Southern Dish is brought to you by these sponsors.

Atmos Energy, proud to support the flavors and the stories that make Mississippi a one-of-a- kind culinary destination.

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This program proudly brought to you by Mississippi's own Foundation Gaming and Entertainment, owner and operator of Fitz Casino Hotel in Tunica, and Waterview Casino Hotel in Vicksburg.

Foundation Gaming and Entertainment, Mississippians proudly supporting Mississippi.

In this episode of Southern Dish, we'll travel with former restaurant owner Lydia Chassaniol to two Mississippi restaurants that have a couple of things in common.

Both found a way to blend a mix of cultures into something that feels uniquely their own, and each are owned and operated by married couples.

Two kitchens, two stories, one Mississippi.

Southern Dish.

Hi, my name is Alex Perry, and I'm the co-owner and co-chef of Vestige Restaurant in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

So when we were looking to open our own spot, it just coincided with this place becoming available, and we thought, "Oh, my gosh, corner location in downtown Ocean Springs."

We just went in and this was actually an old home.

This is such a wonderful place.

I understand we have a strong Japanese influence with the food here.

My wife, co-chef, and co -owner is from Japan, and a lot of the Japanese influence that we have here comes through her and her teachings and just how she grew up eating.

You're trained as a chef.

Yes.

Is she?

No, all self-taught.

So she still had a very big input into your menu, into the dishes you prepare.

Yeah, and just a lot of introductions to flavors and techniques, because my training is classical French, and... classical Japanese, very different.

I have some intel that you are actually a musician.

Is this true?

Musician in training.

Well, recently it's just drums.

Recently?

About a couple years.

That's been a game changer in terms of just stress management, really.

So we're going to be doing a corn potage with poached Gulf shrimp and elderflower, and this is very indicative of the food that we do, in that we're using Southern ingredients, both wild and farm -raised, but we're cooking a classical Japanese dish, which is corn soup.

But we're doing it in a way that kind of marries both styles together.

It's kind of a two-step process.

All right.

So we're going to make essentially our base corn stock, and then once we do that, we're going to make our dashi stock out of the base corn stock.

And tell us about dashi stock.

Dashi is essentially the backbone of Japanese cuisine, and it is a combination of two things, kombu kelp and katsuobushi, which is skipjack tuna that has been steamed, boned, aged, fermented, aged, sun-dried, aged, aged, until essentially a tuna loin is ... hard as a brick.

Let's see how you can take a brick and turn it into stock for soup.

All right, so first one is corn stock.

So some bicolor corn out of Alabama.

And then we're going to reserve our cobs also for the stock, in half.

That goes in the stock.

Smart.

And in they go.

Waste not, want not.

Don't want to waste anyth- exactly.

Exactly.

I like the thriftiness of your kitchen.

Well, there's a lot of flavor left in there, and also there's a lot of corn starch in there.

Uh-huh.

So you got a natural thickener, right?

Exactly.

That's smart.

Exactly.

It's not your first rodeo, is it?

No, I like to cook.

Chef, tell me about this piece of equipment that you've used here.

So this is a PolyScience Control Freak.

It is an induction burner, and we love them because of very efficient heat transfer.

We can dial in the exact temperature that we need.

Very precise, very scientific.

Very precise.

Wonderful.

Wonderful.

Precise cooking, that's great.

Where do we go here?

We got to blend it up.

Now we've made our corn stock, and this is going to allow us to hold this particular liquid at the exact temperatures we need for maximum extraction of our two components of dashi the kombu kelp and the katsuobushi.

So we're going to be making our dashi corn stock.

I understand that you've been nominated for a James Beard Award.

Can you tell us about that?

How many times now?

I believe five.

For us, it was just kind of a wonderful, I mean validation's not the right word, but when we were switching to the tasting menus, and you're kind of worried, oh, are folks going to sort of buck at not being able to pick their dinner?

But it made sense for us, and then having that sort of reaffirm that this was the right path for us.

We had operated from 2013 to 2020, about seven years, in an à la carte format, and we felt creatively we'd kind of taken that as far as we could go.

We started doing a set tasting menu, no choices on the menu, no à la carte, nothing.

So again, it was one of those things where everything just sort of met at the apex, where it made financial sense and it made creative sense.

We're going to shave it on this katsuobushi shaver, and I'm going to hope to not lose any fingertips.

I hope not.

I know.

Well, maybe it'd make for better television if I do.

We'll find out.

All right.

And these are the katsuobushi shavings.

So we're going to bring everything over, and we're going to start our dashi infusion.

Okay.

All right.

So now we're going to add our seaweed, set our temps.

Oh, look at that.

And it stirs for us.

Isn't that nice?

I know.

Put this cap over there, and then we add our katsuobushi.

Huh.

And we'll let it infuse for about five minutes.

Okay.

So it just sits there and all gets happy and married.

And all gets good.

Okay.

So the next step is, again, we strain.

Once again.

This is through a finer mesh filter, about 300 microns, because we want to get every last little bit of corn debris.

Yeah, you want flavor, but nothing else.

That is correct.

All right.

Again, same as before.

Just gentle taps.

And chef, is this recipe of your own invention?

Yeah, a classical Japanese corn potage would look much more French.

Uh-huh.

Usually a lot of cream.

Mm-hmm.

Kind of very smooth and very thick.

And we're going to get there, but we're going to get there without a lot of cream.

So we spend as much, if not more time here than at home.

So we always want to make the restaurant feel like home, or at least certainly the kitchen.

So we just kind of magpie and collect the various things that we think are cool.

This is Gonk Winery.

One of their wines came in a box that just had crazy cool artwork.

So up it went.

Kumi is a avid mushroom lover, so the poster comes up.

Of course, End of All Music, any time we're in Jackson or Oxford, it's probably the first place we hit up.

I adore vinyl, and their metal section is fantastic.

Postcard from Elvie's.

First time we ate there.

Everybody kind of gets one, and we loved it, so up it went on the wall.

Kumi gets care packages from her family back in Japan, and there's always various cool little things here and there, and one of the last ones, they sent a bunch of DBZ postcards.

So definitely watched that in college, so up they went on the wall.

And then this is a daily reminder to Kumi that everybody wants a pimento cheese biscuit, specifically her pimento cheese biscuits.

But we'll take them wherever we can get them.

Do you find it interesting to be married to the person with whom you work?

It took about 12 years to get there.

Because in the beginning, there's so many stresses that you already have, trying to open a new restaurant and being first-time restaurant owners, and then compile that on, I mean, a relatively new marriage.

I mean, we'd been married a couple of years before then.

But you're still trying to get your sea legs and all that.

But just slowly but surely, you figure out what works.

These are your responsibilities.

These are my responsibilities.

You can have input, but at the end of the day, that final call is on you.

That final call is on you, and you just live with the other's decision because you know they have the best interest of the restaurant at heart.

So Kumi and I met in Mobile at a college party where I had made a birthday cake that I thought was going to go over extremely well, and people were going to tell me how great a baker I was, and then they savaged it completely, and I was very distraught.

But she came up and she said, "I heard you made the cake."

"I did."

"I love to eat."

"Fantastic.

I love to cook."

And that's where it began.

We are doing the final seasoning and thickening.

We have a sour amazake cream, so this is basically like crème fraîche.

But we've used soured amazake instead of buttermilk.

And now- ... we want to weigh our kuzu.

We're going to add a little bit.

You want it so we're creating a little slurry.

We'll go ahead and just chill it down.

So this is served cold?

Served chilled.

In Japan, you can have it both ways.

They actually like theirs in the winter served hot.

Yeah.

A little too hot for hot soup around these parts.

When we were thinking about the initial concept for the restaurant, we thought about what it is to dine and what the experience is.

We played a lot around with the vestige of something, right?

Because you're coming in here and you're not buying a car, you're not getting a TV.

You don't have any physical reminder of the experience, the purchase that you made.

So we wanted the food to be that.

We want it to create the memory of being here, sort of the vestiges of your time spent here.

So let's plate it up.

Oh, wonderful.

We get to taste it.

Y'all get to taste it.

Absolutely.

For starters, we've got some beautiful Gulf white shrimp that we've poached in a little bit of elderflower oil.

So we're just going to lay a couple of these out, cut them into- All right ... little bite-size pieces.

Little bite-size pieces.

Yeah.

And here we have little dumplings.

So you got kuzu dumplings.

Yep.

Then we'll get a little bit of finger lime in there for a bit of acidity.

And then here we've got our elderflower kombucha.

Right.

So again, we want a bit more acidity, a couple of little drops.

A little bit of smoked trout roe for a bit of texture, and a bit more smoke, because corn loves smoke.

Right.

There we go.

Oh, and that's beautiful, too.

Does this adapt to Southern tastes well?

We're still in business.

That's right.

That's a good sign.

So I think so.

That's a good sign.

All right.

And then we get about a two-ounce ladle.

And then we'll finish with our elderflower oil.

Okay.

Just kind of a little fun pattern.

And that's an infusion you make here, right?

Mm-hmm.

Yep, from wild elderflower early in the summer.

Beautiful.

And we're done.

May I taste it?

Absolutely.

It's quite delicious.

It's not exactly what I expected, but it's quite delicious.

I'm going to try this kuzu dumpling.

That's a first for me.

Well done, chef.

Thank you.

Thank you for letting me come into your kitchen this afternoon.

It's been a pleasure.

In the industry, it can be hard to maintain relationships with people outside the industry.

Because if somebody has a 9:00 to 5:00, you're not going to see them in the morning because you're probably asleep, and you're not going to see them at night because you're probably still at work.

So it is very nice that we have the same schedule.

We get to see each other, we get to communicate every day.

It's fun.

Nearly 300 miles away, this recently opened restaurant is mixing its cultural diversity with its highly acclaimed Italian dish.

Leña in Cleveland opened its doors to the Mississippi Delta in 2023.

Since then, it's won many national and international awards, including being recognized as one of the best pizza places in the world.

My name is Marisol Doyle.

I'm co-owner and operator of Leña Pizza and Bagels in Cleveland, Mississippi.

I was looking at the placemat.

Mm-hmm.

And it said that you started out with bagels.

So the bagels came before the pizza, right?

Yeah, so I worked in the restaurant business for, it feels, forever.

So I was done with the restaurant business, and I said never again.

And a friend of mine suggested, "Oh, we should do something at the farmers market It's going to be fun."

So we decided to play around and come up with a bagel recipe.

And we kept going back every summer.

We would do the farmers market, and people loved them.

After we perfected our recipe, and we would sell out.

Well, how did you get to Cleveland, Mississippi, anyway?

I'm sort of intrigued by that.

It was because of my husband, Rory.

We were in Arizona at the time.

I have family there.

He got into a graduate assistantship at Delta State in 2009, and we packed up our two-door Ford CX2 with all of our belongings, and we just took a road trip to Cleveland, and we've been here ever since.

Professionally, full -time, I'm actually a freelance photographer.

Mostly I work in editorial, newspaper, magazine assignments, sometimes personal work.

I guess one way I'm able to contribute to Leña is to photograph all the beautiful food that Marisol and her team make, and we're also very lucky that we never have to hire a photographer to photograph the website or social media.

So our partnership works pretty well.

We didn't know anything about Cleveland or Mississippi, because we had only ever passed through on a road trip.

And so what we quickly learned was that the community here is great, and that's the reason we've stayed.

Since 2009, it's been home.

And then, of course, in the last two and a half years, the community has been everything to us with Leña, and so we really feel like our roots are established here.

It's just been great for us, and we grew here professionally and personally and as a couple.

We bought our first home here, so it's hard for me to imagine Leña somewhere else.

Here in Cleveland, we just didn't think that bagels alone would be feasible, so it was actually my husband's idea because he loves pizza.

He was like, "Well, maybe we should try it out."

We went all in and invested in ourselves and went to Naples, Italy.

So you both went to Naples?

Yes, we both.

I said, "Can you please do the course with me?"

I was a little shy, a little nervous.

So we did the course together.

He's been my biggest supporter and cheerleader, and he did it with me.

My background growing up with pizza was less than exceptional, I guess you could say, for someone who co-owns a pizza place.

But I grew up eating a lot of frozen pizza.

I wouldn't even eat it.

But a lot of times, I would just pop one out of the freezer and eat a whole frozen pizza by myself.

I've always loved pizza.

And so when I saw how well Marisol worked with the bagel dough, we started to brainstorm, could pizza be a possibility?

And again, she just picked it up and, of course, I'm kind of ashamed of the pizza that I ate growing up compared to what we put together now, and it's really special.

So tell me about Leña, the name of the place.

Leña means firewood in Spanish.

Oh.

We picked that name because, first of all, we learned how to cook on a brick oven.

We use fire to cook our pizzas, and we wanted to bring that tradition to here, to Cleveland.

And this is how it's done in Naples, Italy, right?

Yes, that's how I studied it.

And how hot is it in that oven?

I'm not going to stick my hand in it.

Right now, you should cook your pizzas 800 degrees.

Right now, we're about- ... 780, 770.

So it's almost ready for a pizza to go in there.

So, yes.

Yes.

And once you put the pizza in, how long does it take it to cook?

Very quick.

Oh.

It's 90 seconds.

Wow.

Like I've always wanted to make a 90-second pizza.

We're going to make a Margherita, traditional Margherita, and we're also going to make steak fajitas.

So once a month, I make a Mexican-inspired pizza and for this week, it's steak fajita.

So we have our dough right here ready.

So all of our flour are from Italy.

We use Caputo, which has been in Italy, I think they just celebrated 100 years.

So it's a very known flour.

And the one we use is a double zero, which is specially for this high temperature.

So I'll go ahead and stretch the other dough for the special.

And the steak fajita.

Yes.

That sounds like a very interesting pizza.

I don't think I've ever had one of those.

What inspired you to do that?

Well, just we wanted to do some flavors of the things that I grew up.

And we actually did a chicken fajita, and it sold really well, and I haven't done steak.

And we just got back from a trip in Mexico, went to visit family, and I'm from the state of Sonora, and steak is king there.

Like carne asada tacos, steak tacos, are in every stand.

So, yeah, I wanted to do something fun.

We do a chipotle sauce with cilantro, and it's like with the- So those are two different types of sauces.

Yes.

Which one, that's going to be the steak fajita?

So this will be the steak right here, the one that is darker.

This one right here, the red one, is going to be the Margherita.

So I'm going to add the basil.

I add the basil first, so I can put the cheese on top.

But the Margherita is a traditional Italian pizza, correct?

Yeah, Margherita, they say that every time you go to Naples, Italy, and if you try different pizzerias, you have to try a Margherita.

And that's Parmesan cheese that's probably on there.

Yes, Parmesan.

Olive oil.

Oh, boy.

This is very simple for a Margherita.

Yeah, Margherita.

This is very simple pizza.

More tomatoes.

You've already cooked the steak.

Pre-cooked.

I've already somewhat cooked it, not too much.

You sliced it thin.

Yeah, and I marinate it overnight with some- Ooh, what do you marinate it in?

Or is that a secret?

It's not a secret.

I just added lemon juice, some cumin, some paprika, garlic, onions.

Yeah, those... Are those peppers that you've just put on?

Yeah, I added bell pepper, onion, and that- Have they been sauteed down a little bit?

Yes.

Yes.

And then did you put them in any sort of pickling compound or anything, or just- No, just as fresh.

Yeah.

The sauce adds a lot of flavor to it.

Okay.

So a little flour goes on your... That's right, a little bit so it won't... So this style of pizza, you cannot really keep it for too long on the bench or it will stick to it.

So now- So speed is essential.

Yes.

Okay.

Here goes the Margherita.

So Marisol, what is this that says 50 Top Pizza USA?

They make a list about pizzerias all over the world.

They gave us a place.

We're number 38 in the United States.

You mean out of all the pizza places in New York, in Chicago, Leña's in Cleveland, Mississippi is a top 50?

That is fabulous.

Yeah, it's a- Now, did you get an award for having him come out here- Mm-mm ... or is that something you can't talk about?

That's something that we cannot talk about.

Oh.

[laughing] Since the stone is a little hot, we're just cooking it on the top.

You can actually pick it up.

It's sort of browned a bit on the top- Uh-huh ... if you need to, like a broiler.

And that's Margarita Does one of those pizzas generally feed two people or one very hungry person?

My husband, Rory, can eat a full pizza.

Yeah.

Well, look who showed up now that the pizzas are ready to eat.

Good timing.

Well, I know what time it is.

It's time to taste test.

Right.

May we?

Show us properly how to do this.

So in Naples, you eat the pizza with a fork and a knife- Yes ... because it's a very delicate dough.

Right.

And the ingredients might fall off.

You can have a fork and a knife, or you can grab the pizza, fold it- Yeah ... and then bring the side in, and just kind of like a little taco.

Take a piece like that.

Mm-hmm.

Is it extremely hot, having been in an 800-degree oven?

It's perfect.

Perfect.

Okay.

I might be polite and use a fork and a knife.

That's delicious.

Very, very good.

Now, what about this one?

Beautiful peppers on it, some steak.

Be able to taste the difference in the sauce.

Yes.

This sauce is a little more complex.

But it's very good.

Excellent.

Excellent.

This has just been great.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Delighted to be here tasting this.

You can see why this has been written about so glowingly.

In the beginning, I think it was all work.

We would bring work home.

But as it kept getting busier and I was more tired, we decided at home not to talk shop and just keep it here in the restaurant.

And we don't come here on Sundays anymore.

Yeah, I think the key to our success is that we support each other.

We understand that we both have different schedules, but we also support each other any way we can and have each other's back.

It's been a recipe for success for us, and I'm grateful that we have each other to share these careers.

Mm-hmm.

In this episode of "Southern Dish," we explored how Southern cuisine is made up of a variety of cultures from all over the globe.

From Michelin-acclaimed restaurants to internationally recognized chefs, it's easy to see how Mississippi is home to some of the best food in the world.

Our food tells us about who we are, where we came from, and where we're going.

Because here in the South, every dish tells a story.

"Southern Dish" is brought to you by these sponsors.

Atmos Energy, proud to support the flavors and the stories that make Mississippi a one-of-a- kind culinary destination.

Mississippi Beverage Association.

This program proudly brought to you by Mississippi's own Foundation Gaming and Entertainment, owner and operator of Fitz Casino Hotel in Tunica and Waterview Casino Hotel in Vicksburg.

Foundation Gaming and Entertainment, Mississippians proudly supporting Mississippi.