Bellue's Fine Cajun Cuisine
Retired police captain, recipe developer, and raconteur Wirt Bellue dishes up inventive Cajun food in North Baton Rouge
Bellue’s Fine Cajun Cuisine on Baton Rouge’s Scenic Highway is a nondescript place with a few tables and counter spaces—but the food is slap-ya-mama delicious. At lunchtime any weekday, the parking lot is jammed.
Diners choose from gumbo, crawfish étouffée, and specials like deer chili—not to mention sixteen side dishes, including rice dressing, mustard greens with tasso, and cornbread dressing.
Lunch often includes a chat with Wirt Bellue himself, the resident chef, host, jack-of-many-trades, and the quintessential man who never met a stranger. If you’re lucky, he will join you, plopping down styrofoam cups of shrimp étouffée or lemon icebox pie (made with fresh lemons squeezed by hand) and urging you to sample them.
Clad in jeans and a polo shirt emblazoned with his name, his lean frame belying the abundance of calories at his fingertips, Bellue feels like somebody you’ve known forever. His talk is a stream-of-consciousness adventure that takes you from his childhood in North Baton Rouge to his upcoming RV trip.
A Bellue story meanders down side streets, detours, backs up, and goes forward. He opens a window on old Baton Rouge, complete with recognizable names like Billy Cannon (who was a regular at the restaurant) and Goudchaux’s. He throws in vintage expressions—certain people “would give you unshirted hell”; when a person told you something, “you could go to the bank with it.” He may drop the occasional F-bomb, but he’s so much fun you don’t notice.
Born at the old Our Lady of the Lake Hospital seventy-four years ago, Bellue has spent his life in North Baton Rouge. He was never allergic to hard work. “We’d work LSU football games selling cokes when I was fourteen,” he said during a recent interview at his lunch spot.
"Welding’s like writing; everybody’s got a different handwriting."—Wirt Bellue
In high school, he got a job with a small oil company. “One of the boys’ daddy was a foreman. We ran a lot of pipelines through people’s pastures. The old man was a welder who I just idolized. I worked myself silly for this guy. I said, ‘Doc, lemme try to see if I can weld.’ He said, “M—f—, I don’t teach anybody. You might be the son of a bitch who takes my job!’”
Bellue admits he “never did like school.” He took “some time” to graduate from Glen Oaks High School. “I lasted at LSU for a week [around 1964]. I walked around the campus, and I was like a fish out of water. They gave Daddy his money back on the tuition.”
Married at nineteen, and a father soon after, Bellue went to work as a Baton Rouge police officer in 1966. He had never lost his desire to weld, so, “I went to Capitol Welders over here on Choctaw and bought this pretty little orange welding machine for $125. Welding’s like writing; everybody’s got a different handwriting. Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught. It would be nice to have the luxury to be trained. I’d work eight hours for the police department, and I couldn’t wait to get home and weld.”
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He lived on Jean Street then and welded on the decks of lawnmowers just to get experience. “I never charged a dime,” he said. “But one day a guy with the city-parish knocked on my door and said my neighbors were starting a petition. They said, ‘If we allow you to run an industrial business, somebody will open a bar next.’
“It’s funny how one door shuts on you and another one opens up,” said Bellue, who searched for a location where he could weld in peace. He found it in a shop on Scenic Highway that was up for lease by a local salesman and musician named Mickey Schittone.
“Mickey Schittone sold suits at Goudchaux’s and played music. I came over and talked to him.” A man named McCulley, who was a metal artist, had started the welding shop years before. He’d load his pickup truck with kids and take them to Memorial Stadium to see Istrouma play football. “Old Man McCulley moved out on Hooper Road. He made metal art, eagles. When you’d go out Hooper Road, you’d see eagles. One of them was in the LSU Museum.” Another welder, Mr. Cotton, took his place, and when he moved out of the shop, Bellue moved right in. “Mickey had been charging him $75, but he let me rent the little shop for $37.50 a month. An old elderly lady, Mrs. Blackwell, was the grandmother of the Amedee boys. She lived in a little bitty house behind the shop. The shop didn’t have running water, so we used her water and paid her water bills. The account is still in her name.”
Bellue discovered that the shop he was leasing was in the middle of a hotbed of football. “This little block here had [former LSU standout and Heisman Trophy winner] Billy Cannon, [former LSU quarterback and placekicker Lynn] Amedee. Pete McCulley, the son of Old Man McCulley, was coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Mr. Disch’s daughter Nettie married him.”
In an industrial area across the road from the ExxonMobil refinery (which began in 1909 as East State Standard Oil, or Esso), Bellue started his welding business while still working as a Baton Rouge police officer. (He would retire as a captain in 1997.)
“I did repair work, built barbecue pits, outdoor trailers. I always loved making smokers. A lot of my black customers wanted me to make a smoker from two oil drums, one on top of the other. After building a bunch of them, I cooked some pork loins on one. They were so good. Daddy always had a smokehouse when I was growing up.”
"All the little girls were stirring pots. That was some of the best damn food I ever ate in my life—rice dressing, homemade bread. It’s hard to find food to beat it.”
In 1968 a motorcycle wreck and a bout of on-the-job fisticuffs tore up his back and a shoulder. He was forced to sit out eighteen months and go on Workman’s Compensation. That meant putting the welding on hold, too. “I couldn’t engage in business while I was on workman’s comp,” he said.
Never one to sit idle, Bellue used his forced respite to try his hand at cooking. He had come up on plain, meat-and-potatoes fare, but he wanted to branch out.
“Growing up, my mother was a really good cook,” he said. “She made healthy food, not fried. She pressure-cooked a lot. Every morning we had to drink a pint of orange juice, not frozen. We took cod-liver oil. We ate cream of wheat, oatmeal.”
Spicy Cajun food wasn’t in his mom’s vocabulary. “She basically used salt and black pepper,” he said.
He discovered Cajun cooking when his welding employee, who lived in Fordoche, invited him over. “He told me, ‘Man, I want you to come home and meet my family.’ I met this old man and lady who were his grandfather and grandmother. His grandmother could not speak English. All the little girls were stirring pots. That was some of the best damn food I ever ate in my life—rice dressing, homemade bread. It’s hard to find food to beat it.”
Soon his employees were sending customers over to Bellue’s house behind the shop to sample his hog’s head cheese and boudin. “I started in that little house making boudin and sausage and giving it to my welding customers,” he said. “Word of mouth got around and people started beating on the door.”
A friend who ran a grocery store asked Bellue to make up a batch of boudin for him to sell. “Next morning he came back and said, ‘People are just having a fit over it.’ Pretty soon we were supplying four little grocery stores. So we built this new building.
“Before I built this facility in 1990, I served food on a counter in that little bitty one-bedroom house. I was living there too. People from the plants came. I knew I either had to get in or get out.”
Bellue designed and constructed many of the machines in his kitchen. One of his inventions, whose shape has been compared to a rocket ship, is a patented, temperature-controlled batch cooker that can handle 600 to 1,000 pounds of food at a time. Every dish is made from scratch, then vacuum-sealed and frozen. When food is ordered, it is thawed in hot water on a serving table that keeps 200 gallons of water at 187 degrees 24 hours a day.
Besides selling plate lunches from 8 until 5 every weekday, Bellue’s does a brisk business in Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. The smoked or fried turkey, “old-fashioned ham,” and turducken (a boneless combination of turkey, duck, and chicken) are big favorites. Gift boxes can be shipped anywhere in the country.
Bellue and his wife Rachel live behind the restaurant in a house he bought thirty years ago. “That was where the Disch family lived. Mr. [Willie] Disch loved sports. The family were all athletic. His granddaughter is [former professional triathlete] Jan Ripple.”
Over the years Bellue has bought up the entire block plus half of the next block. Step out the back door of the restaurant and you are smack dab in the middle of his various welding projects—a brass bed that needs repair, a smoker, a trailer. He hops onto a metal glider to demonstrate how it’s operated by foot power, then hops off and ushers you over to the small Ferris wheel he built. A steam-engine whistle sits atop a forty-seven-foot high pole; he urges you to yank the rope, and you jump at the deafening blast. Wind chimes made from oxygen canisters clank in the breeze. Throughout the tour, Bellue is like a kid showing off his favorite toys.
Back in the restaurant, he confides, “I enjoy my business. In the last few weeks we’ve had customers from Singapore, Japan, Germany, France, Italy. The little girls from Singapore, I took ‘em on a tour. People come here from all over the world.”
His success is surprising, he said, considering that, “We were not in a good location for retail. You didn’t get a lot of north-south traffic. But I wasn’t fixing to move. We’ve developed it over the years to where people will ride up to see us. It’s almost defying gravity to have a retail business on Scenic Highway.”
Bellue’s Cajun Cuisine
3110 Scenic Highway
Baton Rouge, La.
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.