Raleigh chef following up first James Beard nomination with new Wilmington restaurant
For five years, Raleigh chef Sunny Gerhart has celebrated the North Carolina coast in the middle of downtown Raleigh, shucking local oysters and serving up shrimp and Calabash-style seafood alongside New Orleans classics.
Now, Gerhart is looking to the coast for his second restaurant, opening in downtown Wilmington in early 2023.
Olivero, named for Gerhart’s great-grandfather, will focus on Spanish and Italian dishes through a New Orleans lens.
The restaurant will be built in a 2,400-square-foot brick building on the edge of downtown Wilmington, at the corner of South Third and Castle streets, three cobblestoned blocks from the Cape Fear River.
“The interesting thing about the pandemic is you had a lot of time to think about things,” Gerhart said. “There was time for pipe dreams and soul searching.”
A James Beard semifinalist
Gerhart was the opening sous chef at Ashley Christensen’s Poole’s Diner in 2007. He opened St. Roch in 2017 in the former Joule space on Wilmington Street.
This year, Gerhart was named a semifinalist for the James Beard award for Best Chef: Southeast, his first time being nominated for the prestigious food award.
Gerhart lived in Wilmington during high school while his father was in the Marines at Camp Lejeune. He said the city and its nearby waterways always called to him, but the timing never seemed right. Then, he heard that James Goodnight, son of SAS co-founder Jim Goodnight, was looking for a restaurant concept for a downtown Wilmington building.
“It something I always wanted to do and never had the opportunity until now,” Gerhart said.
Gerhart hasn’t had many days off in the last couple of years. There were stretches in the pandemic where he was both chef and delivery driver at St. Roch, and later stretches where he had to put the restaurant back together after a fire.
When he did have a moment it sometimes meant a weekend away at the beaches near WIlmington, days on the water or visiting friends and surfing.
“Opening a restaurant down there seemed like wishful thinking,” Gerhart said. “I love St. Roch, but there are other things I want to do. It’s a beautiful city, I’ve always wanted to get back to Wilmington.”
But don’t worry about reservations for a while. Olivero is a ways out, Gerhart said, expecting the restaurant to open in early 2023.
St. Roch takes its name from a neighborhood in New Orleans where Gerhart’s family is from.
Olivero tells a different part of that family story, named for Gerhart’s great-grandfather, a Spanish sailor from Seville who married into a family from Sicily. The restaurant will weave the Spanish and Italian influences on New Orleans through a menu reflecting the North Carolina coast.
“To me it’s an extension of St. Roch,” Gerhart said. “It lets me explore a little more of the family history through a New Orleans lens.”
‘Cooking as a craft’
The menu is just a rough draft for now, so Gerhart declined to dive into specifics, but look for North Carolina seafood and handmade pastas to be the stars. There will be about a half dozen different fresh pastas each night, plus grilled meats and seasonal vegetables on a small wood-burning grill.
“I look at cooking as a craft,” Gerhart said. “Something that takes a really long time to develop, that’s repetitive. I love making pasta, your hands are in it, building a dough, working on a craft. Your hands are in the flour, you’ve got flour on your apron, you’re rolling out a dough. That’s a big part of what I love about cooking.”
St. Roch already showcases Gerhart’s talent for pasta, with mainstay dishes like shrimp and bucatini and the famous gator bolognese. But those dishes aren’t likely to make the trip to Wilmington, Gerhart said, instead allowing Olivero to find its own voice.
“I don’t think I do anything in the traditional sense,” Gerhart said. “Pasta, for me, is a big part of that.”
This story was originally published April 4, 2022 at 10:26 AM.
