Cocha

Updated on December 29: A version of this piece was first published in August 2016. Cocha will open properly on January 6 for lunch and dinner and a brunch on Saturdays and Sundays. Chef Jourdan Fulbright helms the kitchen, and the impressive, international menu can be found in full at cochabr.com.

Los Angeles might be Mecca for the starry-eyed, but after twenty years out on the coast, Saskia Spanhoff has come home to give her fantasy a shot.

“I’ve always wanted to do a restaurant,” she said in a recent interview. “Just he and I running it.”

“He” is Spanhoff’s husband Enrique Pinerua, and home is Baton Rouge, where the two will open Cocha later this fall in a downtown block just around the corner from Main Street Market.

The couple is encouraged by proximity to the weekend farmers market crowd, a demographic they think will enjoy their locally-sourced, GMO-free, organic-when-possible offerings. Cocha (the name comes from a term of endearment Pinerua has for his wife) will open its doors seven days a week, with dinner on Thursday through Sunday and brunch on both Saturday and Sunday. On those days with dinner, the kitchen will remain open after lunch to accommodate both the office rush and the late-afternoon wanderers. A fine-dining element to the service will not trouble the laid-back atmosphere, or "Southern sensibility." (Pinerua referenced his experience as a new Louisianan and local restaurant owner: “The welcome has been immediate.”)

Cocha will take notes from Pinerua’s Venezuelan heritage, but the couple hastens to quash even one rumor that they’re fronting a “Latin fusion” joint. Theirs is a restaurant without borders. Even if they did stick to heritage alone, Cocha could call on the cuisine of the Lebanese and the Dutch too. (Spanhoff is a second-generation Dutch immigrant.) “And Enrique’s mother was Basque,” added Spanhoff. “Is Basque!” Pinerua countered, laughing. “She’s still with us!” 

But the couple’s travels and Spanhoff’s experience as a sommelier promise a worldly spread with a bias toward vegetables. The menu descriptor they wield most, and not without weight, is “beautiful.” 

“I think the timing is right,” said Spanhoff. In the decades since she left, Baton Rouge has sprawled and bloated, but even as traffic lurches to nightmare levels—or maybe even because of this horror that unites us all—the demand has risen for pedestrian-friendly culture, accommodated, ideally, by the revival of downtown.

“You can see construction everywhere you look!” pointed out Spanhoff. And the success of Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods tells Spanhoff and Pinerua that enough health-minded locals are hungry for lighter, more thoughtful fare.

Construction is underway—though the buzz of machinery does little to obscure the vision Spanhoff paints me, in wide gestures, of communal tables and an open kitchen. Even with a general contractor hired, they can’t stay away from the day-to-day of the restaurant’s progress. “It’s a great way to get to know the whole building,” said Spanhoff. “And if the plumbing breaks down the line, we’ll know how to fix it.” 

View the lunch, brunch, and dinner menus at cochabr.com.