A Small Team of Dreamers and Shopkeepers

Chef James Martin's love of food started as a child, on trips to visit family in South Carolina. Years later, a trip to Spain surprised him in a different way: the flavors felt like home. Paella and Lowcountry perloo. Spanish lima beans and the lima beans his family cooked growing up. It turned out the resemblance wasn't a coincidence.

Spain's Moorish history shaped its agriculture and its table, and that same influence found its way to the American South, carried across an ocean along with rice, grain, and pork.
James and his team spend as much time studying that history as they do cooking from it, tracing the line from Moorish Spain to Lowcountry Carolina, and putting a piece of that story on the plate with every dish. He owns Bocadillo Market with his wife and partner, Jessica Neal.