Chef Sylvester Murray-Sly, to most of his friends-was born and has lived his entire life on the coast of North Carolina. It’s a place of deep history and a place where down home southern cuisine and the traditional fare of the only real Outer Banks, the seafood capital of the South Atlantic, meets and melds.

He’s learned those traditional ways of cooking-southern and coastal-but he’s spent his career concocting and preparing culinary wonders at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, a world- renowned science center which, despite its out-of-the-way locale in the tiny, old seaport and one-time pirate heaven of Beaufort, N.C., attracts students and researchers from the far-flung corners of the world. He’s had to please ‘em all, and has done just that-ask ‘em, please-by incorporating his native know-how and the exotic influences of their homes.