The starting point was a defeat. The inspiration was a bad day fishing the waters of Perdido Pass, and the mission was to “tell a story on the plate.” The central ingredients were a “trash” fish and a tideline critter widely considered bait, not food. The competition itself was an hour of high-pressure haute cuisine intensity, using gear inspired by high school kids.

As they stepped back from the finished plates and the final seconds ticked off, Chef Brody Olive of Orange Beach and his right-hand man, Chef Luis Silvestre, exchanged a high-five and a hug. And a short while later, Olive was crowned the winner of the Great American Seafood Cook-Off, becoming only the second Alabama winner since the competition started in 2005.

That’s big news for Olive personally, and for the high-end Voyagers restaurant at Perdido Beach Resort, where he works as executive chef. But Jim Smith, who became the first Alabama winner in 2011, said it’s a much bigger deal than that.

“It is definitely a big win for the state of Alabama,” said Smith, who should know: The former winner, who operates The Hummingbird Way in Mobile, has served as the executive chef for the state. He’s also the chairman of the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission. After winning GASCO and being crowned the King of American Seafood in 2011, he “became the national spokesperson for Alabama Seafood, American Sustainable Seafood, Gulf Seafood and the NOAA,” according to GASCO, and “as the winner he traveled the country educating the Americans about the benefits of sustainable seafood.” Few know better than Smith how much this does to elevate a chef’s profile. (Smith also was on the judging panel for this year’s cook-off, so he had a front-row seat to Olive’s win.)

“I mean, Chef Brody will become a national spokesperson for all things American sustainable seafood, and in turn it brings a real big highlight to Alabama seafood, which is, you know, always beneficial for the state,” said Smith. “I mean, it really is a huge win, and Brody is a really good representative for the state when it comes to seafood. I mean, he’s on the coast, he loves to be on the water. He knows about anything that you might pull out of the Gulf. And that’s really what makes him a great representative for us.”

BAD DAY, GOOD STORY

It took him a while to get there. Born in the Birmingham area, Olive grew up in Georgia and took his first steps in the business there. After some time at Johnson and Wales University in Charleston, S.C., he returned to Birmingham to take the first serious steps in his culinary career, becoming sous chef at Ocean Restaurant under Chef George Reis. Chance opportunity and a desire for coastal living brought him and his wife Nicole to Orange Beach in 2007. He worked at several venues in the area, including Villaggio Grille, Zen Restaurant and The Beach Club before he landed in 2016 at Perdido Beach Resort, where he oversees the food for Voyagers and several other venues, and Nicole oversees front-of-house operations.

2023 was his fourth time to enter the Alabama Seafood Cook-Off and the second to win it. The first time he won was in 2017. It was a learning experience.

“I’ve chased this for a while,” he said. “I had a lot of takeaways from it, from our 2017 run. We had a very clever dish and I enjoyed preparing it. But I walked away knowing I could tell a better story on the plate with Alabama seafood and focusing on what I love to do, and that’s fish. It’s kind of my decompression time.”

He admired the way the winner, from Alaska, had told a story unique to that state, he said.

“I believe, walking out of there, already in my head I was turning over how I could incorporate something to do with our jetties, something to do with a bad day of fishing, because I have way more bad days of fishing than I do good days,” Olive said.

Rules for the state-level competition required him to lay out a few years after his 2017 win, Olive said. Then came the major disruptions of the pandemic and the crawl back to normalcy. Finally in 2022 he decided it was time to take another run at the title. He and Silvestre, his chef de cuisine at the resort, began kicking ideas around. The idea of presenting a portion of fish with exposed rib, as is sometimes done with pork and other meats, started with Silvestre, he said. Initially they were thinking maybe they’d use pompano. But then, Olive said, he decided “you know what, let’s just get crazy with it.”

Olive often fishes the rocky jetties lining Perdido Pass, just to the east of Perdido Beach Resort. It takes a little effort to get out there to the sweet spot.

“It’s kind of ninja warrior fishing,” he said. “You’ve got a couple of rods, a bucket if you’ve got a bait bucket full of shrimp with you, whatever you’re toting out there. It’s a little over 700 yards of rock. Probably 50 to 75 yards of it, you must be on the rocks to get to the honey hole, the sweet spot, the end of the rocks where the real turbulent water is. As the story goes, you get out there and sit for two hours and put all this effort in and you don’t catch anything but a three-pound gafftopsail catfish. You look at that fish a bit differently. It starts to look like a big old slab of Gulf grouper, versus a three-pound, slimy, whiskery, shiny-blue-skinned catfish. So there’s a decision to be made, right?”

Olive thinks that because he didn’t grow up in the area, he’s willing to try fish that get a bad rap – and he thinks the humble gafftopsail catfish deserves a little more credit than it sometimes gets. He’s caught enough of them on artificial lures to know they’re not just bottom-feeders. “It’s a nice-textured, white, flaky fish,” he said.

The elements started coming together. The fish would be smoked over scrub oak, plentiful in Olive’s own yard. A Gulf shrimp horseradish cream would represent the leftover bait shrimp. To add a note of tartness he settled on pickled purslane, a leafy green coastal succulent that could be found in local foraging. A smoked wafer of paprika tuile, its lacy texture reminiscent of coral, added color and savor.

But he still wanted a little more crunch in the profile. And that took him back to the jetty and another commonplace bait item: Mole crabs, little thumb-sized crustaceans that thrive right at the water’s edge. Locally they’re known as sand fleas, a name that doesn’t exactly make the mouth water. Another nickname, “pompano candy,” sounds a little better, but that’s just a reference to their use as bait.

Eating them is relatively uncommon in the United States, though there are plenty of recipes online for the daring. “There’s a ton of different Caribbean and other cultures out there, where that’s a part of their diet,” said Olive. After some experimentation, he said, he came to the conclusion that a flash-fried mole crab can be “kind of like a little buttered popcorn-y type of soft-shell crab bite.”

In photos the dish looks like a large appetizer or a small entrée. That’s by design. Olive said he put a whole meal on the plate in 2017 and came away thinking it’s better to give judges one or two bites that are going to explode on their taste buds. He and Silvestre were ready to serve those bites.

PRESSURE COOKER

In late May, the four finalists were announced for the Alabama Seafood Cook-Off, and Olive was among them. That alone was a solid accomplishment: At the time, Smith said that the state competition had received the highest number of entries in its history.

As the June 12 approached, the date set for the finalists to face off at Zeke’s Restaurant in Orange Beach, Olive had a small problem: “I think I fished before work and after work for almost two weeks, and I didn’t catch a damn sail cat. They’re never there when you need them.”

Luckily, help was close at hand in the form of the annual Flora-Bama Fishing Rodeo, set for June 9-11. Olive reached out to Blakeley Ellis, executive director of the Coastal Conservation Association of Alabama, and Angelo DePaola, president of the rodeo. “They collected me a cooler full of gafftopsail cats,” Olive said. “So a big high-five to those guys. We got them Saturday, we practiced Sunday, we competed on Monday.”

Olive said he and Silvestre, a native of Spain, have a chemistry that kicks in when they’re exploring new territory under pressure. “Our brains kind of synch pretty well,” he said. “When we’re cooking something, we both look up at the same time. Those thoughts are probably about 80% the same. It was really fun seeing the dish come together, with the majority of the products being things you could forage from the parking lot for the pass to the end of the pass.”

Their win at the state competition sent them to New Orleans for the Aug. 5 national finale, where the pressure ratcheted up hugely. Now they’d have an hour to do battle with 11 other competitors, before a lively, and much larger, audience than before.

“We knew the talent was just going to be the best in the U.S.,” he said. “They had to be governor-appointed or win their state competition. So we knew there were going to be some really unique dishes and we did see some amazing stuff.”

Olive says he’s notorious for drawing the opening spot in competitions, and he thinks it’s the toughest spot because when judges sample the first entry of the day, they have no basis for comparison. But in Orange Beach he’d drawn the closing spot. That’s also tough, because you know you have to wow somebody who possibly has been wowed more than once already. But last is better than first, he thinks, and in New Orleans he drew the final spot again. That meant a long wait, trying not to handicap the odds as other competitors took the stage, trying not to lose focus on their own game. He and Silvestre stayed away from their cooking station until it was time to cook.

“We knew nobody was going to show up with sand fleas. We knew nobody was going to show up with a bait bucket full of Gulf shrimp. And we were pretty confident no one was going to have a fish presentation that would filet their fish in the same presentation that we did,” said Olive. “So I knew that we had three wow factors.”

They had another wow factor that almost backfired. Olive had to smoke his fish on-site and for that he used a small portable smoker box he’d seen young chefs use in ProStart cooking competitions put on by the National Restaurant Association Education Foundation.

“I learned these portable ovens from judging ProStart high school competitions. Throughout the years these kids would show up with these little ovens to complete their dish and I just thought they were genius,” he said. “I reached out to the director of ProStart for the state, ‘Hey, where do you find these things at? I’ve got a competition and these kids have inspired me to seek this piece of equipment.’”

He said the novelty of it impressed some of the other competitors, which was good, but he realized he’d managed to forget the racks that went inside the smoker. He had to improvise, which left him worried his fish portions would be exposed to too much direct heat, drying them out and toughening them.

“Luis said to me, ‘What’s cooking without adversity, chef?’,” he said. They pushed on.

At the state competition, they’d gone right down to the wire and hadn’t quite nailed their presentation, even if they were the only ones who knew it. In New Orleans, they gave themselves eight minutes to put everything together on the plate. That was enough time to create fresh worries, like whether they could keep the plate itself at the right temperature. But it also gave Silvestre a little time to work with the fish, and he was convinced it was fine. “Luis has got a hell of a palate,” said Olive.

As the final seconds counted off, he and Silvestre did the same thing they did at the start: A high-five and a hug. There’s a point to that, he said. “Finish like you started is our motto,” he said. That’s the mindset they instill in the kitchen team at Voyagers, he said: “The last plate is like the first, no matter how busy the service is.”

Plates served it was time for Olive to shift gears, stand up in front of the crowd and tell the story of Perdido Pass, and of a bad day fishing on its jetties. Then came the wait before finally the third-place finisher was named, then the second. And then Olive’s name was called.

“I think my wife probably shattered some people’s eardrums,” he said. “She knew how important this competition was to me, how important our state is and our resources, just how we support and showcase our sustainability and our farmers and our fishermen on our daily practices at home. It’s what drives our practices.”

‘LET’S GO PUSH OURSELVES’

Smith said Olive’s “wow factors” added up to a clear consensus winner.

“From the judge’s table, Brody’s dish really was heads and tails above the rest,” said Smith. “There were a lot of great chefs and it was a tough decision to be made, but the way the scoring broke down, like, all of the judges had Brody far in the lead. I do think that’s an indication of the quality and creative creativity exhibited in his dish.”

“I think that people are starting to wake up to the idea that there are plenty of species of fish and shellfish that are in our waters that we just choose not to eat, not necessarily that they’re not good, but it’s really just sort of more of a choice,” said Smith. “Brody just really does a good job of highlighting a secondary species.”

The commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources seconded that.

“Having the national seafood title return to Alabama is something we are immensely proud of, and we are thrilled for Chef Olive and his team for their innovative approach to this dish,” said Chris Blankenship. “The fact that he integrated what are otherwise underrepresented Gulf species is even more impressive. We hope this win encourages others to think differently about what is not only consumable — but also enjoyable — moving forward.”

Despite the win, you won’t be seeing the gafftopsail catfish/sand flea pairing on the menu at Voyagers anytime soon. Olive said there are enough challenges to make it impractical for restaurant service.

However, he added, the exercise wasn’t in vain. Coming up with the winning dish, and executing it, meant that he and Silvestre had to challenge themselves to try new techniques, push into new territory. Some of their discoveries may well carry over into what they do at Perdido Beach Resort.

“We can do a variation,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to do the mole crabs. We won’t be doing gafftopsail catfish.”

In general, the Great American Seafood Cook-Off win should pay off in the effort to keep things fresh at Perdido Beach Resort and to capitalize on the freedom the job offers.

The resort is not a small property, and overseeing its multiple food-and-beverage outlets is not a simple task. But Olive said that because it’s privately owned, there’s still a bit of a mom-and-pop feel to his job. If he wants to try something different, it’s a direct conversation rather than a voyage through layers of corporate approval.

“The support I have here is just amazing, as far as what do we want to do, and supporting visions and supporting thoughts and ideas, and being able to try stuff,” he said.

“We get to play a lot in different outlets, from counter-service pizza to really nice dining experience at Voyagers,” he said. “We have a good time here. We’re goofballs. There’s a flurry of dad jokes that happen every day in that kitchen.”

For Voyagers in particular, with its steaks-and-seafood menu, he said he tries to create an environment where patrons feel like they can escape the rush of daily life.

“Our waitstaff is a true professional staff,” he said. “They will take you on a curated ride of cuisine and viniculture, if you like. They’re masters of working people through the menu. They’re storytellers, not only of what myself and the kitchen are doing, but of the farmers and fishermen that we utilize.”

If you want to keep telling a compelling story, you’ve got to be able to come up with a new chapter every now and then.

“Competition has been more internalized and more of a personal drive. At the end of the day it’s what’s going to challenge myself to be a better chef, to make me a better thinker about food and ingredients and community,” he said. “Let’s go push ourselves first. If we push ourselves and we feel 100% confident in our dish, the results will show.”