Chefs Cody & Samantha Carroll
[Editor's note: 2014 Small Town Chefs Cody and Samantha Carroll, of Sac-a-Lait and Hot Tails, now star on the Food Network series Cajun Aces.]
Just up the road from the pricey vacation homes lining the banks of False River, an oxbow lake left behind by a Mississippi on the move, the Louisiana cuisine that has informed this little bend of Pointe Coupee Parish is being rejuvenated by the married chef team of Cody and Samantha Carroll.
In April of 2010, just a few months after their graduation from the Louisiana Culinary Institute in Baton Rouge, the couple opened Hot Tails Restaurant on Hospital Road and in that short time have become rather celebrated chefs in South Louisiana. Their numerous awards fill a china cabinet in one corner of their homey restaurant, among them a silver platter naming Cody “King of Seafood” from the 2013 New Orleans Food and & Wine Experience’s Grand Tasting, edging out some legendary competition with a Louisiana speckled trout perdu and red swamp crawfish, accompanied by sweet corn and blue crab callas, whipped Creole potato salad, house-pickled banana pepper, charred green onion and sassafras, and Tabasco sabayon.
Cody has a lean swagger to him, speaking confidently about what he wants to do with his life. “I always knew I was going to be a chef, and I always worked for myself on the farm, I never really worked for anybody. It’s not that I had a problem with authority. It’s just I had that kind of mentality where I knew I’d run my own business.”
Cody grew up in the tiny community of Batchelor, just a few miles north of New Roads. “I started the crawfish ponds. This was right before culinary school. I worked them for about a year, fished them myself, established the relationships with all the people I sold crawfish to and then I went back to culinary school. That’s why we came back here, because I’d already built up a name with the crawfish ponds and me growing up here.”
Samantha and Cody met as culinary students. She seems not far removed from the sweet Gonzales girl that spent her high school years working at a local café. She entered culinary school after her graduation from East Ascension High, and there she met Cody. “Once we had a relationship, we realized that whatever we wanted to do in the future, we wanted to do it together,” she said.
They work and cook together and are one of those couples that finish each other’s sentences. Their narrative becomes intertwined like the cords of a rope when discussing the King of Seafood award.
“Second place at the seafood cook-off was the chef at Arnaud’s,” said Cody. “And third was Tomas Bistro in New Orleans. These guys have been chefs…”
“...longer than we’ve been alive!” interjected Samantha.
The menu at Hot Tails is pulled directly from the Carrolls’ lives. “I do a lot with any kind of fish,” said Cody. “I grew up fishing in Grand Isle. But I also grew up on a farm and was exposed to pork, cattle, deer, squirrel, rabbit—we hunted all that.”
When asked by this reporter, a noted lover of anything squirrel, if they served it in the restaurant, Cody’s eyes opened wide and he shook his head. This has come up before.
“We can’t! I wish!” said Cody.
“If we could, we would,” Samantha added.
The restaurant is a manifestation of their lives. One wall of the dining room is constructed with pallets from the grain co-op Cody’s been dealing with his whole life. Gesturing around the dining room, Cody said, “This is from a beachhead of a plantation that we farm. All this tin is from the roof of an old barn on my friend’s property. We got some of the light fixtures from the Caterie in Baton Rouge when it burned down. My daddy and my brother and I killed all the deer you see mounted on the wall.”
Samantha said, “These are all pieces of us.”
Cody’s inspiration for the menu at Hot Tails is simple. “We wanted to do food we love to eat. I love poboys. I love burgers, seafood platters, charbroiled oysters. If we are going to do it, we want to make a menu of stuff we want to eat."
Samantha added, “And make a menu that we have complete control of.”
“We’ve got to do every detail better than the next person,” said Cody. “Better bread, better lettuce, down to how we cut our lettuce, down to better tomatoes, better pickles, better sauce, down to how we bread something. All of our breadings, seasonings, and sauces are homemade. A lot of people use the store-bought stuff. We use our own seafood boil that was developed even before the restaurant.”
The couple scoffs at the growing practice of using pre-cooked ingredients.
“They are taking the fun out of it,” offered Samantha. “This past food show, we didn’t even go because it’s all just stuff in a bag. Just boil this up and serve it. Fry this up and serve it. We just hang out in the produce section and look at all the new produce they have—actual things to cook with.”
As a demonstration of their ideals, they brought out their gumbo. The dark chunky broth sits in a small individual cast-iron pan on a wooden serving board, a sphere of rice adrift in a dark lake of okra and fat, juicy shrimp. The flavor transcends the typical cocktail of roux and okra—there is at first a smokiness lingering in each spoonful followed by a quick spicy bite. The vegetables are neither too chunky nor do they disappeared in the smothering, but coalesce into the rare gumbo that is actually better than you’ll find cooked at any of the hundred camps lining False River.
Adept at the classics, the Carrolls are also willing to go out on a limb with the food they love.
“We got invited to cook for the Miss USA pageant,” said Samantha. “Growing up we always had chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and gravy, so our take on turning this into a Louisiana dish is to take black skillet pan-fried alligator over hand-mashed mirliton with a white remoulade and pickled mustard seeds. It looked just like chicken fried steak; but it was alligator, remoulade, and mirliton. It was the best thing ever. Everyone raved about it, at least everyone that would eat alligator. Some people thought we were joking.”
Cody was careful to explain that they are not after some kind of culinary stunt or pensive deconstructions of dishes. “I like to move the flavors around,” he said, gesturing as if working in oils. “Like with the pickled mustard seed—a lot of times you have a Creole mustard in a remoulade, so the pickling gives that tanginess and bite with the mustard seeds on top, and it intensifies that flavor of the white remoulade. Plus, it is so cool-looking.”
One of their most celebrated inventions is their take on a fried catfish sandwich. “You mean ‘The Sangwich,’” laughed Samantha. “One of our chefs made that up. He would fix himself a fish ‘sangwich,’ as he’d call it, and we added it to the menu.”
The Sangwich is a mountain of flavors and textures, stabbed in the top by a steak knife with a side order of thick home fries in a little metal bucket. It encapsulates and intensifies what is great about a fried fish sandwich. It is at once tangy and savory, crunchy and delicate, rich and airy.
“We make our own tartar sauce—it’s actually got tartar sauce and remoulade—then we make our blue cheese and pecan coleslaw, which gives a spiciness and nuttiness,” said Cody.
This attention to detail is seemingly endless. “We make our own salt pork. We pickle our own peppers,” Cody mentioned.
Samantha said, “One of our friends came by the restaurant the other day and had one of the appetizers we top with our pickled peppers, and she always jokes with us about how much we do in house and when do we have time to sleep. She said, ‘These peppers are so good, do y’all make these too?’ I told her we make those in the back. My friend was all, ‘Are you serious? I was joking!’”
Currently, the Carrolls are scouting locations for a new restaurant in Baton Rouge or New Orleans to create an upscale Louisiana dining experience. But of course, they are going to do it their way.
“The dilemma we have is that we want to seat eighty to one hundred people,” said Cody. “I don’t want to be a two-hundred-seater monster. But you pay a lot of money for a piece of property that could only seat a hundred people…It’s a dilemma.”
Samantha added, “We want to stay true to the size that keeps it comfortable and personal.”
They are after more than a different restaurant experience, though. They want to add a coveted James Beard award to their trophy case.
Regarding the Beard award, Cody laid his ambitions bare: “When you are young, it’s what you want to do. It’s not about the award. It’s about letting the world see our cuisine. Once the James Beard Foundation notices your cooking, it draws attention to you and all the chefs around you. It puts it on a national playing field.”
He is aware there is plenty of competition at that level, both personally and culturally. “In the world spotlight, when you’re the best—and in the ‘70s and ‘80s with Emeril Lagasse and Paul Prudhomme, Louisiana cuisine was the best—they are going to try to knock you down. It’s our time to come back from that.”
“The thing that put us on the map were the techniques like blackening and things that established what Louisiana cuisine is,” said Samantha. “And we’ve got a lot of great chefs whose restaurants are still open and still amazing, but they aren’t going to be around forever. It’s time for us to put our spin on it, what Louisiana cooking means for our generation.”
Just by their spirit—and a bite of the Sangwich—the Carrolls are likely to add their names to that list of Louisiana culinary giants.
Details. Details. Details.
Hot Tails Restaurant
1113 Hospital Road
New Roads, La.
(225) 638-4676 • hottailsrestaurant.com
For a sneak peek of the chefs at work, watch this mouthwatering video of Chefs Cody and Samantha sizzling up their black grouper at the Louisiana Culinary Institute, in preparation for our Small Town Chefs Award Dinner, where guests formed a daunting line to taste the Carrolls' much-lauded cuisine.