Your Life - Entertainment - Restaurants

Friday, Aug. 08, 2008

EATS: Kenny Wards' crab cakes an Ocean Springs treasure

OCEAN SPRINGS -- Crab cakes at Kenny Ward's restaurant are worth a trip across the bridge from any direction, be it over Biloxi Bay, Fort Bayou or Pascagoula River.

We enjoyed a recent lunch there after a couple of the restaurant's fans e-mailed this writer raving about the food, specifically the crab cakes. Even though we usually avoid crab anything because it's not worth the shells, the e-mail enthusiasm demanded a try.

Not only were there no pieces of shell, the dish lived up to its rave reviews: moist, mostly crab and good tasting with a tangy sauce drizzled heavily over the top.

In a quest to develop a crab cake that was crab and not bread, said Kenny Ward, who is both owner and chef, he tested 21 recipes for crab cake before he opened the restaurant. The sauce for it is made of creole mustard, aioli sauce, horseradish, wasabi, lemon juice and house sauce.

That last, the "house sauce," seems a secret ingredient incorporated into most of the restaurant's sauces, all homemade from scratch by Ward.

At $12 for one healthy sized crab cake and a side salad, listed on the menu under "lunch combos," this may be more of a special occasion place for lunch. The dinner menu lists Creole Crab Cakes in the plural at $24. Dinner entrees range in price from $18 for chicken pasta to $3 for two Australian lobster tails.

The salad part of our combo was a satisfying Caesar for which the Romaine had been shredded into friendly, bite-size widths served with a light dressing that did not drown the greens.

Collard green soup that was ordered out of curiosity surprised with its light taste, light broth and fresh veggies, but not too heavy on the veggies.

Ward said he started cooking at the White Pillars in Biloxi when he was 14 and later cooked at the Lagniappe in Ocean Springs. After a career travelling the country as vice president of a national video chain, like so many native Coastians, he came back home. He opened the restaurant on Government Street in Ocean Springs about a year ago.

He said the lunch favorites are crab cakes, scallops and grouper sandwiches. For dinner, customer favorites are the 8-ounce filets and 16-ounce rib eye and scallops.

"We use large fresh sea scallops wrapped in apple and wood smoked, topped crab meat and Maytag blue cheese cream sauce," Ward said.

Also very popular is the seafood pasta made with colossal crab meat and crawfish tails.

Diners are enveloped in the warm elegant decor that's both Mediterranean and contemporary and is as artful as Ward's food. A martini karaoke bar to the back is easily identifiable by a lighted scroll over the door that reads "Leanna's Martini Bar."

The restaurant has bright tangerine walls of faux stucco, dark wood chairs with rich blue upholstery and table appointments arranged on bright white clothes. The mix of art ranges from prints framed in gold gilt to sleekly contemporary frames of Wyland sea images. These pictures, one a diving whale and another of twirling dolphins, hang above a large fresh water aquarium against the central wall.