Standing Strong

Post-Katrina, New Orleans chef and ex-marine John Besh has doubled his number of restaurants and quadrupled his resolve to perpetuate the culinary soul of his beloved city.

Lolis Elie
Posted: August 1, 2007

In those first weeks after the federal levees gave way and Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters inundated New Orleans, conversations with John Besh revolved around two themes: self-reliance and faith in his city.

Most New Orleanians felt abandoned by a government that seemed unwilling or unable to locate Louisiana on the map. Many Americans questioned whether the birthplace of jazz was worth saving. Besh would neither blame the feds nor surrender the city. Then, as now, he dedicated himself to proving that American ingenuity and Creole cuisine are sufficiently powerful forces for rebuilding this city and the culture for which it stands.

Having won the Best Chef Southeast award from The James Beard Foundation in 2006, and having defeated Mario Batali on Iron Chef America, he has the bona fides to be taken seriously. What's more, in the two years since the storm, the Besh family of restaurants has grown from two eateries to four. Restaurant August, the six year old flagship, and Besh Steak at Harrah's Casino have been joined by Lüke, a downtown brasserie, and La Provence, a Creole-inflected Provençal restaurant across Lake Ponchartrain from the city. Now Besh has twice as many plates on which to present his case.

At August, he makes his point with a soft shell crab "BLT" served on pain perdu. At the steakhouse, aged beef shares the menu with shrimp rémoulade and fried oysters bordelaise. At La Provence, house-raised baby lamb is roasted and served with local onions, fava beans, and morels; and at Lüke, the Monday brasserie fare includes red beans and rice. But whether diners realize it or not, everything they eat at Besh's restaurants these days goes back in part to the vats of red beans and rice the marine-turned-chef cooked in the days after Hurricane Katrina.

"Monday afternoon, the day that the city flooded, one of the senators in Lafayette asked for people to come in with boats. Wednesday morning, we showed up at 4 a.m.; probably 250 people left Lafayette with boats to come help out. I came in with a lot of those fellows," recalls Blake LeMaire.

LeMaire and Besh met in the marine reserves while both were studying at Louisiana State University. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, they were deployed in separate units, but they kept in touch and have been friends ever since. While doing rescue work in the city, LeMaire called Besh to tell him that Restaurant August had been spared the brunt of the flooding and the looting. Besh, whose wife and sons had evacuated to North Carolina before the storm, suggested that LeMaire help him gather provisions and cook for the relief workers who were arriving in the city. "With the help of some of my former marine buddies and text messaging, we were able to put together about four 55-gallon drums of gasoline and 100 gallons of diesel fuel and six crawfish pots, along with burners, about a ton of rice, and 700 pounds of red beans," says Besh, who was born across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans. They served soldiers, relief workers, and whoever showed up, from a Wal-Mart parking lot.

That good deed brought Besh good luck. As the situation in New Orleans stabilized, some of the folks he'd fed for free hired him to provide catered meals for the oil company workers repairing pipelines, the firefighters, the government relief workers, and the odd television crew. When August reopened, a month after the storm, there were few customers in the city. The profits from the catering jobs subsidized the restaurant's operations.

The experience of the storm proved formative. Besh had seen the plight of New Orleanians waiting for assistance from distant Washington. He had seen how government regulation and bureaucracy had thwarted the efforts of many of the private citizens who wanted to come in with boats or provisions to assist storm victims. And he had seen the smiles that real New Orleans food brought to the faces of the people he served in the days after the storm. He resolved then to narrow the circle of people and institutions on which he relies to run his restaurants. And he resolved to plant his own cooking even more firmly in the bedrock of Creole cuisine and the European foods that had influenced it.

"It made me think twice about the role of government in our lives and the role of insurance and these safety nets that we take for granted," he says. "I need to make decisions in my life, as best I can, that will put me in a situation where I will be less dependent.

"Strength comes from individuals working with each other on a community level versus with people far removed. The more self-sufficient I am, the less I rely on Sysco or the big national companies, and the less affected I am when some of these purveyors don't deliver or can't deliver," he continues. "So that made me dig even deeper to find my fishmonger in Slidell, Brian Cappy, who uses only Lake Ponchartrain crabs, and my oyster man, Sal Sunseri from P&J Oyster Company."

It has also meant that quintessential New Orleans dishes like gumbo and red beans and rice showed up on the fine dining menu of August. "Before, I wouldn't have had gumbo on my menu. This is something else that brought me full circle to the reason why I stayed and the reason I settled here to begin with. It's taken Katrina to shake us all up, to say, 'This is what I love.' You ask, culinarily speaking, what I dig about New Orleans? That's it. It's the tradition. All these crazy bloodlines came in and created this culture here, and it is through that that we are able to really create one of the most interesting, heartfelt, soulful menus that you just really couldn't replicate anywhere else in the country. They have great food all over the place. But is it 'their' food?"

Besh approaches the New Orleans tradition from a broad perspective. A graduate of The Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, New York, he'd intended to further his training in kitchens in France and England, but he couldn't get a work permit in those countries. He could, however, get one in Germany and found himself cooking under chef Karl Josef Fuchs in the hills of the Black Forest at Romantik Hotel Spielweg, a popular vacation spot.

"It worked out perfectly because it came at a later time and shaped my entire career. The chefs in that little region would only serve what came from their area, known as the Muenster Valley. That idea of regionalism was something that I knew existed at one time in this country, but we had strayed so far from it."

Besh has collected a set of ideals from his Louisiana upbringing, from his time in Germany, from his experiences after Hurricane Katrina. Had it not been for a pair of post-Katrina strokes of good fortune, though, those ideals might never have reached their full expression. After the storm, Hotel Monaco sold its New Orleans hotel to a company that rebranded it as a Hilton and set out to find a new chef to run its kitchen. In January 2006, five months after the storm, they contacted Besh. He and his business partner, Octavio Mantilla, agreed to take over the kitchen and then began the work of transforming what had been Cobalt Restaurant into what would become Lüke. Before they could get started on that project, Besh got a call from Chris Kerageorgiou, his mentor and the chef/owner of La Provence. Though his name was Greek, Kerageorgiou was French. For three and a half decades he had brought Provençal cuisine to Lacombe, Louisiana, a small city near where Besh grew up. Kerageorgiou, as it happened, was critically ill. He wanted desperately for his protégé to buy the restaurant and keep his vision alive. He wanted the deal done before his pending surgery. Besh and Mantilla thus ended up scrambling to open not one but two new places. In addition, Besh Steak at Harrah's Casino reopened in February 2006.

In order to assure that quality remains consistent across their four restaurants, Mantilla and Besh make partners of the general managers and executive chefs at each location. Steve McHugh, the executive chef at La Provence, had been the chef de cuisine at August for years. Drew Mire, the general manager at the restaurant, had been the manager at Artesia, the first restaurant at which Besh was executive chef. For Lüke, Besh tapped Jared Tees, the former executive chef at Bourbon House, to be his partner in the kitchen, while LeMaire serves as managing partner.

"The business model that John and I have developed acknowledges that you can't be everywhere all the time," Mantilla says. "If we're going to build more restaurants, we have to bring in great chefs, great managers, and give them part of the business."

Though the acquisition of La Provence was hectic, it came with a huge bonus: four acres of farmland behind the restaurant. On those acres, Besh raises Berkshire pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, salad greens, and some other vegetables. A few miles away, he raises Charolais cows, from which he gets beef for all the restaurants except the steakhouse.

"We make our beer in Covington. The pigs are fed the spent barley that comes from the beer, so it doesn't cost us a dime extra," he explains. "This Berkshire pig would cost us up to $20 a pound bringing it in from Iowa, from Niman ranch. But now we've started our own hog operations, and I've got a cousin who agreed to run our breeding program for us. He's in Alabama breeding the pigs, and he sends them down to us when they are about 50 pounds. The things that are high in beta carotene—the carrot trimmings, the beet trimmings—all go in, along with ground-up crawfish shells, to the chickens, so we have nice orange egg yolks."

Using whole animals could be a disadvantage: there are only so many pork chops on a pig. But Besh's dishes often contain two or three cuts of meat: the beef short ribs at Lüke are accompanied by tripe; veal cheeks at La Provence share the plate with sweetbreads; the lamb at August might include braised shoulder as well as a lamb chop. By composing dishes in this way, Besh cooks contrary to the fine dining convention of serving only the choicest cuts of meat cooked medium-rare. By slow cooking large cuts, he's able to make the choice cuts go further and also bring an appealing rusticity to white tablecloth dining.

The theme of local ingredients runs through all four Besh restaurants, but his having four places also allows the chef to focus on different aspects of New Orleans culinary heritage. In studying old menus, Besh discovered that downtown New Orleans restaurants in the 1960s and '70s, like Kolb's and Gluck's, reflected the German-Jewish character of the clientele and the owners. At Lüke, Besh's German training revives a forgotten New Orleans tradition. The menu features such Creole classics as shrimp farci and trout meunière, but it also offers choucroute and house-made sausages.

The menu at La Provence mirrors what you might see on those of restaurants along the French Mediterranean, with offerings such as tuna niçoise, paella negra, and fritto misto. The Creole touches are visible less in the preparations than in the inclusion of such local ingredients as crawfish and Louisiana black fish.

At August there are no strict rules. "When people dine at August, they are more or less subjecting themselves to the whim of the chef. They trust that the chef understands what he's doing. They're dining with a different mentality," Besh says, sipping Champagne at La Provence. "I can get away with a lot more at August than I can anywhere else. If I put any of the August food on this carte, I'd be out of business."

Whereas much of New Orleans was damaged beyond repair by post-Katrina flooding, Besh has emerged perhaps stronger. Not only has he doubled the number of restaurants he owns, he may also have hit his culinary stride. Four months before the hurricane struck, Besh and Mantilla bought August from its owner. August is certainly the chef's flagship and standard-bearer. As it goes, so goes the growing Besh empire.