Here’s what it’s like to dine at the James Beard-award nominated Vestige in Ocean Springs

One reason I enjoy visiting Ocean Springs down the Mississippi Gulf Coast is for a transporting sense of contrast.

You feel it after driving in through the valley of casinos in neighboring Biloxi, crossing the gentle swoop of the bay bridge and then arriving in this enclave of Deep South small-town Americana.

Maybe you see it in a beach vista striped by sand, sea and sky along the barrier island horizon, and you might feel it in the interpretations of this environment at the museum dedicated to the town’s famous artist, Walter Anderson .

These days there’s also the contrast of a community with quiet, small town contours under a lacing canopy of live oaks that now also has an increasingly bumping and boisterous night life.

But on a trip in July, the overarching feeling I found in Ocean Springs was one of harmony and revelation, thanks to an extraordinary restaurant that is now deservedly getting more attention.

Vestige is a high-aiming tasting menu restaurant that combines the ethos of local, seasonal ingredients with elements and aesthetics of Japanese cuisine.

It’s a personal expression created by a husband and wife: Alex Perry, who grew up in Ocean Springs, and Kumi Omori, who is from Japan.

A tasting menu is a take-it-or-leave-it trust fall of a proposition. It’s also one increasingly adopted by ambitious chefs to orchestrate a more refined experience, now including at smaller restaurants .

At Vestige, it yields a destination restaurant for Gulf Coast people who normally travel to New Orleans for meals of this caliber, and a restaurant for New Orleans people to build a weekend trip around. That’s exactly what I did.

Small town, big accolades

Omori and Perry opened Vestige in 2013 as a more conventional upscale restaurant. It evolved gradually and emerged from the pandemic with its new tasting menu format, and the chefs’ now-or-never resolve to see where they could take their restaurant. That has been drawing high-profile attention.

In 2024, the restaurant was a finalist for the James Beard award for Outstanding Restaurant , a national honor and highly coveted in the restaurant business (earlier, Perry and Omori were also nominees for the regional James Beard award for Best Chef: South).

Vestige has been on my own bucket list for too long, and so it inspired a quick overnighter to Ocean Springs from my New Orleans home on a hot July weekend when a road trip beckoned.

How it works, what it’s like

Tiny is a word that comes up often when describing Ocean Springs, a densely settled town of fewer than 20,000 residents. But even in this setting Vestige indeed feels tiny. It’s a cottage in the center of downtown with a single dining room for nine tables.

The five-course menu is the only option, and it’s $99. If you really do it up with cocktails ($9-$18) and the wine pairing ($60) the final bill can just about double, but it remains below the top-dollar rates of the closest contemporaries to Vestige in New Orleans. Expect about two hours at the table. Reservations are key , and are generally available about a week ahead.

Dishes change up gradually, guided strongly by seasonality, so week to week the menu will be different.

More fixed are the cocktails. Get the tanuki sour, an elegantly subtle blend of sake, the Japanese citrus yuzu and a flicker of ginger, all fortified with vodka. The heat of the July day vanished in its soft-pink hue.

Service is friendly and casual, befitting a restaurant where people might be wearing shorts in the dining room. Underlying the casual bearing is the staff’s wealth of information about each dish, which is important because there is a lot going on.

Tasting through the menu

The first course this night was a paragraph of ingredients on the printed menu that resolved into a petite tasting platter.

There was a single piece of sushi made with locally grown rice (hence the appealing term “missisushi”), crowned with gorgeous local blue crab dressed with a briny-creamy sauce made with uni and a fermented-spicy heat. There was a tartlet of grilled mushrooms that could fit on a teaspoon, giving a single umami-laden bite of the foie gras and black garlic amid the mushrooms. A cup of amazake, a mellow-sweet sake, was brewed with peach pits for a cool sip between them.

Peaches centered the second course, rendered as a dollop of sweet-savory custard that was visually stunning though busy on the palate, and the one course I wished was edited down a bit.

The fish that followed was breathtaking. It was sous vide red snapper that managed to retain the raw elemental essence of sashimi, but with a texture that could be cut through with a spoon. It tasted of summer, with a delicate tomato dashi draped over the fish.

A bread course came in between, an unconventional pacing that was both a grounding breather in midmeal and also a dramatic pause before the most intense course.

Slices of Japanese A5 Wagyu beef showed why this steak is so venerated, and its preparation pushed it to another level. The thick marbling was still visible when cooked, each vein of it gushing like a river of flavor on the palate, augmented by green garlic oil and a rich, cultured koji butter and flurries of black truffles. It all cemented the flavor experience to memory.

A homey dessert brought things back down to earth, a fig and almond cream tart set in a landscape of different flavored custards and curds to alternate bite to bite.

Thrill writ large

With the tasting menu format, the meal I last had will be different on a future visit. That’s a little sad, because I want others to taste, and I would love to repeat, specific highlights. But this approach, the creativity behind it and the prowess of the execution, all shows so much confident promise for whatever might come next.

In this doll’s house of a dining room, in this humble cottage, in this small, if increasingly bustling town, Vestige is a culinary thrill writ large.

Get the Sun Herald's AM Newsletter