On a recent afternoon at Dulce Dough Donuts & Bakery on St. Simons Island, Ryanne and David Carrier reflected on their reasons for putting down roots on the Georgia coast.
“In the restaurant industry, it’s fast-paced; it’s intense,” David said. The nice part about being on the coast, he said, “is that when we’re not working, we’re in the marshes of Glynn County, and not, you know, Times Square.”
The Carriers moved to Georgia in 2010, after Ryanne was hired as a sommelier at Sea Island Resort. David, whose career included a stint at the French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley, soon followed. He eventually became executive chef of the Cloister and Beach Club, and Ryanne moved up to director of wines and spirits.
Credit: Benjamin Galland
Credit: Benjamin Galland
About five years later, the Carriers decided to pursue their own ventures.
They now own Dulce Dough, which opened in 2020, and Woodside, which began offering an elevated dining experience in late 2023.
As it turned out, the Carriers were on the leading edge of a small wave of chefs and restaurateurs who have moved from larger cities to the Georgia coast, seeking a better quality of life, professional independence and stronger bonds with family.
When the Carriers left the resort, they became much more entrenched in the St. Simons community and developed a new appreciation for the sophistication and worldliness of the residents of the region, both those on the island and further inland.
They chose to call their new restaurant Woodside as an homage to the Woodside neighborhood in Queens, New York, where David’s parents owned a restaurant serving northern Italian cuisine. David is the chef at Woodside; Ryanne is the pastry chef.
“I actually think that people in the South are by far better traveled than people up North,” Ryanne said. “Ever since we moved to the South, what we’ve experienced is people who have been to France multiple times, been to Spain, who go to Italy, who go all over the world.”
David said they see their restaurant as “an opportunity to kind of bring things back in, reel things back in to go back to a time where things weren’t as chaotic as they seem to be these days.”
“Ultimately, we’re only successful if we bring people joy,” Ryanne said, “and that’s what we look to do every day.”
“That joy is on both sides of the bar,” David added. “Whether you’re behind it or in front of it, there’s got to be that joy, that happiness, that want and desire to belong.”
Finding a home in Brunswick
Weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic, Nicki and Keith Schroeder walked through downtown Brunswick with an economic development official.
The Schroeders could see the writing on the wall for their troubled Marietta-based ice cream business, High Road, which had been on a growth boom until the sudden implosion of the restaurant industry. They were looking for a place to regroup.
“My wife and I couldn’t get the idea of doing something down here out of our heads,” Keith Schroeder said. “We had the sense that we were going to be OK, and this was where we were going to rebuild our lives.”
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
The family opened Schroeder’s Market in January 2023 and followed with SchroGlo Community Restaurant & Bar this past January.
SchroGlo occupies a comfortable space that once held a guest house and lounge that were listed in the Green Book for African American travelers, which enabled them to find lodgings, businesses and gas stations that would serve them during the days of segregation.
“First and foremost, our responsibility is to be welcoming to the people who have lived here for generations,” Schroeder said. “We were very intentional about trying to write a menu that would bring everybody together into this room.”
The offerings include burgers, fish and chips, chicken wings and fried shrimp. The restaurant also frequently presents live music.
“Because there weren’t a lot of places to go for so long, many of the residents down here took entertaining into their own hands, so they became food and beverage people in their own right,” Schroeder said. “In many ways, they’re the most exciting customers because they let us do anything we want.”
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
In general, Schroeder said, “I think what you get in Brunswick is folks who have a real strong need to express themselves in their culture. And they really swing for the fences, without regard for whether or not they’re going to win.”
He said that running small businesses that serve the community is much more satisfying than living the “Shark Tank fairy tale” with High Road. “You get sucked into this persona that the world wants you to have when you’ve been lucky enough to catch fire, but this is more indicative of who my family is.”
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Stephen B. Morton for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Reverse migration
Chris Meenan grew up near New York City and trained at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan (now the International Culinary Center), but his passion for regional American cooking led him to other parts of the country.
“Working with French chefs has been incredible, and what French cuisine did for the world, for professional cooking, is undeniable, but this Eurocentric view of food that a lot of people had when I was growing up, or I felt early in my career, I rejected it,” Meenan said recently in the high-ceilinged dining room of Dottie’s Market on Broughton Street in Savannah. Meenan and his wife Ericka Phillips opened the restaurant in March 2023.
Meenan’s interest in regional American cooking eventually took him to New Orleans, where he worked with Greg Sonnier at Gabrielle at its original location on Esplanade Avenue. Later he moved to Sante Fe, where he worked at The Compound with Mark Kiffin, who won the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef: Southwest in 2005.
Back in New York City, he became executive chef at Blue Water Grill on Union Square, but he and Phillips knew that they wanted to open their own place. They considered a number of cities before settling on Savannah.
Phillips’ great-grandmother Dottie, an Alabama native who moved north with her family during the Great Migration, served as inspiration for their Savannah restaurant. “She embodied so many of the things that we try,” Meenan said of Dottie, whom he met for the first time on her 100th birthday.
The couple considered moving to other cities, but decided on Savannah, in part because the market was not saturated, Meenan said.
Credit: Angela Hopper
Credit: Angela Hopper
He first took the position of executive chef at St. Neo’s Brasserie in Savannah’s new Drayton Hotel in 2019, so that he could get to know the city better before he and Phillips decided on a location for their restaurant.
Meenan was surprised to find that “the food system is a little bit broken” in the Savannah area. While he has established relationships with numerous local farmers and other suppliers, he thought that the longer growing seasons in the South would result in a wider availability of products.
“The broken part I found right away was that so much of the seafood catch just bolts out of town immediately,” Meenan said. “The fish comes in right here, but then the fish goes to Atlanta to get processed, and then comes back, and you’re just putting time and days on the fish.”
(Keith Schroeder described a similar problem with getting freshly caught fish in Brunswick.)
Also, Meenan has been disappointed in the Georgia peaches he has tried, but said the state’s blueberries are “magic.”
Credit: Angela Hopper
Credit: Angela Hopper
The opening of Dottie’s Market has allowed Phillips and Meenan, whose mother’s family lived in Savannah for a number of years, to reconnect with their Southern roots, although he said that the Georgia city remains largely segregated and he doesn’t think it has reckoned adequately with the legacy of slavery.
“Ericka was inspired and we were inspired to create ... a place for everybody,” he said.
Reclaiming family traditions
On March 13, 2020, Andrew Brochu wrote a check for the alcohol license for his long-planned “fried chicken and fancy seafood” restaurant in Chicago. Two days later, the city shut down due to the pandemic.
Brochu said he and his wife, Sophie, eventually decided to take their idea for a chicken and seafood spot to her hometown of Savannah. With four partners, they opened Brochu’s Family Tradition in late 2022 in the Starland neighborhood.
Credit: Robin Elise Maaya
Credit: Robin Elise Maaya
Brochu attended high school in Gwinnett County and discovered his enjoyment of cooking while working in restaurants after graduation. He studied at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Tucker and then reached out to Grant Achatz about completing a four-month externship at Alinea in Chicago.
Brochu ended up working there a couple of years. He was chef at a champagne bar when he met David Carrier, who hired him at Kith & Kin, where he became executive chef after Carrier’s departure. Kith & Kin closed in 2011, and after a couple of other jobs, Brochu was back at Alinea Group, which led to him working at Roister, where Brochu was nominated for a James Beard award in 2018.
Credit: John Park
Credit: John Park
However, Brochu said he decided “I didn’t want that stress anymore,” referring to the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety of some kitchens. “I wasn’t getting the same feeling that I used to get from the backyard gatherings that my family had and from sitting on the beach and shucking oysters or eating chicken with your hands, or just sitting around a table with a bunch of bottles of wine and having a good time.”
Ultimately, he decided to launch his own restaurant, and the pandemic-inspired move to Savannah gave Brochu and his partners a chance to create the casual coastal vibe that they envisioned.
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