Place Setting

What is the flavor of life in Savannah?

We asked the Garden’s resident culinary muse to take our taste buds out on the town.

Produced and styled by Libbie Summers ¦ Photography by Cedric Smith

Assistant to Libbie Summers: Candace Brower

Production assistant: Anthony Lunsmann

Savannah’s Libbie Summers chooses very carefully. Like her ingredients and images, the words behind the culinary artist’s lifestyle brand, “A Food-Inspired Life,” sum up her vision with a marksman’s precision.

An award-winning producer of lifestyle content for the likes of Paramount Pictures, Bon Appetit, Vogue, the Food Network and “both of the ‘livings’—Southern and Country,” Libbie takes her taste buds to task daily. She produces videos, recipes and photo essays for her website, Libbiesummers.com, and Salted and Styled, the wildly popular food blog she makes with fellow Savannahian Chia Chong. And then there are the bestselling cookbooks: Sweet and Vicious: Baking With Attitude [Rizzoli 2014], Brown Sugar [Shortstack Editions 2014] and The Whole Hog Cookbook [Rizzoli 2011].

But what’s truly remarkable about Libbie is her synesthesia: her ability to approach life itself through foodways. Fashion, décor, travel—even dance moves—are experienced first on her palate … which makes her our muse for the May/June issue. When we asked Libbie to help us paint a food portrait of Savannah, the ideas flew.

“This place is so much at once: artful, enchanted, eccentric and gritty,” she told us, and promptly set out to make us a moveable feast—four courses, shot on location in some of the city’s most beautiful places, and designed to help us taste and see the true flavor of home.

Feast your eyes.