You have to taste these exotic options from Jackson County caterers

Eat.Drink.Love catering aims to provide quality cuisine from a less-than-traditional location.

The business, which opened 18 months ago, occupies a space in a doctors office park on Doctors Drive in Ocean Springs.

“We started at first as corporate catering — you know, medical reps and board meetings and all that, which explains why we’re off the beaten path,” said Seth Braden, who co-owns Eat.Drink.Love with his wife, Lauren Braden. “After that, we started doing take-and-bake meals and after that we started doing specialty meats, which had all led to our lunch specials.”

“We’re constantly changing — we’re never really sure which direction we’re going to take it.

“We’re not really a restaurant, and we’re not really a grocery store, either.”

The catering group can accommodate breakfast, lunch and dinner and will provide full entrees or just finger foods if that’s what is needed. They deliver on orders exceeding $50 and can provide servers, ice sculptures and other services that may be needed when hosting an event.

The box-lunch and take-and-bake meal options use high-quality ingredients, the Bradens said, locally sourced when available. The deli meats are all cut in-house to ensure freshness.

Eat.Drink.Love also keeps the shelf time short on the items so the food is always fresh. Its ever-rotating menu is posted on its Facebook page and includes items such as a grilled chicken salad, and a ham and brie sandwich with peach jam, fresh basil and balsamic reduction. Another lunch item is a noteworthy roast beef baguette with honey horseradish, provolone, red onion and spring mix.

Its most unique aspect is its offering of New Zealand Cervena venison and silverside kangaroo, ingredients Seth Braden cooked with when he worked in the Virgin Islands, where he met Lauren.

“I lived in the Virgin Islands for seven years and I worked in a restaurant that catered to the yachties, you know, a higher end kind of international crowd, so we would overnight this stuff in every single night,” he said.

“One of the things we did there was kangaroo and it was phenomenal. It was like filet, so we took a Coast turn on it. So instead of roast beef po-boys, we did kangaroo po-boys and it was a hit.”

The kangaroo meat Eat.Drink.Love gets is the thigh meat, so it works well for braising and slow-and-low cooking. There’s also a selection of prime aged beef and options of elk, wild boar, and bison cuts.

Not just wanting to offer exotic food, another focus at Eat.Drink.Love is from-scratch family favorites people can pick up and take home.

“Everything we make and put in the freezer are things we grew up eating, it’s what Mom made for dinner,” Lauren Braden said. “It’s the stuff people want to have but don’t always have the time to make. We make our own bechamel for the lasagna — it takes us two days to make the meat and tomato gravy for that.

“It’s a lot better than the freezer section in the store, because it’s food we’d like to eat ourselves.”

This story was originally published July 23, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "You have to taste these exotic options from Jackson County caterers."