The body of Philip Bardin, the vivacious chef celebrated for helping to make shrimp and grits a staple of modern Lowcountry cuisine, was found Monday in his Elloree home, Orangeburg County Chief Deputy Coroner Sean Fogle confirmed today. No foul play is suspected.
Bardin, 64, was found Monday by a friend. The cause of his death is pending. No funeral information is yet available.
Bardin, known far and wide for his cooking at the Old Post Office on Edisto Island before Charleston was a foodie destination, was more than a gifted chef, remembered longtime friend and chef Frank Lee, a former owner of Slightly North of Broad. Bardin was a gifted storyteller and writer.
“He had a very wide and varied interest,” recalled Lee late Tuesday. “His circle of friends included opera singers, editors, artists, horse racers, stable hands and half-blind drunks in his hometown. He just had a wonderful way of embellishing his stories.”
Award-winning cookbook author Nathalie Dupree, who now lives in Raleigh, remembered Bardin, who retired a few years back, as a magnet for good food.
“Philip was one of a group of culinary leaders in the Lowcountry and you heard about his cooking on Edisto Island before you ever got there,” she said. “He made Edisto a destination.”
Bardin and Lee coincidentally attended the same Columbia elementary school and embarked on cooking about the same time, although Lee was four years older.
“He was a terrific human being, a very kind and generous and gentle person,” Lee said. “He was a really great chef that really put Charleston and the Southern culinary scene on the map. … He could really take his life happenings and weave them into stories that were just engaging and would resonate with people.”
Private chef Brett McKee agreed, saying Bardin was one of the chefs who was the foundation of why Charleston is on the map for being a culinary destination.”
Shrimp and grits
Bardin may be best remembered for bringing back stone-ground grits to the Southern food scene, along with chefs like Louis Osteen and Donald Barickman, Lee said. He remembered the grits came from a Tennessee mill and the shrimp from Edisto Island streams.
Bardin’s signature dish was a creamy bowl of grits topped with shrimp cooked simply in butter with garlic and topped with a luxurious mousseline sauce — a blend of hollandaise sauce and whipped cream.
“He influenced the way that grits are now legitimized when using local stone ground grits were all the rage,” said Lee, who riffed on the dish at SNOB. “My preparation was very different. Philip’s was very pure with the shrimp and grits. Mine was kind of a takeoff on the frogmore stew without the corn on the cob.”
A Columbia native, Bardin first came to the Charleston area’s culinary scene when he opened the Old Post Office restaurant on Edisto Island in 1988. Unlike today, no one then considered offering shrimp and grits for dinner, much less charging more $10 for the meal. Bardin took that classic, inexpensive Southern staple and reinvented it for the fine dining world.
In a 1989 article in The New York Times, acclaimed food writer John Martin Taylor, also known as Hoppin’ John, wrote:
“Long a breakfast mainstay in homes and restaurants throughout the South, grits are mostly thought of as bland, bleached, finely ground mush. But at the Old Post Office on Edisto (pronounced ED-is-toe) Island, where Mr. Bardin is chef and co-owner, the grits are yellow, coarse and freshly ground to his specifications.”
In a 2013 article in Columbia’s Midlands Biz, Bardin recalled, “After a few months of harsh commentary, we got lucky at a little-known Old Post Office Restaurant on Edisto Island with some excellent write-ups and a loyal following. Soon, we gave spoonfuls to every plate. Years later, every restaurant downtown followed our lead with dozens of variations and almost all of them really good.”
Reactions to death spread across food world
News of Bardin’s death rippled across social media Tuesday.
“Philip Bardin [was] a one-of-a-kind man and leading light of South Carolina cuisine, best known for creating Edisto island’s Old Post Office restaurant,” said Roadfood.com critic Michael Stern.
Taylor’s just-published book, Charleston to Phnom Penh: A Cook’s Journal, includes a memory from the early 1990s. Back then, Bardin asked Taylor to try a new recipe — watermelon and Clemson blue cheese.
“I had never heard of it,” Taylor wrote. “In his 2004 cookbook (with Jane and Michael Stern), he called it a ‘redneck version’ of melon and prosciutto. It’s a weird dish … and it works!”
Taylor also shared a photo that showed him, Lee and Bardin having a meal a few years back filled with South Carolina delights: “That looks like grilled quail, grilled okra, pickled shrimp, rice and butterbeans. And both margaritas and white wine. And homemade bread. Philip would definitely remember. He remembered everything.”
Bardin left the Old Post Office when it closed in 2006, but returned to help reopen with new owners in 2009. He eventually left the restaurant again. By 2016, he signed on as partner and consultant on Edisto’s Ella & Ollie’s.
Since then, Bardin has been mostly retired, but periodically worked in and out of the kitchen, offering some specials and kitchen takeovers at Ella & Ollie’s in 2018 and participating in events like the fifth annual Grits, Gullah and Three O’Clock Dinner event in 2020.
Michael Pham contributed to this story.
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.
