Announcing Our 2016 Small Town Chefs

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With temperatures on the rise and school doors closing, we hope your summer plans are shaping up admirably. Are you headed to the beach? Did you book that Airbnb? And most importantly, will you be joining us for supper on June 26? 

If two months seems like inordinate lead time for your appetite, let us tease out a few details from our third annual Small Town Chefs Awards. It’s the first Sunday of the summer, set at the Tin Roof Brewery in Baton Rouge, with a four-course meal presented by our four 2016 Small Town Chef honorees, whose hard-won position was the result of a statewide search, pared down to ten finalists, and finally the winning four.

We are proud to officially present … Chef Holly Moore Schreiber, graduate of the French Culinary Institute, who has since returned home to Benton, in northwest Louisiana, to share her talents through Sainte Terre, a venue operated on family land; Chef Jean-Pierre Guidry and Chef Carl Schaubhut, the young team who’ve managed to squeeze global influences into one Covington kitchen at Bacobar; and Chef Toby Rodriguez, a culinary pied-piper devoted to reviving boucherie traditions with his Lâche Pas Boucherie, both in his hometown of Grand Coteau and for adventurous eaters as he tours the country this summer.

We couldn’t put a dinner like this on the table without our partners at the Louisiana Culinary Institute. Who better to marry the gifts of four wildly different chefs into one evening? For three years now, we’ve worked with LCI to identify the year’s Small Town Chefs winners, creative chefs and culinary professionals operating in towns under twenty-five thousand. For whatever reason—and we’ve been delighted to find each winner’s story to be so different—these exceptional cooks are off the eatin’ path; through these awards, we aim to fix that. We urge you to head north to see Chef Holly at Sainte Terre, to grab a ticket for Chef Toby’s next boucherie, to travel the world in one meal with Chefs Jean-Pierre and Carl at Bacobar, and to join us for supper in a few weeks, where you can experience all these wonders at once. 

2016 Small Town Chefs Awards
Tin Roof Brewery 
Sunday, June 26
4:30 pm–7:30 pm
$90; $80 early bird tickets available here until June 1. 

We gathered recently with our Small Town Chefs at Toby Rodriguez' sunlit apartment in Grand Coteau to begin our menu plans and start this culinary collaboration off right ... with a feast prepared by all four chefs, a bounty determined to make stomachs rumble and tables groan. For a taste of what's to come this, take a gander below:

See you this summer! Reserve your seat today.