Chef Ben Lewis
By moving to the Caribbean, the Woodville native developed a new perspective on familiar foods
Our 2019 Small Town Chef Ben Lewis has roots two hundred years deep in Woodville, the historic, southwest Mississippi town around which artist/naturalist John James Audubon identified twenty-six species of birds to include in his magnum opus, The Birds of America, and where only around a thousand people still live today. Many are some kind of kin to Lewis. His great-great-great-grandfather, Colonel John South Lewis, built the town’s second home, and the colonel’s descendants have run the state’s oldest paper, the Woodville Republican, since 1879.
Woodville’s major industries include timber and hunting, and Ben Lewis can surely fell a tree and kill a bird. But he found his real gift at the stove, learning rib-sticking classics from kitchen staff at the venerable Arcole Hunting Club in Pinckneyville, Mississippi. In seventh grade he took home a trophy from a wild game cooking competition held annually on Woodville’s oak-shaded courthouse square. (Competition was fierce; Lewis stuck with duck, but fair game in the “Other” category extended as far as armadillo.) By the time he was in middle school he was working as a hunting guide and cooking for his clients, too. “I was never a homebody,” he said, “I always liked being active.” In Lewis’ accent you’ll hear all the burrs and whistles of a boyhood spent in the Mississippi outdoors. He is assuredly a product of his place, but when it comes to cookery he’s no traditionalist. Indeed, some fans of classic Southern fare might consider what he’s doing a travesty. This thirty-one-year-old chef is dismantling and rebuilding Southern cuisine, engaging in a spirited debate on how the region’s favorites can—and should—be done.
He is assuredly a product of his place, but when it comes to cookery he’s no traditionalist.
I first encountered Lewis last fall in St. Francisville, a town twenty-four miles south of Woodville and practically its sister. He was working on the menu for Restaurant 1796, the Myrtles Plantation’s new onsite restaurant, which he would helm as executive chef when it debuted in February 2019. At the restaurant’s center would be a full open hearth, and Lewis was the man appointed to usher St. Francisville into a new era of farm-to-flame-to-table dining. He had a test hearth to prepare.
With a hearthside seat, arguably the best a diner can have, I watched as grilled bone-in ribeye and gilded baby potatoes drizzled with lemon aioli (and nestled among halved heads of roasted garlic) emerged from the flames—vibrant in high contrast to the gleaming black cast-iron skillets in which they arrived. When handled properly, fire has a glamorizing effect on food, but I bit through the crisp crusts to discover something more: Flavor. I credit the bright, tanginess of lemon aioli for muscling its way past my former, admittedly tender notions of meat and potatoes. Lewis does too. “I love sauces,” he grinned. “They’re a vessel for ninety-seven thousand delicious things.”
But Lewis’s sauces are flavor superchargers, not shrouds. At Restaurant 1796, the fried chicken straddles pools of bearnaise sauce (tarragon-flecked hollandaise) and hunter-green hot sauce, scattered with tiny shavings of cured egg yolk. All this might seem like a refusal to leave well enough alone, but only until you begin swiping a forkful daintily through one sauce, then the other … perhaps a bit more of the first … and suddenly you’ve polished off every last nib of egg yolk and find yourself wondering whether second helpings of each sauce might be available by the tankard. In Lewis’s hands, no Southern standard is sacred. His hot sauce features Balinese long peppers and jalapeños fermented into nuance: one blazing note of heat becomes oxymoronically pleasant and sour. Red beans are accompanied by grilled conecuh sausages, sushi rice cooked cornbread-like in a skillet, his fermented hot sauce, and scallion threads. The catfish sandwich is topped with sticky rice and East Asian peppers. Greens glisten with safflower bacon jam.
Where does a native son get these wild ideas? For Lewis it was a matter of waking up to the world around him. After college at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where he earned a bachelor’s in business marketing, Lewis took a trip with his father, Dr. Bob Lewis, to St. John, the smallest of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Most accounts of men lured to exotic islands feature vigilante justice, sinister science experiments, or a crazed general who’s graduated to hunting people. Lewis blames only the chef assigned to cook in their vacation villa, whom he spent hours quizzing to learn how he might do the same. “I couldn’t believe he did this for a living,” he said. Vacation ended and Lewis returned home just long enough to say his goodbyes and pack the rest of his wardrobe. Arriving back on St. John a few days later, he headed straight to Mathayom Private Chefs and offered up his services—free for about a week to prove himself. Then they gave the obsessed kid a paying job.
On the island, Lewis learned to cater to a wide variety of tastes—including those of musician Kenny Chesney and exotic royal families with their own intimidating customs—and to incorporate the lush local produce into Caribbean feasts for his clients. With his father the town doctor, the fresh vegetables of Woodville’s many kitchen gardens had always landed on Lewis’ porch. (As the adage goes, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but a bunch of Swiss chard cuts your next bill in half.) But there in St. John, trees hung low with mystery fruit … some furred, some golden, some likely poisonous. “It could be intimidating,” Lewis laughed. “As soon as I’d see someone walking down the street, chewing on a spiky thing, I’d think, ‘Okay, you can eat it!’”
The eggfruit he found especially hard to understand. “It’s an avocado in texture: creamy, buttery, and smooth. But it’s sweet, kind of like yogurt.” The locals recommended simply eating eggfruit or using it to top fish. Lewis added it to his culinary repertoire.
“It could be intimidating,” Lewis laughed. “As soon as I’d see someone walking down the street, chewing on a spiky thing, I’d think, ‘Okay, you can eat it!’”
After two years at Mathayom Private Chefs, Lewis joined the faster pace of Longboard Coastal Cantina, his first experience working in a proper restaurant kitchen. He was there in September 2017 when Hurricane Irma arrived, followed three weeks later by Hurricane Maria, and he learned the other side of living by the sea. The back-to-back storms battered the island, felling trees and power lines. For over a month Lewis lived under martial law. He canvassed the area, helping with tree removal, and took a job cooking with the Red Cross but eventually ceded it to someone who needed the work more. “I ended up rebuilding the garden on the island that supplied all the restaurants with fresh produce,” he said. “That’s where I spent my time.”
Late in the year, he flew home to Mississippi with a new perspective. “Anything that grew fresh was suddenly vivid to me in a way that it wasn’t before,” said Lewis. “I went to the islands really spoiled, in more than one way. And I pretty much went broke and worked harder than I ever have in my whole life. I saw the hurricane suck the life out of the island. For fifty days almost, I worked just to keep it together. But I loved it.”
“Anything that grew fresh was suddenly vivid to me in a way that it wasn’t before,” said Lewis.
Soon after returning to the States, he was hired by Morgan Moss, second-generation owner of The Myrtles, to serve as executive chef for the ambitious new restaurant they were building. Lewis wouldn’t quite be cooking in his hometown, but he’d be close enough for family and friends to make frequent visits and witness his hard-won skills. “My dad was there every day the first week, and almost every other day after,” he laughed.
“I started telling him when he was six years old that he needed to find some way to get paid to cook. He was always in the kitchen,” said Dr. Lewis. Like most fathers might, the doctor worried when his son shed his Mississippi life for a loose job in St. John. But as updates came from across the sea, Dr. Lewis saw an aimless kid transformed into a chef—with vision and creative passion bursting from every pore. “We’d see photos of him and his friends holding lobsters they caught. Fresh tuna. He had happy in his eyes. That’s the way we saw it grow.”
“Everything I do is contrary to what he does, but he supports me,” said Ben Lewis. “He knows I can cook.” A very small percentage of guests in a restaurant can claim to be the chef’s father, but Lewis has confidence that total strangers will like his food just as much, if he can only talk to them—define eggfruit, explain all his sauces. At the core of Lewis’s food is a deeply Southern sensibility, that of sharing remembered pleasures with others. “Ninety-nine percent of what I cook is about recreating something delicious I had,” he said. Restaurant 1796 proved not to be the place for his persuasive powers. Though many of his recipes still appear on the menu, Lewis left in late spring. “You can’t talk to a guest with fourteen people in between you and with three hundred guests at a time,” he said.
That creative remove would be solved, Lewis imagines, at his ideal restaurant: a tiny place with just four or five staff members, chef included. He imagines a version of New Orleans’ ballsy sandwich shop, Turkey & the Wolf, “but with a hard country curve.”
Currently, Lewis isn’t cooking at any restaurant you can visit. In fact he’s working as a lumberjack again, drawing solace from fresh air and solitude after his recent disappointment. “I had all my eggs in that basket,” he said. High up in the trees is a different perspective than the one he’s had recently. What will he see from that vantage point? And more importantly, what dishes will he dream up next?