At Okàn, Bernard Bennett Taps History and Traditional Techniques to Tell His Story

Bernard Bennett sees himself as much as a storyteller as a chef. At Okàn, the restaurant he opened last year in Bluffton, S.C., Bennett develops dishes based on the forced movement of enslaved people from West Africa to the Caribbean and Southern United States. Many of these dishes, like whole fried fish escovitch and Trinidadian doubles, descend from traditional forebears. Others, like blue crab with berbere-spiced watermelon and alligator...