Chef Bret Edlund has had many great teachers on his way to helming the kitchen at one of the most prestigious resorts in Montana. The Seabrook, South Carolina, native is still trying to replicate the homemade meatballs his old babysitter, Ann, cooked for him. Another childhood caretaker, Margie, made the best red rice he ever ate. “Ann’s meatballs and Margie’s Charleston red rice provide such fond memories of food for me,” Edlund says. “I think these two items made me want to be good at cooking when I was real young.”
Now the culinary director at Resort at Paws Up, a luxury mountain property set on a working cattle ranch, Edlund credits his parents for giving him the drive as a teenager to work at a bakery in Charleston, South Carolina. “My parents instilled a strong work ethic in me, and the long hours in the bakery felt normal,” he says. But it wasn’t until he joined the staff at Charleston’s Hank’s Seafood Restaurant, working with the lauded chef Frank McMahon, that he saw a career path.
“Frank realized how serious I was about cooking before I did,” Edlund says. “One day he called me into his office and handed me a Charlie Trotter and a French Laundry cookbook. Reading those books was a revelation. I didn’t know that kind of food existed.”
He does now. I recently visited Social Haus, a glass-enclosed dining room tucked in a ponderosa pine forest at Paws Up’s gated Green O compound, on an evening when Edlund was preparing the eight-course tasting menu. There was an amuse-bouche of Hokkaido beef and ginger displayed on a river stone; tagliatelle and spring onion; spring lamb and rutabaga; chocolate and gianduja. My partner, Patricia, declared it the best meal she has ever eaten, period.
Edlund credits McMahon with one other morsel of advice: to pack his knives and leave the comfort of Charleston. He enrolled in the New England Culinary Institute, drawn equally to the ski slopes as to the six-to-one faculty-student ratio. But a chance encounter at a job fair would soon call him back to the Lowcountry.
“I was heading to the ski hill when I decided to scan the job fair participant list. When I saw [the chef] Scott Crawford’s name on the list, I stowed my ski gear in the car and went in,” he recalls. “I approached his table, and we talked about food for two hours straight. He asked me to join him at Sea Island Resort’s Georgian Rooms.”
Starting as a line cook at the coastal Georgia resort, Edlund continued his classical culinary education. He prepared a ham seventy-five times before Chef Scott pronounced it exactly right—a Southern equivalent to the “French omelet” apprenticeship. Edlund moved through every station before becoming the de facto sous chef under Crawford.
“One of my favorite things about Bret is that he thinks about food in his own way,” Crawford says. “He is not afraid to be truly creative, to think outside the box. This, combined with his strong foundation of both classical and modern technique, makes Bret a culinary force.”
After five years, Edlund felt he was ready for city cooking, so he departed for Paul Kahan’s Michelin-starred Blackbird in Chicago. “I gained an appreciation for simple, clean food at Blackbird in one of the strongest kitchen cultures I’d ever experienced,” Edlund says. “I also met Krystle Swenson, my partner, there, so it’s that much more special.”
Though Edlund and Swenson, a James Beard–nominated pastry chef, thrived in Chicago’s dynamic restaurant scene, they returned to Raleigh when Crawford made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: to work on new concept restaurants from the foundation up. “Chef Scott trusted us and gave us so much creative freedom in several kitchens, including Crawford & Son, our proudest project,” Edlund says. “I honed the details of the craft working on dishes like rabbit pot pie, which took three days to prepare, required over one hundred knife cuts, a sauce from scratch, and freshly made biscuits.”
Now, as he looks over his spread at Paws Up, Edlund says the mentors he’s met in the South still deeply influence the food he serves to visitors from all over the world. “Even the heaviest dishes come across light if you balance them,” he says. “At its best, Southern food satiates you where you leave the table feeling full without rolling down the hallway.”
This summer, Paws Up is launching a barbecue program with a new outdoor grill and an expanded open fire pit. As always, Edlund’s Lowcountry cooking roots will be on full display as he prepares his signature grilled oysters, soaked in a vat of hot sauce, fresh herbs, and vinegar that, when thrown on the sizzling griddle, issue aromatic smoke signaling supper’s on at the ranch.
