Sunny Gerhart

Sunny Gerhart’s kitchens are built on a plainspoken brief: keep the flavors clear, keep the seasoning in line, and keep the plate from getting busy. That approach has carried from Raleigh to Wilmington, where Olivero and St. Roch Fine Oysters + Bar both reflect the same no-fuss standard in different registers. The path through Raleigh kitchens sharpened that discipline. At Enoteca Vin, working alongside Ashley Christensen, Gerhart learned in a room where pace and precision mattered. At Poole's, the sous chef role required control and consistency. At Joule, as head of kitchen, the work moved with the same emphasis on order, timing, and exactness. What connects those roles is not scale, but sequence: each step added responsibility without changing the center of gravity. Gerhart’s career has been shaped by clarity over clutter, and by a way of cooking that treats restraint as a tool rather than a limit. The result is a body of work that stays direct, seasoned, and disciplined. At St. Roch since 2017 and at Olivero since 2023, that same approach holds across both addresses. The food is built to read quickly: ingredients allowed to speak, seasoning kept deliberate, and the finish left clean rather than overworked.