Page 80 - South Mississippi Living - May, 2019

Vestige
715 Washington Ave, Ocean Springs 228.818.9699 www.vestigerestaurant.com
Ultimate
farm-to-table
Vestige CThef Alex Perry NOMINATED FOR JAMES BEARD AWARD
story by Jeff Clark photos by Donn Hupp
he James Beard Award is one of the most prestigious awards given in the culinary world. The late Anthony Bourdain is a past winner for his work in television and a then-young chef named Bobby Flay won the award for rising chef in 1993. Ocean Springs native Alex Perry can now add his list to the name of James Beard Award nominees. Perry, who owns Vestige in Downtown Ocean Springs, is a 2019 nominee for the Best Chef in the South, which includes Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida and Puerto Rico.
“To say it’s an honor to be nominated for a James Beard Award is a huge understatement. It’s not something we ever thought would happen,” Perry said. “Our mission at Vestige is a simple one – to cook “clean” food with an emphasis on farm-to-table ingredients. We operate under a three-fold code: the food has to taste good, the food has to be harvested in a sustainable way and the locality of the food. The first two supersede the third because if it doesn’t taste good, it doesn’t matter and we don’t want to serve something that meant a whole forest had to be destroyed to harvest it. We just want to showcase the Coast and the region in a different way.”
The award is a huge deal for any chef, especially for Perry, who was very close to living in a world where he worked in the medical field. He said his move to the culinary profession was something of a “Hail Mary.”
“I went to college at the University of South Alabama and I was studying
to become an epidemiologist,”
he said. “But after I
graduated, I realized there was no way that I wanted to do that. Truth be told,
I had never really
had any interest in
cooking, food was just something you need for substance, but I decided
to give cooking a try. I
went to Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Orlando and worked at Universal Studios. Then, I landed a job in Mobile before I decided to open Vestige in Ocean Springs.
80 SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living • May 2019
FOR MORE REFLECTIONS OF THE GULF COAST >> www.smliving.net