated Parmigiano to give the pappardelle that creamy, silky, shiny texture. It’s classic Italian food made in a very Southern place, and every bit at home.