Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  Rain Shadow Meats’ Quality Dog: Well, what do you know? This was hands down the wiener-winner. Jeffery reported (again, cannily) that it had “lots of actual flavor—less like a hot dog, more like a sausage. I feel like the pig was killed within 50 miles of here.” Conjecturing about the methodology of the test, Zac said, “I feel like we’re going up in quality—maybe it’s psychosomatic, but I feel like we went up in meatiness.” Ben B. (floor refinisher) admired both the crunch and the spice. And yet the gains in texture and taste were not at the expense of archetypal hot dog flavor; as Sara put it, “Mmmmm—hot dog.” Greg liked the looks of both the size and the color, and after one bite said, “This is it. This is the shit. This is in my refrigerator. It tastes like people just cared more, whether it’s quality ingredients, craftsmanship—it has more dimension. Someone cared.” Informed about the added expense, he opined that if the hot dog was still only a couple bucks, it was entirely worth it—you do get what you pay for. Ben K. concurred, lauding the Rain Shadow dog’s “multiple flavor notes.” He then summed up the taste test thusly: “Three wieners in my mouth—what a perfect Pride weekend.”

  Not long after, the Dyke March went by with beating drums, aglow with the fresh legalization of gay marriage in New York and the late-evening sun. March participants wore rainbows and trilby hats and gold lamé shirts and no shirts at all, flashing peace signs and waving. The taste-testers screamed in support until all were hoarse. Is this a great country or what? (Great country!)

  THE MISSING LINK

  By Brett Anderson

  From The Times-Picayune

  After eleven years of covering New Orleans’ food scene—most memorably through the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill—Brett Anderson recently took a year’s leave from the Times-Picayune (in the throes of a controversial downsizing) to accept a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.

  Donald Link barely gave the chickens a chance to stop sizzling before he put his hands around them, subjecting each to a tactile examination that looked like nothing so much as a quarterback blindly feeling his way to a football’s seam.

  One of the chickens looked like wild game, its flesh darkened by injected Cajun spices vivified by the flames in the wood-fired oven behind it. The other, which had been brined overnight, wore the more typical mottled gold-brown armor of roasted farm-raised fowl. Both stood upright in cast-iron pans, impaled by beer cans. Link appraised them while sucking the grease off his fingers. “Turns out there are a lot of ways to cook a chicken,” he said.

  That statement of the obvious prompted laughter in the peanut gallery behind him, at the edge of the open kitchen inside Cochon in Lafayette.

  The opening of the restaurant, a spin-off of the original Cochon in New Orleans, was still three weeks away, but on this hot August night, Link and his team had crossed the threshold where obsessive planning gives way to undressed rehearsals. Ryan Prewitt, until recently chef de cuisine at Herbsaint, Link’s flagship New Orleans restaurant, explained, “We talked about (cooking chicken) for like three hours last night.”

  “It got pretty heated,“ chuckled Stephen Stryjewski, who is, along with Link, chef and co-owner of both Cochon locations.

  Cochon Lafayette has more than just a name in common with its New Orleans counterpart. The most important similarity is a concept that encapsulates Link’s vision of what, to use his words, “Cajun food has become.” Not since Paul Prudhomme opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen more than three decades ago has New Orleans seen a new restaurant elicit such a phenomenal response from such an array of diners. That both happen to hang their hats on the food of Acadiana is a topic ripe for academic inquiry.

  Evidence of Cochon’s success goes beyond the crowds that regularly congest the restaurant’s corner of New Orleans’ Warehouse District.

  Since Cochon opened in 2006, both Link and Stryjewski have won prestigious chef awards from the James Beard Foundation. In 2008, The New York Times ranked Cochon the third best new American restaurant outside New York. Link also won a Beard for “Real Cajun,” his provocatively titled cookbook that delves deep into the pot that inspired Cochon’s creation. “Gossip Girl” star Blake Lively was so besotted with the restaurant’s sweet potato sauce at a recent visit that she tried to persuade staff to circumvent FDA regulations by sending her some inside a disemboweled teddy bear. (The response she received from Cochon, according to Glamour magazine: “We are not the drug cartel.”)

  Still, the new Cochon is a re-creation of the old one, not a straight replication. (An item not central to the New Orleans Cochon repertoire: roast chicken.) The fine distinction begins to explain why Link’s journey back to his native Cajun country—Lafayette is its putative capital—has been filled with trepidation as well as joy.

  The chef’s family roots run deep in the region: He was raised in Lake Charles, on Cajun country’s southwestern edge. But as much as Link identifies with the cooking of his—and perhaps as importantly, his family members’—youth, there is no erasing that he became a big shot in a city whose relationship to Cajun country has dysfunctional dimensions. As Billy Link, a Crowley soybean, rice and crawfish farmer, put it, “New Orleans is New Orleans, and there’s a line between New Orleans and here. They don’t mix well, in a way.”

  Billy Link, who is either Donald’s third or fourth cousin (it depends on whom—and when—you ask), was leaning against the poured-concrete counter separating the restaurant’s kitchen from one of two main dining rooms. He’d arrived with his wife, Becky, and their two young sons to feast on the dishes Cochon’s chefs were fine-tuning while test-driving the new kitchen equipment.

  The banquet included the two roast chickens, along with one that had been cooked in an outside smoker built by Dwane Link, another cousin; two darkly crusted pork shoulders; a whole ribeye roast cut into bite-size strips; a pan of shrimp in a butter sauce spiked with the Brazilian peppers that Donald Link grows in his Lakeview backyard; and smothered rabbit provided by yet another cousin, served with rice that Billy Link is supplying the Lafayette restaurant.

  “That’s the old Cajun style right here!” Billy Link proclaimed, delighted by the sight of the rabbit, which he called, in an exaggerated French-Cajun accent, lapin. “If they cook it like this, they’ll be all right.”

  Billy Link has known his cousin only as a successful chef, having first met Donald at a family reunion six or seven years ago, and relishes his role as an unofficial critic of Cochon’s food. He’s playfully dismissive of meat smokers as an influence of the Zaunbrechers, the Cajun family on Donald Link’s mother’s side. (“The Link side? Non-smokers.”) He wore a Cochon T-shirt but actually prefers Herbsaint, where the food reflects European traditions as much as Louisiana ones.

  The preference could be a simple matter of taste. It also could have something to do with the games Cochon plays on native Cajuns’ memory and sense of pride. The phenomenon might be summed up by the review Billy Link said a group of his friends gave the New Orleans restaurant after visiting: “We can cook better than that.”

  Donald Link responds to his family’s ribbings the way he responds to irritants both mild and severe: with a crooked smile that causes him to resemble a cat that just made a snack of a pet canary. While he’s no stranger to cameras or laudatory press, by the standards of a moment where chefs can become television stars without ever running a restaurant, Link counts as a throwback to the days when chefs let the food speak for itself. He insists, “I am not trying to be a celebrity chef.”

  The strategy has served Link well, and not just economically. Anthony Bourdain, the acerbic chef, television host and best-selling author, has said of Link, “there’s no one in the business with more credibility.”

  The challenge in Lafayette is that credibility earned for cooking Cajun food in New Orleans isn’t exactly a recognized currency. In fact, it could be a liability.

  “A lot of (Cajuns) know of him who haven’t tried his food, but they know of him because he’s up here,“ Billy Link said of
his cousin, raising his hand up high to illustrate the chef’s exalted status. “And they’re waiting for him.”

  One of the many ironies attending Cochon Lafayette is that its owners don’t regard area Cajun restaurants to be their primary competition. Ask Link or Stryjewski what inspired them to open in Lafayette, as opposed to, say, Houston or Covington, both of which were considered, and they will invariably talk with amazement about the crowds at Pamplona Tapas Bar or the slick Japanese restaurant Tsunami in Lafayette’s old downtown.

  “You need to check that place out on a Friday night,“ Stryjewski said ofTsunami. The night-clubby restaurant is not the sort one would expect to impress Stryjewski, a tattooed, bearishly boyish man who in plain clothes often appears to have just stepped off a skateboard.

  But Tsunami, like Pamplona, captured the chefs’ attention because its crowd, particularly on weekends, exposes an indigenous population of young adults whose interests clearly go well beyond—and possibly don’t even include—boudin and zydeco.

  The opportunity Cochon’s chefs see in Lafayette has as much to do with business as it does aesthetics, and it is similar to the one they road to fame and profit in New Orleans. While the level of attention Prudhomme had brought to Cajun food in the 1980s altered the way Americans eat, the Opelousas-born chef’s fame was so widely felt—and his food so widely misinterpreted—that it sparked a debate over authenticity of the cuisine that has yet to quiet.

  “Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine,” a definitive book on the subject, debunks the myth that Cajun food was developed in a vacuum; authors Marcelle Bienvenu, Carl A. Brasseaux and Ryan A. Brasseaux call it a “cross-cultural borrowing of the diverse ethnic and racial groups that have co-existed in the Bayou Country since the late eighteenth century.”

  Cochon entered into this historical fray by exposing one thing Prudhomme’s revolution did not spawn: modern Cajun restaurants that uphold the highest standards of quality and service. The very fact that Link’s team drew a bead on Lafayette suggests that this has been the case not just in New Orleans but in Cajun country itself, an implication that steers the age-old debate over authenticity into uncharted, potentially turbulent waters.

  Link and Stryjewski are intense students of Cajun cuisine and its evolution. And the chefs’ idea of “real” Cajun food around Lafayette tends to be found in the same places Cajun food purists look for it: on home cooks’ stoves or in decidedly blue-collar restaurants like T-Coon’s and Laura’s II, both order-at-the-counter, rice-and-gravy plate lunch places that have almost nothing in common, at least atmospherically, with Cochon.

  But in the crowds found at the more modern non-Cajun restaurants, Link sees “an indication of the desire of this city. If you want to feel metropolitan, if you want to go for a glass of wine and a decent meal, where do you go? It’s usually fried food and beer and cocktails, and if there is wine, it’s not good wine. I think there’s a lot more sophistication going on in these small towns that’s not being reflected in the restaurants.”

  Demographic evidence supports Link’s hunch. The 2010 Census data puts the median household income in Lafayette Parish at $47,901.That compares to a $35,505 median household income in Orleans Parish, according to data provided by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

  But is it possible tonier Cajun-style restaurants are few and far between in Cajun country because Cajun diners don’t trust restaurants with wine lists to properly represent a folk-art form born of subsistence living many people still remember?

  Pat Mould was the chef at Charlie G’s when the restaurant opened in Lafayette in 1985. He remembers raising eyebrows with the restaurant’s contemporary Louisiana cooking and sleek interior, which was designed by a prominent Chicago architect.

  “Because we had this perception of being a citified restaurant, we got a ton of (criticism),” Mould said. “People were suspicious. We have this jaded perspective that no one’s going to cook it better than mama.”

  That Charlie G’s remains one of the region’s relatively few high-end restaurants interpreting Louisiana cuisine also points to persistent assumptions about the corrupting effects of elevated social status. In an oral history conducted for the Southern Foodways Alliance by the New Orleans historian (and Lafayette native) Rien Fertel, T-Coon’s owner David Billeaud said, “I’m not a chef. I’m a cook. Cooks work hard.”

  In New Orleans, Cochon proves daily that questions surrounding its food’s authenticity are matters of semantics and style, not substance. The food’s rusticity provides cloud cover to a technical proficiency that is the mark of professionals who regard the chef title as an honor earned through labor. The results—the fried rabbit livers riding pepper jellied toasts, the hogs-head cheese shaved over fresh peas, the skillet-cooked rabbit and dumplings based on a Link relative’s recipe for squirrel—are almost always prettier than anything a Cajun grandmother has ever served.

  Link and Stryjewski, after all, are not Cajun grandmothers. They’re chefs whose skill-sets and sensibilities were formed in restaurants as far away as northern California. But because the ingredients and recipes ground Cochon’s food in Cajun country’s bayous, prairies and marsh, Cochon cuts through the social baggage—name another Beard-winning restaurant offering iceberg lettuce salad, unironically—that has weighed on Cajun cuisine since its commercialization.

  Diners can reasonably argue that they’ve never had anything like Cochon’s braised pork cheeks in Abbeville, or that it is heresy to charge $8 for an oyster-meat pie, flaky as Cochon’s is. But it would be impossible to conclude after eating either dish at Cochon, perhaps with a bottle of Burgundy wine alongside a free cone of fried pigs ears, that the chefs regard their source of inspiration as a backwater.

  Still, theories that hold true in New Orleans are being tested all over again at Cochon Lafayette. And Link knows it.

  “As a chef your (work is) always on the table. You’re always up for discussion, “ Link said. The difference in Lafayette, he explained, is “everybody is a food critic who could make or break you. It’s a whole other level.” You can’t “PR your way out of” a bad night’s performance when there are no waves of tourists coming in behind the diners you may have disappointed on an off night.

  “I’m feeling way more pressure performance-wise,“ Link added, comparing Lafayette to New Orleans, “because it’s deeper.”

  The chef was sitting on the deck outside Cochon after dinner service on Sept. 15, the restaurant’s opening night. The task of convincing Lafayette diners that the restaurant is adequately respectful of Cajun cuisine’s hardscrabble roots is further complicated by its location in the city’s River Ranch development, a model of mixed-use New Urbanism that architecturally looks more suburban than urban.

  T-Coon’s is only three miles away, but Cochon Lafayette’s closest and fiercest business competition may be the Bonefish Grill. Earlier in the night, the River Ranch outpost of the Florida-based national chain hosted overflow crowds, mostly locals angling for a good view of the LSU football game. (Bonefish is also where Link’s father, who lives in Lake Charles, drove to celebrate his most recent birthday.)

  Cochon Lafayette won’t conjure visions of the rural idylls on full-color display in Link’s cookbook, but it is beautiful, particularly at night, when its lights cast a soft glow on the Vermilion River running just below the herb-and citrus-tree-lined deck and terrace. At 6,000 square feet, the restaurant seats around 250, twice as many diners as its sister location in New Orleans. It also evokes the original, with its pigmented concrete floors, blonde wood accents and open kitchen.

  Beth Hebert ate her lemon-and-garlic-scented oven-baked shrimp at the restaurant’s expansive bar, which overlooks the river and suggests what a fishing camp might look like if renovated by an architect specializing in urban lofts. Hebert was in Lafayette visiting relatives from her home in Los Angeles. She declared Cochon’s food “not unrecognizable” from what she knew growing up. Still, she said, “I couldn’t take my parents h
ere. They’re old. They’d be confused.” Hebert’s friends in L.A.? “They’d absolutely love this place.”

  If Cochon Lafayette succeeds, bridging this generational divide could be its greatest accomplishment. Cognizant of this challenge, the owners larded the opening-night staff with seasoned Link Restaurant Group operatives. Among them were Stryjewski and Prewitt, who was recently promoted to oversee all of the company’s restaurants’ kitchens, including Cochon Butcher, the sandwich cafe and Cajun-style butcher shop in New Orleans.

  “One of the reasons we’re doing this is to give our people new opportunities, provide them a career and a life,“ Link said. “If we didn’t have the talent to open this place, we wouldn’t be.”

  Together with Kyle Waters III, Cochon Lafayette’s chef de cuisine, the restaurant’s team built a menu around Cochon classics while, as Link put it, “trying not to appear like we’re competing with anyone’s grandma.”

  The smothered chicken nods to a regional mainstay, only Cochon’s is smoked and gilded with pickled onions and mustard seeds. One older man told Link he enjoyed the grilled skirt steak “but didn’t know what to do with” its side of collard green slaw. (Major difference between the slaw and traditional smothered collards, which are also on the menu: length of cooking.)

  The fried redfish collar was certainly familiar to any Cajun fisher who has refused to waste any morsel of a day’s catch—never mind that other diners may recognize the dish as a staple of Japanese cooking, too.

  Cochon Lafayette’s boudin is smoked, its casing charred, the space in the cavity where it’s split filled with a pinch of sliced pickled chile peppers. The dish represents a reversal of Link’s original vow to stay away from boudin in Lafayette for fear of becoming ensnared in the contentious regional argument over whose is best. So what if his doesn’t resemble anything anyone has ever eaten in the cab of a pick-up?