During our first full night in Charleston, SC recently, we had been given a list of recommended restaurants in the area by a waiter at Amen Street. One of them that he highly recommended was a place on Johns Island south and west of Charleston, an Italian restaurant by the name of Wild Olive. One evening we decided to head out to Johns Island and try Wild Olive for dinner.
Jacques Larson was an Illinois native who went to school at the University of Iowa studying English and history in the early-to-mid 1990's. Larson had worked in an Italian restaurant while he was in high school and he worked in various restaurants in Iowa City while going to school.
After graduation, Larson moved to Charleston in 1996 and a year later he helped start up the Peninsula Grill, an upscale eatery in the heart of Charleston's French Quarter. For seven years, Larson served as the sous chef at the restaurant.
Larson didn't think that he wanted to be stuck in a kitchen and he began making plans to go to a college on the west coast to get his Master of Fine Arts degree in painting. He left Peninsula Grill at the age of 30, but was sidetracked by joining an Italian restaurant in North Carolina. The restaurant was headed by Jimmy Noble who has a number of restaurants under the Noble Food and Pursuits banner in the greater Charlotte area. Even though Larson worked in an Italian restaurant as a high school student, he never really cooked in one. It was working with Noble at the Italian restaurant that Larson fell in love with Italian cooking.
After working in Charlotte for a couple years, Larson decided to immerse himself in all things to do with Italian cooking. He tried some of the better Italian restaurants in New York City eventually landing a job in one. He traveled to Italy to learn more by cooking in a restaurant where he also started to learn about Italian wines. By the time he moved back to Charleston around 2007, he was fully onboard for all things Italian.
Pictured right - Jacques Larson. Photo courtesy Charleston City Paper.
Larson had worked at a restaurant in Charleston for a couple years before he decided to move back to the Midwest and open a restaurant in either Iowa City or Madison, WI. A week before he was scheduled to leave Charleston to scout locations in the Midwest, Larson was recruited to a new restaurant that had opened just a couple months before to help run the kitchen. Fred Neuville and Doug Godley had opened Wild Olive in 2009 as an Italian restaurant. But when Larson joined the kitchen staff, he found that there was only one dish that consisted of pork - a pork chop - when pork was a staple of the Italian diet. He slowly incorporated more pork based dishes into the menu at Wild Olive.
In 2010, Neuville and Godley dissolved their partnership in Wild Olive and the restaurant went under Godley's Frankie's Fun Parks corporate umbrella. Frankie's Fun Parks is a chain of amusement parks with locations in South Carolina and North Carolina. Under Godley's ownership, Larson flourished in the kitchen and Wild Olive became one of the top food destinations in Charleston. In 2014, Larson and Godley opened The Obstinate Daughter on Sullivan's Island just north of Charleston offering more of a Low Country menu with Italian mixed in.
We had made reservations for 7 p.m. at Wild Olive. Actually, we drove out a little early thinking that maybe we could get a drink at the bar while waiting for a table to open. And it was probably a good thing that we did go early because we passed the entrance to Wild Olive twice before we realized that it was tucked back off Maybank Highway (State Road 700) just nine miles from downtown Charleston. (see map) A small sign in front was almost impossible to see when you were driving by as it was set back from the roadway and it was understandable that you could miss it if you didn't know where Wild Olive was.
The parking lot in back of the Wild Olive is shared with its neighbor, Low Tide Brewing. Wild Olive featured a handful of Low Tide beers including an IPA that I got for my first beverage at Wild Olive that I thought was very good.
Upon entering Wild Olive, the main dining room is off to the right side. Wood paneled walls held a number of historical pictures from the Charleston area while a series of LED lights were pointed at the wood planks on the ceiling diffusing the light in the room. The kitchen was off to the side of the main dining room and through a double wide opening you could see the hustle and bustle going on in the kitchen.
In the back corner past the lounge area was another dining area, smaller than the main dining room. Banquette seating was along the wall with a number of table in the middle of the room. It was a cozy room with the same lighting scheme as the main dining room.
Since we were still a little early, the young lady at the hostess stand said that it would probably be about a 20 to 25 minute wait for a table in the two dining rooms. But she said that she had a high-top table in the lounge. The lounge was actually very nice - a large communal table under a rack of faux grapes were hanging over the table. The bar wasn't very big, but it also had a nice cozy feeling to the room. Music by Jack Johnson, Bonnie Raitt, The BoDeans and others played in the background during our time there.
The hostess took us into the lounge and pointed to a table around the corner and tucked in the back part of the lounge near the bar. My wife and I looked at one another, sort of shrugged our shoulders in approval and decided to sit there. It was actually kind of nice as it wasn't in a high traffic area and there weren't any other tables around us. Our server that evening was a helpful and fun guy who was introduced by the hostess as Christopher. But as the night went on, he insisted that we call him Chris.
The menu will vary depending upon seasons and availability of locally-sourced products. But most of the main items on the menu stay intact most of the year - Lobster risotto, "Sunday-gravy" lasagna, baked penne pasta with sweet sausage, as well as chicken parm, veal scallopine, and something that I found pretty interesting - a grill elk loin. I've had elk in the past and it's some of the better game-style meat I've ever had.
The choices for appetizers were pretty slim, but they included fried calamari, a Caesar salad, and something that jumped out at me - grilled octopus with chopped creamer potatoes, pancetta, capers and spring onions. The octopus - while not many of them on the plate - was charred and chewy with a great flavor. There were too many potatoes on the plate for my liking, but it was still a nice little start to the meal.
Eschewing a salad, my wife got a cup of the lobster bisque. Creamy and hearty with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar added to the top, my wife declared the bisque to be wonderful. She offered me a spoonful and I also thought it was very good, as well.
That evening, Wild Olive had a fish special - a locally-caught wild grouper filet pan-seared and placed on a bed of grilled vegetables with a risotto sauce on the base of the plate. She got a house Pinot Grigio to go along with the meal. My wife thought the grouper was outstanding - it had a butter-char to the outside and was light and flaky on the inside. She especially liked the grilled vegetables as she decided to eat somewhat healthy that evening.
I went the pasta route with Tagliatelle pasta with a bolognese sauce. I've been getting really deep into meaty, hearty and creamy bolognese sauces recently, especially paired with wide egg noodles. (I also have made some bolognese sauce at home recently with San Marzano tomatoes in a tomato-cream sauce which turned out pretty damned good, if I say so myself.) And the tagliatelle pasta noodles with the ground veal/ground pork bolognese sauce was also outstanding. I had a light lunch earlier in the day because I figured that we'd be eating pasta that evening, so it was no problem for me to finish the whole delicious plate. For a wine pairing that evening, I got a glass of the house Super Tuscan red they had available.
For dessert that night, we had to get a slice of their tiramisu. Freshly baked, the tiramisu was very good. But it was also very rich. Still, we somehow made it through the whole piece.
But there was something else on the dessert menu that screamed my name - the affogato. It featured their house-made vanilla gelato with double shot of espresso and a slice of biscotti on the side. But the clincher was that for a $3 upcharge, I could get a shot of Ramazzoti liqueur to dump on top. I've had affogato many times in the past, but none have been offered with a liqueur before. And it was dynamite. The espresso with the gelato was good enough, but the sweetness of the syrupy Ramazzoti liqueur made it even better.
Everything that I expected Wild Olive to be in a farm-to-fork/locally-sourced Italian restaurant more than exceeded my expectations. The food was exquisite, the atmosphere was calming and cozy, and the service was exceptional. We ended up lingering for a few moments to savor the meal we had just experienced and talked with Chris about some other restaurants in the area. We ate at some very good restaurants while we were in Charleston, but none of them were better than the meal we had at Wild Olive. (Photo courtesy Wild Olive Facebook page.)
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