Photos by Brei Olivier
Inside Alzina Toups’ restaurant, if you can rightly call it that, there are no walls between the kitchen and the dining room. Cook (she firmly eschews being called a “chef”) and customers eat family-style, passing hand-to-hand bowls and platters of Toups’ deftly prepared, seasonally based Cajun food. She has been stirring these pots for forty years, nourishing countless priests and nuns from her regional St. Joseph’s church community, visiting bishops, in-the-know international travelers, and regulars who drive in from hours away. She celebrated her eighty-eighth birthday in August. In 2013, the Southern Foodways Alliance honored her with the Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award, presented to unsung heroes or heroines of traditional Southern foodways.
Toups entertains only one party of no fewer than ten diners at a time and no more than thirty per meal. She accepts no walk-ins. Hard-sought reservations must be made at least two weeks in advance. If you show up early, you will be obliged to wait outside, either in your vehicle or while swatting at mosquitoes as you stand in the yard. No alcohol is offered, but guests are welcome to bring their own wine or beer. Toups brews pitchers of fine iced tea; but if they run out, the pitchers are replaced with water from the tap.
“I really think it’s like a get-together,” Toups said. “Like family, because if I do one family they don’t have walk-ins. I don’t mix them with another family. It’s only for that family. It’s private. And it’s like their home; they do whatever they want. I used to do forty to fifty people, but now I want to do twenty-five to thirty.”
[Related: Chef Carol Baugnon opened her first restaurant, Grand Coteau's Creola Café, at age sixty-five.]
The place can be frustratingly hard to find. The windowless metal building where she plies her trade is located on a residential street a couple hundred feet off of Bayou Lafourche. The former welding shop was given to her by her son when he decamped for larger digs. The blue metal letters he fastened to the building to announce his mama’s providence within eroded into the humid air long ago.
She dislikes the grocery store and avoids it as much as possible, instead using seafood gathered from local fisherman, produce from nearby farms, and herbs grown in a collection of planters outside her kitchen door.She takes no short cuts. Every ingredient is chopped by hand, every pot stirred with a long wooden spoon. The flavors of her dishes are built in layers, each ingredient coaxed to give its utmost for the communal good.
Toups’ vast culinary canon spans two published cookbooks (Cajun’s Joy: Cookin’ and Eatin’ and Cooking for Life: A Cajun Guide to Healthy Eating) and a pile of composition notebooks in the corner of her kitchen. Favorites include brown sugar shrimp, crabmeat (the crabs are boiled and picked by Toups herself), and shrimp lasagna made with handmade pasta, smothered cabbage and braised pork loin, black-eyed pea jambalaya, amaretto yams, a magnificent walnut tart, lofty cakes and pies (a chocolate layer cake once auctioned at a church fair for $2,000!), heavenly dinner rolls, and freshly baked bread with every meal.
Toups grew up in Galliano on land her father purchased on a dollar-a-day salary as a “workaholic” oysterman. It’s the same land she and her family (children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren) still live on just steps from Bayou Lafourche. Her neighborhood teems with relatives.Toups remembers her mother as an extraordinary cook who wove nets for area fishermen, crocheted masterfully, and arranged flowers for their church. Both of her parents primarily spoke French at home, and she still weaves her conversations with French words and phrases delivered in her melodious Cajun lilt.
She and her late husband, David, were once self-employed shrimpers, plying the Gulf of Mexico between Texas and the mouth of the Mississippi. Those years left a deep impression on her; she wrote about them in the introduction to Cajun’s Joy: Cookin’ and Eatin’:
Grand Isle is so picturesque to the fisherman who begins trawling early in the morning with the stars and full moon setting the scene. Against the land, like a ball of fire, the rising sun reflects a beautiful orange color on the water. As the day progresses and the sun starts to set, a sight hard to forget is the silhouettes of Fort Livingston and the anchor boats with their wings spread out on Grand Terre Pass. The weather may change very fast, from calm to rough, but the beauty one has captured in their minds remains forever. I thank God everyday for letting us experience this lasting beauty.
“We worked together on his boat, our boat,” Toups said. “So after he sold the boat, I wanted to keep on working.” It was then that her son gave her his welding shop to convert into a kitchen and dining space. That the space grew into a restaurant was secondary; its initial purpose, like everything else in Toups’ life, was to serve the Catholic Church.
[Related: Chef Leah Chase: Sitting down with the Queen of Creole Cuisine]
It is customary for churches within a parish to host, on a rotating basis, monthly deanery meetings. Every seven months, the responsibility falls to St. Joseph’s Church, where Toups attends Mass each morning. Instead of cooking the deanery luncheons at the church, the new, larger space allowed Toups and the other ladies of the parish—all of whom donate the ingredients and their time free of charge—to prepare bigger repasts for the extraordinarily well attended five-to-seven-course luncheons.
Many of the priests hail from foreign countries, so Toups takes care to prepare dishes they will find comforting. “I try to accommodate each priest,” she said. “We have … Irish priests: they love cabbage and potatoes. We have priests from India that like curry. Another priest from Malaysia, who likes another kind of curry and sometimes whole fish.
“We always have about four kinds of desserts,” she said. “That’s my love. I love to do desserts. We have crème brûlée, walnut tart, pie, chocolate cake, tarte [à la] bouillie, coconut cake ...
“You know what I really like, too? I like to surprise my parish priests, especially when my son brings me fresh seafood. I’ll pack my bag and I’ll knock at their door. I’ll say ‘I’m over here today cooking you a meal.’ They get excited and they call some of their friends to come and eat. They always help. I guess they appreciate what I’m doing.”
Details. Details. Details.
117 East 132nd Street Galliano, La. (985) 632-7200
