Chef Donald Link has been chosen as a finalist in the James Beard Foundation Awards Outstanding Chef U.S. category! Chef Link joins a superior group of accomplished chefs from around the country: David Chang, Gary Danko, Daniel Humm, Paul Kahan and Nancy Silverton. In true New Orleans fashion, the celebrating goes on – New Orleans is represented in several other categories, as well. Emeril’s was honored with an Outstanding Wine Program nomination. Times picayune writer Brett Anderson was nominated for his writing in the Environment, Food Politics, and Policy category. Brett Martin, a new New Orleans resident, received a nod for his Humor article in GQ. And four fellow New Orleans chefs were nominated for Best Chef: South—Justin Devillier, John Harris, Tory McPhail and Alon Shaya, in addition to Sue Zemanick, up for Rising Star Chef of the Year.

The James Beard Foundation Awards recognize outstanding achievement within the food and wine industry and are considered to be the “Oscars of the food world.” The winners will be announced live from New York on May 7, 2012.

I was always in love with the idea of eating out in New Orleans, but I was never in love with actually eating out in New Orleans. The food was filling, but often uninspired. Cochon changed all that. Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski raised the bar on the rich culinary traditions of the Louisiana bayou and gave the NOLA dining scene what it was missing—a passionate, pork-filled point of view. Sure, there are roasted oysters and gumbo, but there’s also fried boudin, stuffed pig’s foot, and unforgettable rabbit and dumplings. And while too many of the city’s dining rooms feel dusty, Cochon’s postindustrial Warehouse District space is like its food: reverent of the past but definitely in the present. Even better, seven years on, Cochon’s approach still drives countless U.S. chefs to get down with all the nasty bits and play with their own traditions.

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Although it varies from cook to cook, gumbo is south Louisiana’s signature dish – a complex stew pot thickened by a roux, a mixture of fat and flour that’s carefully cooked into a paste with color ranging from blond to dark brown, depending on what’s going into the pot. When I was growing up, we had chicken-and-sausage gumbo or seafood gumbo, but it was rare to find a combination of the two – probably because the smoked sausage there can be a bit overpowering. However, in this gumbo made with chicken, shrimp and tasso – spicy smoked pork that’s a staple of south Louisiana cooking – the three ingredients complement one another because the distinctive flavor of tasso provides good balance, keeping the shrimp and chicken on an even playing field. Maybe you’ve heard that only little old ladies in Louisiana know how to make a roux. That’s not totally true. But it does take care and attention. I generally make my roux somewhat lighter for gumbos that have seafood in them because it helps the flavor stand out, but even a lighter roux requires vigilance and constant whisking. One little bit of flour stuck in the bottom of the pot can burn, screwing up the flavor of the whole gumbo. Just remember to whisk slowly. They call roux “Cajun napalm” for good reason: If a flying drop lands on your skin, it’ll give you a good sizzle. That shit hurts. – CHEF DONALD LINK

Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski, Cochon’s chefs and co-owners, have not reinvented Cajun cuisine. The crowds (Cochon may be the toughest reservation in town) and accolades (the partners have won three Beard Awards between them) just make it appear that way. Spend a few minutes with Cochon’s flaky crawfish pies, restorative rabbit and dumplings or signature crisped pork cake with turnips and cracklins and it’s clear the chefs respect their source material too much to modify it beyond recognition. Part of the thrill of eating in this post-industrial Warehouse District space — or in Cochon Butcher, the post-industrial sandwich shop and meat shop next door — is that you can’t tell if the kitchen is bucking for brownie points from Acadiana natives — by dishing up authentic boudin balls, squishy-hot rolls and hogshead cheese — or pandering to picky urban tastes — by making it all look like something you could serve in Seattle. The answer is that everything is the genuine article, provided you open your mind enough to imagine a Cajun grandmother roasting local goat to serve with fresh beets and peas or slathering fried alligator strips with chile-garlic aioli. If you thought you knew Cajun cooking before trying Cochon, you weren’t wrong. It just turns out there was more to learn — and love.

When chef Stephen Stryjewski was growing up, Easter meant pierogies, kielbasa and sauerkraut, and he has continued that tradition with his own family. “We always have some aspect of Polish food,” Stryjewski said. This year, he also brought the taste of Easter in Poland to Calcasieu, the special-event venue above Cochon and Cochon Butcher, where Stryjewski is chef and co-owner with Donald Link. More than a dozen dishes were passed, family style, at Wednesday’s event….
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Dispense with labels for a moment. Forget about whether Cochon’s food is Cajun or Southern or some mash-up of New Orleans, Alice Waters and testosterone; whether a restaurant that doesn’t do table linens can play in the same league as those that do; whether a dish as neat and contained as its catsh courtbouillon should really be called courtbouillon. Let’s instead allow all stakeholders in South Louisiana culture to beat their chests over
what Cochon’s food brings to light; a native food tradition spanning parish, swamp and prairie that has no weaknesses. Yes, there is a good deal of pig worship on display. But as often as not, pork is revered for what it offers its plate-mates, be it the housemade bacon upping the score of a fried oyster sandwich or braised pork cheeks melting into the background on forkfuls of fresh pear, goat feta and crisp kraut-potato cake. Co-chefs
and owners Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski are not ones to shy away from fat, but their food has a much broader range than the fashionable burly-cooking sold in restaurants Cochon easily outclasses. The chefs intuit where herbs, produce and pickling can lighten a dish’s load. Salads and vegetable sides speak of the seasons, seafood to the bounty beyond the farm. If the cooking at Cochon — and the neighboring café and “swine bar”
Cochon Butcher — looks and tastes new, it only goes to show what a difference a fresh set of eyes make.

BEST BETS: Grilled shrimp with chow chow, fried boudin balls with pickled peppers, rabbit and dumplings.

…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 pheromonal response from such an array of diners.
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… But these dishes make up just one part of a year’s meals taken at the professional table, one sleeve in the accordion folder marked “2010 Delicious.” Add meals I ate out of town on assignment or off the clock or on the way to the clock, and the catalog swells. There is, for example, the sandwich of deep-fried oysters and house-made bacon I had this year at Cochon in New Orleans, served on white Pullman bread with a chili-spiked mayonnaise…

The Louisiana cochon, a crisped pork cake plated with turnips, cabbage and cracklins, is not the best dish at Cochon. The fried oyster and bacon sandwich is. Or is it the stewy ham hock that has recently been showing up with shell peas and greens? It’s probably the ham hock, unless of course you arrive one night craving rabbit (fall-apart tender and submerged in broth) and dumplings. Whatever the case, the best new dish to recently emerge from Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski’s kitchen involves nothing more than a single poached yard egg, roasted mushrooms, a grits cake and a mahogany sauce that bears a resemblance to demiglace. The dish encapsulates many of the factors — a sinewy approach to ingredient worship, an expansive view of both Cajun and Southern cuisine, an insistence that cooking heartily does not preclude cooking with delicacy that have made Cochon the most celebrated new New Orleans restaurant in recent memory. It also further complicates the question that vexes every party that occupies a hard wooden table in this fiercely traditional but also sui generis restaurant: What to order?

Leave it to my adopted second home of New Orleans and always unpredictable charms to provide my favorite food moment of 2006, a year in which my dining experiences in Italy and across America were exceptionally rewarding. A friend and Louisiana native had invited two-dozen guests to his home for Thanksgiving. As we neared the start of the feast and the end of our second round of cocktails, he confessed he had gotten off schedule the day before and had not allowed enough time to thaw the two turkeys he was to roast on his outdoor grill. But rather than panic, he looked around and found his solution right in front of him: the heated swimming pool. He plopped the plastic-encased fowl into the water, watched them bob back to the surface, and four or five hours later he fished the perfectly defrosted birds from their bath. We joked the chlorine had mad the beast meat a little whiter, but other than that, the taste was delicious, and we were left with a tale we’ll dine on for years. (By the way, do not try this at home; it only works if there’s New Orleans mojo involved). I also was blessed to find more traditional dining pleasures in a host of other places this year, most notably the Italian city of Torino and the surrounding Piedmont region; Washington, D.C.; both Portland, Ore., and Portland, Maine; Anchorage, Alaska; wine countries of California, Ohio and Virginia; and my home base of New York. The best of those experiences are offered here in my annual buffet of five top meals and 25 top dishes of the year (listed in no particular order).

5. Cochon, New Orleans This contemporary Cajun restaurant, an offshoot of chef Donald Link’s equally fine and more upscale Herbsaint, is probably the best eatery to open in New Orleans post-Katrina. I’ve eaten there at least five times and have made a pig of myself on each occasion. I cannot resist the signature Louisiana cochon du lait with turnips, cabbage and cracklings; roasted corn cala; fried boudin with pickled peppers; smoked ham hocks with braised greens; rabbit and dumplings; nor any of the other two-dozen items on the menu.

The Cajun Factor For those interested in the big flavors that lie at the intersection of urban New Orleans and rustic Cajun country, Cochon, a few blocks upriver from Emeril’s, is a can’t-miss stop. The chefs and owners — Donald Link, who also owns the well-regarded Herbsaint in the Central Business District, and Stephen Stryjewski, a sous chef at that restaurant — opened Cochon in 2006, a few months after Katrina. The dining room looks out through walls of windows, and its brick walls and bare wooden furniture glow in soft light. It is a highbrow roadhouse, a juke joint near Neil Young University. The food is head-shakingly good: delicate fried rabbit livers on toast points with a fiery pepper jelly; oysters roasted in the heat of a wood fire; fried cauliflower with a chili vinegar sauce; a gumbo of shrimp and deviled eggs. This is not bad for starter plates, with a glass of bourbon from Black Maple Hill and a chaser of Miller High Life. Afterward matters get serious. Main dishes include a marvelous soft Louisiana cochon, a kind of Cajun version of suckling pig, slow-cooked and then crisped, served with turnips, cabbage and crackling skin, as well as a perfect sandwich of deep-fried oysters and house-made bacon on white Pullman bread, with a chili-spiked mayonnaise. A fellow could eat that for days. And there is a simple salad: cucumber and herbs in vinegar, lightly pickled. It will be familiar to anyone who has ever eaten a banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwich.

In a city synonymous with eating, it’s hard to know where to begin…
Don’t let the phase “contemporary Cajun” scare you; there’s no trickery about the food at Cochon. Devoted to protecting old-style traditions, chef/co-owners Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski turn out splendid boudin, andouille, and smoked bacon, which you can also buy at the newly opened Butcher, located in the same building. Order absolutely anything: wood-fired oyster roast, ham hock with lima bean hoppin’ John, catfish court bouillon. And whatever you do, don’t leave without trying the fresh chunk-pineapple and cornmeal upside-down cake, slightly sticky with caramel sauce. The last bite will haunt you for days.