Lucie Monk Carter
Plant your feet in a certain spot at The Myrtles, a haunted place if there ever were one, and I promise you´ll feel a warmth. Perhaps a tickle, as blue-gray wisps dance past your face on their trip skyward. Tourists flock to the circa-1796 plantation to hover around the mirror, the breezeway, the seventeenth stairstep—all places where the veil between our world and the next is said to be unnervingly threadbare. But there’s no disputing the flickering spectacle at the heart of The Myrtles’ new Restaurant 1796, an open hearth dishing out flame-kissed Modern South cuisine.
Tending the flames is Chef Ben Lewis, a Woodville, Mississippi, native whose wild curls brush broad shoulders. He had his own walk with death a year ago, as Hurricane Irma screeched through the Virgin Islands, where Lewis worked at the Longboard Coastal Cantina. Forty-six days after the storm, with little company save for lizards and few sights apart from a spray of sickly yellow dirt that coated everything, Lewis came home. “I was lucky, I had some money to live on,” said Lewis, but money only went so far under martial law and felled phone towers. He felt shaken from his comfortable upbringing. “I’ll tell you, I appreciate every bite of food now,” he said, spearing a piece of exquisitely grilled bone-in ribeye which he’d just pulled from the hearth’s smacking embers, sliced, and sprinkled with benne seeds, an heirloom Southern cousin to sesame.
Lucie Monk Carter
Myrtles owner Morgan Moss, left, and Chef Ben Lewis.
Growing up, Lewis felt sure he´d be a salesman; still he finds plenty of outlets for his natural affability in his new calling as a chef. Morgan Moss, owner of The Myrtles, was a childhood friend who wanted to make use of Lewis’ diverse skill set for the new restaurant he had planned for his family's B&B, a place that would open up The Myrtles to a new audience, preferably local, without shaking loose the fervent ghost-hunters and their loyal spouses.
Visit with the chef around the hearth at Restaurant 1796 and you’ll see the stranger who could sell you anything even without the fire’s beautiful bronzing as well as the chef who learned to cook at the hunting camp and got polished in the Caribbean. Somewhere between is the humbled man who walked free from a hurricane and appreciates his gifts as they come. Take a leaf from his book and warm to the anticipation as the chef raises and lowers your food in the flames. He plates the crackling protein, showers the vegetables with salt, a housemade lemon aioli, and herbs from the garden. Thanks to Lewis’ careful choreography with the fire, dinner is crisp on the outside and tender within. But how do you know anything for sure in this place of spooks and peripheral mists? You can see this food, blink all you want; you can touch it with your piercing fork—and oh boy, you can taste it, each bite its own blessing.
Lucie Monk Carter
myrtlesplantation.com/restaurant1796
35th Anniversary Party Menu - November 11, 2018
Sweet Cabbage Slaw
Pickled Apple // Benne Seed
Cornbread & Mustard Greens
Whipped Buttermilk // Sport Pepper
Pork Belly
Butter Rice // House Pear Jam /// Scallion
Smoked Salmon
Charred Okra // Shallot /// Hot Molasses
Beets & Turnip
Arugula // Jalapeño Mint Tzatziki /// Pine Nuts
