Continental Magazine
Native Son Chef Donald Link just won’t leave his beloved city of New Orleans
Published: February 2007
By Christie Matheson

It takes more than a devastating hurricane to get Donald Link to abandon his dedication to New Orleans. The Louisiana native’s commitment runs long and deep - grown from the memory of the honest cooking he knew as a child and from the farms from which he now sources ingredients for his two restaurants.

The style of food isn’t the only thing at Cochon (French for “pig”) that comes from Louisiana. So do most of the ingredients. “We butcher all our own pigs, and we get them from a local guy. We have some really good local farmers, and we stock up on whatever is in season: fresh shell peas, lady peas, chilis. All that stuff is native,” says Link.

“We were planning for the opening of Cochon at the time of Katrina,” Link says. “But the first priority was getting Herbsaint reopened.” Reopen it did, on October 7, 2005 — “the first day they said the water was safe to drink,” Link recalls. Grateful citizens poured in every night, eagerly enjoying the menu that had been redesigned to feature whatever local farms had available. If he hadn’t done that, Link says, some of those farms might have gone out of business. “The restaurant was like a sanctuary. When we opened, it just felt like everything was going to be fine. Because at least we had this.”

Providing a haven for local residents was reason enough for Link to roll up his sleeves and get to work. The overwhelming customer response meant an insane schedule for Link and his limited staff (many on his team had been forced to evacuate). “I got pretty tired of washing dishes by the second week,” he says. He wasn’t the only one. “We had the general manager’s boyfriend, the bartenders, even a local banker washing dishes.”

Slowly but surely, though, Link’s team returned. By November 2005 his staff level was almost back to normal, and he could turn his attention to prepping for the Cochon opening. “I can’t say enough about the staff that came back after the storm. Would I have come back?” he wonders. “People came back to support the restaurant. The hours and energy that those guys and women put in was just unbelievable. I couldn’t have done any of this without them.”

Between Herbsaint and Cochon — which opened a mere six months after Herbsaint reopened — Link now has about 80 people on his payroll, enough that he’s no longer spending late nights washing dishes. But he’ll never take his restaurants for granted. “Reopening Herbsaint and opening Cochon after the storm — those were big deals,” he says. “We saw that life would go on, and new and wonderful things could happen in the wake of something like that.” Sounds like a commitment worth sticking to.