BAYOU LA BATRE, Alabama – Bayou La Batre will host the fourth annual Alabama Seafood Cook-Off on Wednesday, June 13, at the Bayou La Batre Community Center, giving the winning chef a shot at representing the state on a national stage. The competition brings the state’s premier seafood cooking contest to the working waterfront community widely regarded as the heart of Alabama’s seafood industry, and it gives the state’s restaurant talent a platform in front of the fishermen, processors and families who supply it.
The winner will go on to compete at the 15th annual Great American Seafood Cook-Off in New Orleans as well as the 2018 World Food Championships in Orange Beach. Those back-to-back opportunities make the state contest more than a local honor: the Great American Seafood Cook-Off draws chefs representing states across the country, and the World Food Championships rank among the largest competitive cooking events in the world, giving Alabama’s champion two national stages on which to carry the state’s culinary flag.
This year’s field includes four chefs, three of whom are competing for the first time: Chef Jeremy Downey of Bistro V in Birmingham, Chef Jeremiah Matthews of Southwood Kitchen in Daphne and Chef Scott Simpson of the Depot in Auburn. The fourth competitor, Chef Jason Ramirez of Villaggio Grille in Orange Beach, returns after finishing as runner-up in last year’s competition. The lineup spreads the competition across the state – from Birmingham’s dining scene to the Gulf Coast’s beachside restaurants – and gives the returning Ramirez the experience edge as he chases the title that slipped away a year ago.
Chris Blankenship, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and program administrator of the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission, said the contest has become an annual showcase for the state’s seafood industry. “This year’s contest will prove to be another annual highlight for Alabama’s thriving seafood culture,” Blankenship said. “We congratulate all of the finalists and wish them the best as they work to perfect their recipes for next month’s event.”
Blankenship holds a dual role that connects the contest directly to the industry it celebrates. As conservation commissioner he oversees the state agency that manages Alabama’s marine resources, and as the marketing commission’s administrator he leads the state’s efforts to promote Alabama seafood to consumers and restaurants. The cook-off sits at the intersection of those missions: it turns the state’s catch into a culinary competition that builds demand for the product the fleets of Bayou La Batre and the other Gulf ports deliver.
Taste of the Bayou runs alongside the competition
While chefs compete inside the community center, Bayou La Batre’s own Taste of the Bayou event will run in conjunction outside, giving residents and visitors the chance to sample fresh, local seafood for $10 per ticket. The pairing puts Lower Alabama’s self-described seafood capital on full display for a single afternoon, blending professional competition with a community food festival.
The two-in-one format is deliberate. Competitive cook-offs draw media attention and visiting food enthusiasts, but community festivals draw the local crowds that sustain the event from year to year, and Taste of the Bayou gives the competition a festival atmosphere that celebrates the town as much as the chefs. For $10, attendees can taste their way through local seafood while watching the state’s best kitchen talent compete a few feet away, an arrangement that few venues outside a working seafood town could offer.
Bayou La Batre’s claim to the event is rooted in its economy. The city’s fleet and processing houses have made it synonymous with Alabama’s commercial seafood industry for generations, supplying oysters, shrimp, crab and finfish to markets across the region, and the community’s identity remains tied to the water even as the industry has weathered hurricanes, oil spills and import competition. Hosting the state cook-off in Bayou La Batre puts the chefs’ ingredients a short drive from where they were landed.
A Mobile chef heads to Atlanta’s wing showdown
Mobile’s food scene will also be represented outside the state this summer. The Southern Wing Showdown, set for Sunday, Aug. 5, in Atlanta, will include Southern National chef Duane Nutter among roughly 30 top chefs from across the Southeast competing for the title. The event routinely sells out, and organizers are encouraging fans hoping to attend to secure tickets early.
Nutter has built a national reputation that extends well beyond the Gulf Coast, known for a cooking style that blends Southern tradition with inventive technique, and his presence in an Atlanta competition field underscores how far Mobile’s culinary profile now reaches. Wing competitions occupy a niche of their own in the food-event world – part serious cookery, part festival – and the Southeast’s version has grown into a sellout attraction that gives participating chefs exposure to thousands of food-mad attendees in one of the region’s biggest restaurant markets.
For Mobile diners, the appearance is also a reminder of the caliber of cooking available at home. Southern National has made the Port City a destination restaurant in its own right, and a Mobile chef holding his own against the Southeast’s best in Atlanta is the kind of visibility that local food scenes work years to earn.
Tickets remain for a James Beard-winning chef’s dinner
Food lovers looking for one more event before summer are running out of time to catch a dinner featuring James Beard Award-winning chef Hank Shaw. Great Days Outdoors and The Noble South restaurant are hosting the dinner on Thursday, May 31, where guests will meet Shaw, sample hors d’oeuvres drawn from recipes in his latest cookbook, “Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail,” and receive a signed copy of the book. Tickets are $75 per person and can be purchased at www.thenoblesouthrestaurant.com/hank-shaw/.
Shaw is among the most distinctive voices in American food writing, having built his reputation on hunting, fishing and cooking wild foods, and his James Beard Award marks him as one of the few writers in that niche to win the industry’s highest honors. “Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail” extends his field-to-table approach to small game and upland birds, a subject rarely covered in mainstream cookbooks, and the dinner format – hors d’oeuvres drawn from the book’s recipes alongside the author himself – gives guests a direct taste of the philosophy behind it.
The pairing of Great Days Outdoors, an outdoors-focused media brand, with The Noble South, a restaurant built on Southern ingredients and Gulf Coast sourcing, is a natural fit for the subject matter. Wild-game dinners occupy a small but devoted corner of the Southern food calendar, and events that combine a nationally known author, a respected local kitchen and a signed book to take home tend to draw serious food enthusiasts from well beyond the host city.
Alabama’s seafood culture on display
Together, the three events sketch the breadth of the state’s food calendar as summer arrives: a state championship cook-off in the seafood capital, a Mobile chef on a regional stage in Atlanta, and a James Beard honoree bringing wild-game cooking to a downtown Mobile dining room. Each draws a different audience, but all of them trade on the same asset – Alabama’s rich supply of seafood, game and farm produce, and the chefs who have learned to cook it well.
For the seafood industry, the cook-off’s timing is no accident. June sits in the heart of the Gulf’s fishing season, when local shrimp, crab and oysters are at their most abundant, and the contest gives the industry’s marketing arm a ready-made showcase at peak supply. The recipes the four finalists develop for the competition often travel beyond the event itself, appearing on restaurant menus and in state seafood promotions long after the winner is crowned.
The competition format also serves the chefs. A state title, a trip to New Orleans for the Great American Seafood Cook-Off and a spot in the World Food Championships in Orange Beach offer career-building exposure that few regional contests can match, which is why the field has drawn chefs from Birmingham, Daphne, Auburn and the coast. For Ramirez, the returning runner-up, the June 13 contest is a second chance at the same prize – and for the three newcomers, a first shot at putting an Alabama seafood title on their résumés.
Whatever the judges decide inside the Bayou La Batre Community Center, the afternoon outside belongs to the community that hosts it. Between the $10 tastes of local seafood at Taste of the Bayou, the working fleet just down the road and the state’s best chefs competing for the right to represent Alabama nationally, the fourth annual Alabama Seafood Cook-Off promises to be what Blankenship described – another annual highlight for a seafood culture that the state is proud to celebrate, right where that culture lives.