experiencelifemag.com Print › | Back › Home Cooking Chef John Besh watched his restaurants and his hometown cuisine nearly get wiped out by a hurricane. Now he’s sharing the culinary secrets and local-food traditions of New Orleans with the world. By Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl October 2009 All of us are from somewhere, but do we care? For John Besh, being from somewhere — specifically, the tight-knit hunting-and-fishing community of Lake Pontchartrain, across the water from New Orleans — was something he didn’t think too much about. It was just who he was, and he was busy building on that: fighting in the first Gulf War, raising four little boys, and cooking, cooking and cooking some more as he worked to establish a small empire of good restaurants in the Big Easy (including Restaurant August, Lüke, Besh Steak and La Provence).    But then Hurricane Katrina struck. In moments, the “somewhere” Besh was from went from something he didn’t think too much about to something he was in ­danger of losing forever. It changed him dramatically.    “Katrina woke me up,” Besh told me from his home in New Orleans. “It’s that old saying, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,’ and I suddenly realized what America would lose — what the world would lose — if this national treasure disappeared. “New Orleans truly is the birthplace of so much ­richness we have in our country today. Not just jazz — which most people understand was born here and then moved up the Mississippi to become blues and rock ’n’ roll — but also cuisine. New Orleans has the only native urban cuisine in America,” Besh says, referencing the area’s historic blend of French technique, African ingredients and foodways, and local, Native American ingredients like crayfish and redfish.  It wasn’t just the physical devastation of the storm that threatened New Orleans’s food, however; it was the way the storm revealed that many of the city’s most important food traditions were, in fact, just hanging on by a thread.  Take shrimp, for instance. Locals have been ­harvesting clams, crayfish, oysters and shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico waters near New Orleans for as long as people have lived there. When the storm wrecked so many family-owned shrimp boats, it wasn’t just the destruction that was the problem: In the months it took for families to process their insurance claims, repair their vessels and get back in the water, the local market was swamped by cheap, imported farmed Asian shrimp. When local fishing families got back on their feet, they found their customers were now ­accustomed to paying prices they couldn’t hope to meet. “I encourage every American to think about the shrimp they buy,” says Besh. “Are they wild-caught American shrimp, which are harvested sustainably? The commodity shrimp that come from Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, China — who knows anything about them? I have no patience for them. They’re processed with ­chemicals so they all look the same color; texturewise, they’re kind of chewy; and if you think about all the problems we have with simple things coming from these unregulated places — like ­children’s toys being painted with lead — how can you feel comfortable with foods coming from them?  “You’re just getting something so much better when you buy American shrimp, whether they’re sweet, little pink Maine shrimp; or big, briny sweet spot prawns from California; or brown shrimp from New Orleans,” he insists. “I’m a big advocate of knowing where food comes from and then doing as little to it as possible. Everybody, at one time in their lives, should try a fresh wild-caught American shrimp next to one of those rubbery cheap ones — they’d learn right away what they’d been missing.” In the interest of letting the wider world know what they’ve been missing (and what they very nearly lost at Katrina’s landfall), Besh wrote My New Orleans: The Cookbook (Andrews McNeel Publishing, 2009). It’s a fascinating book, filled with 200 of Besh’s gorgeous recipes, along with historical photos of the New Orleans food culture that have never before been seen outside of Louisiana. Plus, there’s lots of good information about unique ingredients and current foodways.  For me, it’s not just a cookbook: It’s a work of ­contemporary anthropology. I wish there was a book like this about every “somewhere” in the United States: one on Maine and New Hampshire, another on Washington State, another on Wisconsin. All of us are from somewhere, and a lot of those somewheres are vanishing because of forces just like those commodity-farmed shrimp.   “After Katrina,” Besh says, “I made the decision to procure as much as I could locally — last year [my ­restaurants] spent $15 million on local groceries. I’m doing what I can to make sure we don’t lose the passion, the soul or the vitality of my home.”  Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a celebrated food and wine critic. Nominated seven times for James Beard Foundation Awards — the Oscars of the food world — she has received four awards for her restaurant and wine columns. Since 2001, her work has been regularly featured in the Best Food Writing anthologies. Her new book, Drink This: Wine Made Simple (Ballantine, 2009), is being released in November. For more recipes from Besh’s My New Orleans, including the Shrimp Remoulade pictured above, see the Web Extras! at the top right of this page.

Home Cooking

Chef John Besh watched his restaurants and his hometown cuisine nearly get wiped out by a hurricane. Now he’s sharing the culinary secrets and local-food traditions of New Orleans with the world.

All of us are from somewhere, but do we care? For John Besh, being from somewhere — specifically, the tight-knit hunting-and-fishing community of Lake Pontchartrain, across the water from New Orleans — was something he didn’t think too much about. It was just who he was, and he was busy building on that: fighting in the first Gulf War, raising four little boys, and cooking, cooking and cooking some more as he worked to establish a small empire of good restaurants in the Big Easy (including Restaurant August, Lüke, Besh Steak and La Provence).   

But then Hurricane Katrina struck. In moments, the “somewhere” Besh was from went from something he didn’t think too much about to something he was in ­danger of losing forever. It changed him dramatically.   

“Katrina woke me up,” Besh told me from his home in New Orleans. “It’s that old saying, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,’ and I suddenly realized what America would lose — what the world would lose — if this national treasure disappeared.

“New Orleans truly is the birthplace of so much ­richness we have in our country today. Not just jazz — which most people understand was born here and then moved up the Mississippi to become blues and rock ’n’ roll — but also cuisine. New Orleans has the only native urban cuisine in America,” Besh says, referencing the area’s historic blend of French technique, African ingredients and foodways, and local, Native American ingredients like crayfish and redfish. 

It wasn’t just the physical devastation of the storm that threatened New Orleans’s food, however; it was the way the storm revealed that many of the city’s most important food traditions were, in fact, just hanging on by a thread. 

Take shrimp, for instance. Locals have been ­harvesting clams, crayfish, oysters and shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico waters near New Orleans for as long as people have lived there. When the storm wrecked so many family-owned shrimp boats, it wasn’t just the destruction that was the problem: In the months it took for families to process their insurance claims, repair their vessels and get back in the water, the local market was swamped by cheap, imported farmed Asian shrimp. When local fishing families got back on their feet, they found their customers were now ­accustomed to paying prices they couldn’t hope to meet.

“I encourage every American to think about the shrimp they buy,” says Besh. “Are they wild-caught American shrimp, which are harvested sustainably? The commodity shrimp that come from Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, China — who knows anything about them? I have no patience for them. They’re processed with ­chemicals so they all look the same color; texturewise, they’re kind of chewy; and if you think about all the problems we have with simple things coming from these unregulated places — like ­children’s toys being painted with lead — how can you feel comfortable with foods coming from them? 

“You’re just getting something so much better when you buy American shrimp, whether they’re sweet, little pink Maine shrimp; or big, briny sweet spot prawns from California; or brown shrimp from New Orleans,” he insists. “I’m a big advocate of knowing where food comes from and then doing as little to it as possible. Everybody, at one time in their lives, should try a fresh wild-caught American shrimp next to one of those rubbery cheap ones — they’d learn right away what they’d been missing.”

In the interest of letting the wider world know what they’ve been missing (and what they very nearly lost at Katrina’s landfall), Besh wrote My New Orleans: The Cookbook (Andrews McNeel Publishing, 2009). It’s a fascinating book, filled with 200 of Besh’s gorgeous recipes, along with historical photos of the New Orleans food culture that have never before been seen outside of Louisiana. Plus, there’s lots of good information about unique ingredients and current foodways. 

For me, it’s not just a cookbook: It’s a work of ­contemporary anthropology. I wish there was a book like this about every “somewhere” in the United States: one on Maine and New Hampshire, another on Washington State, another on Wisconsin. All of us are from somewhere, and a lot of those somewheres are vanishing because of forces just like those commodity-farmed shrimp.  

“After Katrina,” Besh says, “I made the decision to procure as much as I could locally — last year [my ­restaurants] spent $15 million on local groceries. I’m doing what I can to make sure we don’t lose the passion, the soul or the vitality of my home.” 

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a celebrated food and wine critic. Nominated seven times for James Beard Foundation Awards — the Oscars of the food world — she has received four awards for her restaurant and wine columns. Since 2001, her work has been regularly featured in the Best Food Writing anthologies. Her new book, Drink This: Wine Made Simple (Ballantine, 2009), is being released in November.

For more recipes from Besh’s My New Orleans, including the Shrimp Remoulade pictured above, see the Web Extras! at the top right of this page.

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