2018 Small Town Chefs: Joshua Hebert
How a self-taught Napoleonville boy brought fine dining to Ascension
Growing up in a town like Napoleonville, with fewer than seven hundred residents, one has to exercise some creativity in order to stay occupied. Chef Joshua Hebert, who today is executive chef and general manager of The Cabin Restaurant and Events (as well as The Coffee House at the Cajun Village, and the soon-to-reopen Bernadette’s, all on the same compound in Gonzales) spent his small-town childhood filling his time—and his belly—by eating.
“We lived right next my grandmother, my mom’s mom. Mawmaw Pie was her nickname when we were growing up. So I remember eating. All the time. I’d eat at her house, then I’d go back home and eat, then I’d go back over there,” said Hebert. “When I was little, I was learning, ‘cause I was always eating while they were cooking.”
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To this day, Hebert credits Mawmaw Pie (an adaptation of her former nickname “Sweetie Pie,” whose real first name was Janith), as his greatest culinary influence, along with his mother Jacqueline. Hebert’s voracious appetite—for his grandmother’s cooking, for observing and absorbing all of her culinary techniques along the way, and in particular his habit of eating directly out of the pot on the stove—earned him the childhood nickname “Potlicker.”
“My grandmother cooked all the time, and while she was cooking I would eat out of her pots on the stove, and she would tell me how she was doing something, or why she was doing something,’” mused Hebert. “And I learned that way, that really influenced me when I first started.”
As a result, when Hebert first began working as a personal chef in the early days of his career, he veered towards the comfort of the Southern and Cajun dishes he grew up with. While attending LSU, first to study music as a trombone player (not too far off from Emeril Lagasse’s musical roots as a percussionist; Hebert’s also pleased to note he was in the Golden Band from Tigerland when the Tigers won the 2004 national championship), and later concentrating on business, Hebert found himself gaining joy from cooking dishes like jambalaya for roommates and coworkers at the health club he managed in those days. Occasionally, he would get requests to cook meals for people in their homes as a private chef, and eventually he says his now-wife Jamie said, “Well, why don’t you put some prices together and go do it?” Hebert took her suggestion and has yet to look back.
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In those early days, Hebert gave cooking demonstrations and taught classes in the display kitchen at the former B.D. Kitchen store in Town Center in Baton Rouge, cooking anniversary dinners and teaching private classes for people in their homes and catering birthday parties and baby showers. As word spread, Hebert’s private chef clients began to hire him to cater board meetings and other get-togethers for their businesses, and the transition from the eager kid his family called “Potlicker” into a full-fledged professional chef had begun.
As far as training goes, Hebert is entirely self- and family-taught. He had a friend, Chris “Pepe” Gunn, who attended the Louisiana Culinary Institute (and is a contractor doing roofing these days), whom Hebert said was a big help when it came to resources early in his career.
“He lent me his textbooks, and I read through all of them. I got some of the technical stuff, and I’d watch videos online. More of the technical stuff and the terminology and things, I learned on my own,” said Hebert. “The cooking came naturally. And I cooked what I knew.”
But Hebert says that as he ventured further into the culinary world, he wanted to branch out and incorporate more new and unfamiliar ingredients.
“I got out there and bought stuff that I didn’t know what it tasted like and tried to incorporate that into what I already knew. Anything that I don’t know what it is, I will buy it or order it from a vendor. Especially with a lot of these farms out here that are growing things that are unfamiliar. Or the things that are on Food Network, the trendy things that people are cooking all over that are not very well known [here]. I’ll buy it, try it raw, cook it a few different ways, see how I like it, and then use it,” said Hebert. Because while Hebert’s menu at The Cabin consists of plenty of classic Cajun and Southern staples, playfulness and creativity are still very much a part of his culinary philosophy.
“I don’t pigeonhole anybody. If my assistants in the kitchen want to do an Indian dish at our Cajun restaurant, I’m like ‘All right, let’s do it! Let’s find a way to infuse some Louisiana into it.’ I don’t pigeonhole myself either really, why do that?”
This open-mindedness comes into play in the ever-changing Chef’s Features that supplement the primary menu at The Cabin and is particularly evident in the menu for Bernadette’s Table, the monthly “upscale-casual” five-course dinner event. Hebert curates these chef’s tables with the hopes of reopening Bernadette’s for regular service every weekend beginning sometime next year. Previously, the offerings at Bernadette’s were exclusively classic French fine dining offered by appointment only; the restaurant eventually closed when the previous chef, Gerard Hemery, retired. In September 2016, when Hebert came on as executive chef and general manager of The Cabin and its neighboring properties, he had a plan to eventually re-open Bernadette’s for regular service with help from Chef de Cuisine Adam Reeson. Hebert hopes that his Bernadette’s Table events will provide him with the feedback he needs to create more permanent menus for the restaurant.
[Our review of Bernadette's Table.]
“The chef’s tables are letting us experiment with what we may want to put on the menu and see what the customers are requesting for the area,” said Hebert. “Not super fine dining, but upscale casual, rotating menu, fresh ideas, not the same old steak and potatoes or Cajun seafood kind of thing.”
In re-opening Bernadette’s, Hebert’s aim is to provide the continually growing Ascension community with a delicious and memorable dining experience, without having to drive thirty minutes to an hour to get to Baton Rouge or New Orleans. “If we can give them the same or better quality of experience that’s five minutes from their house, I think that would be a great thing for Ascension.”
“Quality” is not a word that Hebert uses lightly. In addition to sourcing the vast majority of his produce and meat for Bernadette’s from local farms like Fullness Organic Farm, Goppelt Farms, and Iverstine Farms Butcher, he has cultivated his own herb garden to incorporate into his dishes, with the hopes of expanding it in the future. The bed for the garden provides an example of Southern ingenuity at its finest, as Hebert uses cleaned-out metal drip pans discarded from Robert’s Oil Distributorship next door.
“We grow parsley and green onions for when we do boudin, we grow all the herbs to make our steak butter, and all the dishes we need herbs for at Bernadette’s, we plant the herbs for there, and use them,” said Hebert. “That way they’re here and we just water ‘em, we don’t use any chemicals or anything like that. It’s good food for the bunnies on the property as well.”
These days, in addition to gardening and juggling multiple roles as chef and manager, Hebert and his wife, Jamie, along with their two sons Jackson (four) and James (one), a yellow lab named Honey, and a cat named Pasqually, live in Pierre Part, but are planning to move to Ascension Parish before Jackson begins school and Jamie starts the Library Sciences masters program at LSU this fall. It takes a great amount of innate skill and talent to keep a forty-six-year-old restaurant like The Cabin alive and fresh, along with providing unpretentious gourmet dining like Bernadette’s to the Ascension community, but Hebert remains up to the task, partially thanks to all that early training in the kitchen of his Mawmaw Pie.
“I was immersed in it my whole life,” said Hebert. “Whenever I try to make a menu for somebody or create a dish, it just comes easy because I have so much flavor in my head from being a fat kid.”
The Cabin and Bernadette's
5405 Highway 44, Gonzales, Louisiana View Map