From a food truck to a standalone restaurant, Okàn is set to redefine taste and culture. 🍽️ SouthCarolina restaurant
. Mosquitos, bless the bloodsuckers, haven’t started biting. The setting sun burns fiery orange, and a dolphin surges out of the brackish water as it corrals its dinner.
For much of its history, outsiders have ignored sleepy Bluffton, passing through on their way to Savannah, Hilton Head, or luxury resort Palmetto Bluff. But in the last few decades, the city’s population has grown 120 percent. Pine forests have been raised for housing tracts and golf courses, and a fledgling market for high-caliber dining has emerged where there was none.
Bennett is quick to clarify Okàn is not an African restaurant. He will explore Chinese and Indian influence in the Caribbean, sub out collards for dasheen leaves, dye Charleston gold rice yellow with turmeric, and season his fufu in a manner that would raise eyebrows in Ghana. “We’re a restaurant that serves African cuisine, and there are variables in that narrative,” he says. “I’m not an in-the-box person.
Once home to rice plantations and then communities of emancipated slaves, this part of the South lies at the heart of Gullah-Geechee culture—although you wouldn’t know dining out in Bluffton. “How are we here with no representation of Gullah or Caribbean food, right on the water?” Bennett says. “With Okàn, I’ll be that guy.”Rice is the spiritual heart of the Okàn. Bennett sources grains from Rollen Chalmers, a multi-generational rice farmer in nearby Hardeeville.
From this truck, he serves pork griot that’s been braised and fried, but in his new kitchen, Bennett rolls pork belly, cooks it sous vide for 24 hours, pan fries it, and serves the meat atop creamed hominy. A griot, he told me, is also the name for West African storytellers—revered passers-on of poetry, royal history, genealogy, and music—and the revised dish becomes an edible pun, a story of its roots and potential.
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