Louis Osteen

Chef Louis Osteen has been a part of the southern food renaissance from the beginning, helping to elevate the country cooking of coastal Carolina into haute cuisine. You could even credit him with establishing Lowcountry cooking as a tourist draw in Charleston, SC. Indeed Osteen was the first to introduce Lowcountry cooking to restaurant diners.  As southern food historian and cookbook author Damon Fowler noted, “Classical Southern food was founded on English cooking, enriched and nourished by new native ingredients, and transformed in the hands of African cooks.”

Osteen was the original in Charleston. He started just north of Charleston in Pawleys Island in 1980 and then in 1989 relocated to Louis’s Charleston Grill at the Omni Hotel.  There he became well known for cooking the cuisine of his childhood, discovering the traditions of the Lowcountry, and proving to naysayers and Yankees alike that southern cooking isn’t about mushy overcooked vegetables and fatback. It’s about local ingredients and ancient traditions. Nationally, he was credited with securing Lowcountry and Southern cooking a stronghold in the regional American culinary movement that began in the 1970’s and thrived in the 80’s. Esquire magazine identified Osteen as “the premier interpreter of New Southern Cuisine”.

Osteen’s creative, intelligent, and respectful regional southern cuisine has put him in the pantheon of southern chefs, earning him (among other honors) a James Beard Best Chef Southeast in 2004. His menus are elegant and creative with dishes like braised lamb shank, Blue Ridge rainbow trout, chicken-fried duck breast, and a scrumptious interpretation of shrimp and grits, where the grits are formed into a timbale and served with Lowcountry shrimp gravy.

Osteen took regional favorites to new heights and put them in print in his cookbook:  Louis Osteen’s Charleston Cuisine.  In appearances on the TV Food Network, and Discovery Channel Osteen comes across as Southern gentleman with a wonderful sense of humor, the epitome of Southern hospitality. You can meet the unpretentious and genial Osteen and taste his exquisite regional interpretations at his Pawleys Island restaurant, Louis’s at Sanford’s.