Bringing po-boys to Kiwi TV
An LA chef who cooks cool Cajun is coming to our small screens soon, writes Steve Kilgallon.
In a downbeat sidestreet of Los Angeles’ Chinatown district comes an unexpected, brightly lit slice of pure, exported New Orleans. Here, the gregarious chef-owner Marcus August Christiana-Beniger (we’re gonna call him Marcus hereafter), who left Louisiana some 18 years ago, shows he hasn’t lost his taste for an artery-sogging cuisine that he describes thus: ‘‘if it ain’t fried, it ain’t food’’.
Marcus and his speciality, New Orleans po-boys, make a fleeting but scene-stealing outing on tonight’s episode of the Kiwis-around-the-world cooking show Kasey and Karena’s Kitchen Diplomacy, and while it may seem odd for a suburban LA diner to appear on New Zealand TV, Marcus’ luminous verbosity explains his instant appeal to any passing TV producers.
Why he would be on our screens, he admits he’s not quite sure. Why he’s cooking New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp in butter sauce for a New Zealand journalist doesn’t seem to be relevant either: he loves to cook and loves to chat. His best anecdote about New Zealand is about how you can use kiwifruit to soften crocodile meat for cooking. His chat’s not bad, and his food, incidentally, is bloody good.
Marcus’ thing is po-boys, the traditional long French bread-sandwich packed with meat or seafood. There’s 40-odd of them on the menu (and eight kinds of hot chips), and he issues a short daily paper menu and a daily special (Monday, red beans, Wednesday, white beans). But tonight, as we talk, he’s knocking up his other signature, New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp in butter sauce. The whole pound of butter that kicks off the sauce (‘‘this,’’ he says, ‘‘is not a mistake’’) and the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon lager that follows (‘‘any beer, so long as its cheap,’’ he counsels), gives an idea of the calorific nature of a sauce that also combines Worcester sauce, garlic, lemon, black pepper, hot sauce, chilli, and red onions, to provide a glutinous swimming pool for the shrimps to bathe in.
As he cooks, he relays his own tale: a familiar refrain of boy gone bad who finds himself in the kitchen. It was his grandmother who first taught young Marcus to cook (French beef stew, he still makes it).
‘‘I was a troubled kid, like a lot of people who end up in kitchens, and to try calm me down and occupy my mind she would take me to kitchens and we would work it out there,’’ he says. That led to working in pubs and diners in his native New Orleans but he’d had enough by the time he moved to Los Angeles.
‘‘I probably had the same ambitions as a lot of people who come here - I worked in film production - but I started to miss it and I began to hear my grandmother’s voice in my head saying ‘you should do it if you think you can do it better’.’’
Post-Katrina, he found and converted an old Chinese restaurant, chosen for the huge kitchen with lots of gas-powered flames, and a smoker for the speciality sausage he sells in his adjoining gourmet deli/grocer.
‘‘I never wanted to see a restaurant again, truly. To me, this is the back of my hand. But I learned to love it again, on my own terms. Back home, I’d just be another person doing it.’’
The result is his restaurant, the Little Jewel of New Orleans, a heartfelt homage to his homeland and his grandma. ’’This is a direct reflection on my childhood in New Orleans. It’s a reflection of taking the one thing I liked from all the places I went to and combining them ... it’s a pastiche of all the wonderful cultures I grew up with ... if you’re not going to do anything better than that, don’t change it.’’
Amid the life story, there’s bon mots about food in general. On style: ‘‘Southern food is not about presentation. I should glop it on to your plate and you’re licking that plate at the end.’’ Or on garnish: ‘‘If parsley doesn’t take care of it ...’’ And food prep: ’’Serve them leftovers in advance. Cook it, you can’t have it, put it in fridge ... reheat it back up, it tastes better two days later.’’
We sit down at the formica tables with a bottle apiece of Louisiana root beer, blues in the background, and sample as real an American experience as a visiting Kiwi could hope for. We’re meant to be his final customers of the day, but as Marcus stacks the chairs on the tables, a large party of elderly Southern black ladies ventures in, having been told this was the most authentic New Orleans cuisine in town. Marcus flips the chairs back over and seats them. I wander over as they begin their po-boys. Oh yes, says the oldest, this is the best.
Chef Marcus features on Kasey and Karena’s Kitchen Diplomacy, TV1, Sunday, 8.30pm.
'Southern food is not about presentation. I should glop it on to your plate and you're licking that plate at the end.' Chef Marcus