Husk, Charleston



One year in Charleston South Carolina had certainly changed Merle and his understanding of food, namely how to prepare it for the sake of something other than personal appetite or mere mass production.  Cooking, he thought, had been something like an athletic event when he worked down at the Sweet Shack on Captiva Island, Florida.

Down there the days might be long but the nights were short, for he was working there nights, and could remember the frantic hustle of the small kitchen.  Nobody seated in the dining room looking inward to the kitchen could possibly realize that the Shack's prep room was packed with six cooks and chaotic. It was full-on busy all the time.  Out back in the parking lot of the Sweet Shack they ran

a smoker day and night.  Merle would prepare pounds upon pounds of baby backs, rubbing them down with a ginger-based and lime zest sprinkle that had become famous there on Captiva, and would later, with the help of one or two other secret ingredients, win him an award at the Airport Restaurant, Piccadilly Lilly in Wisconsin.


It was in Florida, though, where Merle began to see that cooking for mass audiences was different than the individualized meal that he grew up cooking for his six brothers and sisters in Soldier's Grove, Wisconsin.  His father was a farm cooperative representative and he spent his days roaming the endless rural by-ways of the bountiful Wisconsin farm fields in his black '64 Chevy, often carrying along with him in the back new specs for small machinery that he thought could lighten the load for the standard over-worked small farm owner.

His mother, of Italian descent, had grown up in the small Tuscan village of Montepulciano, where her father owned and ran a 7th generation olive farm.  Merle could still find in certain specialty stores in Madison or Milwaukee (now online) stocks of the famous Montepulciano Olive Oil.  


He reached South Carolina via a short stint as sous chef on a cruise boat, heading northwards one day by picking up all his belongings in his small permanent hotel room at the Captiva Seven Seas Resort (he was a consultant for the resort restaurant as well), and found an apartment near the Restoration on King hotel in the center of the shops and restaurant scene in Charleston.  One interview led to another, until Merle's story of Montepulciano Olive Oil picqued the interest of the manager at the world-famous Husk Restaurant, where they took buying

local to an extreme which Merle had yet seen.  The head chef and owner Sean Brock owned a parcel of farmland nearby and would await news each day as to what was ripe for picking, would harvest it, then create a menu to showcase those products that day.  There was no set menu.  Brock collected his own heirloom seeds and grew personalized tomatoes that tasted as they had for previous generations before mass production had sapped all of the energy and flavor out of the ordinary market tomato.  The idea at Husk was to re-live South Carolina history not only through the taste buds but through the  traditional rituals of service, preparation, and setting.  Merle, with his own background in local, and in ribs preparation, was hired on the spot to be in charge of an all local meat selection.