Dinner's at Elvie's
At Jackson's hottest eatery, Chef Hunter Evans crafts a quintessentially Southern culinary experience defined by hyper-local ingredients and the spirit of collaboration
I took just one walk through Jackson’s historic Belhaven neighborhood and could easily see why most of the staff of Elvie’s, Chef Hunter Evans' and Cody McCain’s all-day café, live in the leafy enclave. Besides being close to the restaurant, the neighborhood exhibits a scope of architecture, so that one might briefly feel transported to Portland or historic parts of Houston. The nearby house of Mississippi’s beloved Eudora Welty, though, reminds me I’m in the heart of Jackson, where there’s a new hum of activity. At Elvie’s, where Evans combines Old World technique with the culinary rhythms of his hometown, the “City with Soul” is hardly resting on its laurels alone.
“I was rethinking food and the South and how to look at it differently."—Chef Hunter Evans
I was in town for Elvie’s Guest Chef Series, where Evans invites chefs from around the South to take over the kitchen for a coursed-out dinner. For this one, held in August, Commander’s Palace's Meg Bickford held the reins. Bickford is a fitting match for Evans, whose Mississippi upbringing was supplemented by trips to New Orleans to visit his grandmother, May Elveretta—the restaurant’s namesake. Coming from a family that usually cooked at home, Evans was enamored by the gilded restaurants of the French Quarter, with their white tablecloths and tuxedoed waiters. The kitchen’s calling eventually brought him to the hospitality program at Ole Miss, and then the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park and Daniel Meyer’s North End Grill in New York City. But soon enough, Jackson was calling Evans home.
“I was rethinking food and the South and how to look at it differently,” he said of his return home. Inspired by classic French technique and “leaning into the seasons of the South,” he wanted to approach Mississippi through a new lens.
Evans has a timeline of Mississippi history tattooed on his arm. His preoccupation with the state’s history guides the all-day and dinner fare at Elvie’s. From the corn, beans, and squash cultivated by the Choctaw, pigs brought in by the Spanish, and the cuisine of French fur traders who settled around Natchez—Mississippi has a confluence of culinary cultural influence it doesn’t always get the credit for. And so, foraged mushrooms might appear on Evans’s menu, or cuts of Mississippi venison, which he grew up hunting—all prepared with classic technique and in collaboration with local purveyors like Biloxi’s French Hermit Oyster Co. and Como’s Home Place Pastures. Evans has even put ads out in the paper to collect local seeds. One responder gave him white velvet okra seeds he had kept since his wedding day, forty-five years ago.
It’s about more than just provenance, though—the food’s got to taste good. And Elvie’s does that right too, as evidenced by its inclusion in the New York Times "Best of 2022 Restaurants".
In the dining room on the Commander’s Palace Guest Chef night, the mood was festive. Bickford and her Chef de Cuisine Nat Carrier, along with Evans and his staff, plated dishes with an intense focus unaffected by their sense of fun. Co-owner Cody McCain, who runs front-of-house operations, and Brandi Carter, who heads the bar program, poured wine, ran food, and greeted guests.
"Kitchens can be a dark place, and my goal was to be a light.” —Chef Hunter Evans
This menu celebrated the foodways of the diverse South. The American red snapper with beet-stained popcorn rice and an herby, tangy mirliton and mango slaw nodded to the Gulf’s relationship to the Caribbean, as well as the vibrant Vietnamese community in Louisiana. With each carefully-sourced ingredient—“Cajun” caviar atop a meta chicken-fried chicken skin; chilled buttermilk avocado soup with blue crab—you could follow the story of this region’s long traditions of hunting, fishing, farming, of approaching the land with respect and curiosity.
[Read more about Vietnamese culinary influence in Louisiana in these stories: "How Cafe du Monde became the signature ingredient for Vietnamese coffee" ; "The Banh Mi and the Poboy" ; and "The Village of Versailles".]
The wine pairings, selected by Carter and Sarah-Fey Rumbarger Brown of International Wines, were not only lively compliments but testaments to the hard work of the beverage team in bringing new wines to Jackson. The German Scheurebe, for example, was the only one available in the state.
“We have many challenges in terms of accessibility that a network of dedicated wine professionals and I have been working to overcome,” Carter said. “Most of us, myself included, have had to travel for our wine education,” though she added that she is working on bringing more wine resources to Jackson. In June, Carter invited wine educator Joanne Close from The Independent Caveau NOLA wine shop to teach a WSET (Wine and Spirit Education Trust) class in town, and hopes to expand the program further.
Carter and her cocktail team make everything, sans the spirits, in-house. “The journey of making every component is really exciting to me and our staff,” she said, and her favorite cocktail concepts “come from a memory of a flavor profile from childhood or travel.”
As with Evans’s fond memories of his grandmother’s table, nostalgia is a universal experience so often associated with cuisine, and I tend to ask any chef who has a strong childhood attachment to food: but why become a chef? The quiet delights of cooking at home are quite a different thing from working through high-pressure dinner rushes in New York kitchens.
“I’d be lying if I said those thoughts don’t come up,” Evans responded. “[I believe in] being who you are and using the gifts that you are given, and this is honestly where I was called to be. Kitchens can be a dark place, and my goal was to be a light.”
This commitment is what motivates the great lengths Evans and McCain extend to ensure that Elvie’s is a positive environment for his entire staff, and that each of their needs are being met. “The daily realities and stresses that come with our industry can’t be ignored and necessitate a focus on mental health,” McCain said. He and Evans implemented “simple” policies that helped in big ways: gym memberships, therapy reimbursements, health insurance, and staff retreats.
“I believe a lot of a person’s mental health at work can be tied to how valued they feel as an individual,” McCain says. “These ideals and ways of thinking are contrary to what have been the norm in our industry in our area, though we’ve started to see it change and improve in the past couple of years.”
For staff and guests alike, Elvie’s is at its heart a Belhaven destination. Despite pleas from fans to open a restaurant in the Jackson suburbs, Evans is adamant about keeping Elvie’s location in the once-forgotten downtown, where energy is picking up, like a heartbeat finding a new rhythm. In a city that is still recovering from the economic hit of the pandemic, which was followed by flooding and a subsequent water crisis, the commitment to this locale is no small thing.
After the dinner, the energy among the staff was that of a job well done. New Orleans met Jackson for the night, in a city described by some as the South’s crossroads. Later, in the Library Bar of the Fairview Inn, where I sipped on an Alice Walker and scanned stacks of Mississippi books—photographs of old blues haunts in Birney Imes's Juke Joint, poems by Natasha Trethewey—staff shook up drinks for tables occupied by locals. A patron chided the bartender with, “You haven’t been to New Orleans? It’s just down the street!” After a stay in Jackson and a dining experience at Elvie’s, I was ready to bring the same question, in reverse, back home.