Photos by Sam Hanna, courtesy of Chef Eric Cook.
Chef Eric Cook, photographed at his restaurant Gris-Gris in New Orleans.
In Chef Eric Cook’s notes—a yellow legal pad scrawled with recipes, stream of consciousness journaling, little drawings (he calls it the ‘serial killer notebook’)—is a list of potential names for his cookbook. Listed in his “pharmacist’s handwriting”: “The Guilt of Success,” “Eat This,” “Bite the Hand That Feeds You,” “Return to Simplicity,” “Sense of Place”. How to sum up his thirty-year career in New Orleans cuisine, but more than that—a sacred and inherited food culture that had come to shape his life, his world—in just a few words?
“These are dishes that represent the evolution of culture over hundreds of years, the influence of tradition and local ingredients,” said Cook. “It’s a food culture that continues to become more and more diverse. It’s evolving and it’s relevant, and it’s happening right now. It’s modern. It’s a story. That’s what it is. I don’t just want to tell you my story, I want to feed it to you. I want you to understand it, and smell it, and taste it.”
Modern Creole is what he landed on, emphasizing a historic, tradition-infused cuisine as a contemporary phenomenon, an ongoing story. To be published on September 17, 2024 with a foreword by Gordon Ramsay, the cookbook is an extension of Cook’s oeuvre of “simple cooking,” a hallmark at his restaurants Gris-Gris and Saint John. It has always been about elevating the food that beckons Louisianans to the table. “That’s what I think the story is about: home,” he said. “The kitchen is the heart of the home. And when people come to the table, that’s what it’s all about. Everything stops.”
“Traditional gathering food, that’s what we have here in South Louisiana. It’s indigenous. What they do, what my mom did, what the grandparents did, it’s been going on for hundreds of years. And it’s just simplicity.” —Chef Eric Cook
This was how it was in the kitchen that raised Cook, anyway. Born the youngest of four children in Arabi, Louisiana, Cook grew up in the thick of St. Bernard hunting and fishing culture. (Arabi, he also noted, is home of the very first Popeyes. “Every Wednesday they’d sell gizzards for a dollar,” he laughed.) He remembers standing on a stepstool on the linoleum floor beside the double oven, peeling shrimp and potatoes next to his mom. She cooked on the weekdays, and on the weekends his dad came in with more daring, game-centered recipes. “He did a whole redfish court-bouillon, and I remember standing in front of the oven looking at that fish,” said Cook, who has described his childhood as “one of the greatest upbringings you could ask for”.
The plan wasn’t always to be a chef—“I don’t think I’ve had a plan in my entire life,” he laughed. After graduating from high school, he immediately joined the Marines, a calling he has described as “more like a scream” to him. He quickly made his way up the ranks, a “wild man” thriving in an environment of such structure and discipline, and describes his tour as “some of the best years of his life”. He remembers how when he was abroad, his mom would send care packages with Creole spices and booze.
Photo by Sam Hannah, courtesy of Chef Eric Cook.
Chef Eric Cook grew up on the bayous around New Orleans, hunting and fishing and gathering for meals with his family.
Cook returned to the New Orleans area unsure what was next, a little lost. He’d never been to a fine dining restaurant when a family connection introduced him to the late Michael Roussel, who was at the time the Executive Chef at Brennan’s. “I came out of the military and fell into the kitchen,” said Cook, who found the structure, discipline, and sense of camaraderie of a professional kitchen reminiscent of life in the Marines. “It was, like, violent and vulgar, and everyone was always drinking,” he said. “I loved it.”
Cook cites Roussel as the number one influence of his life. “I still hear that guy’s voice in my ear,” said Cook. “You could see the passion. His approach, his training, the way he ran his kitchen in one of the most famous restaurants in the world—that was the big thing for me. It was culture.” Training under Roussel at Brennan’s, Cook worked his way up to sous chef and chef de partie, then went on to cook at many of the city’s finest restaurants, including Bourbon House, Tommy’s Cuisine, and N.O.S.H. It was while working as the Executive Chef for the National World War II Museum’s restaurant American Sector, though, that he started reaching back toward his roots.
"We need to preserve this cuisine, to keep the old books, to talk about them, And we need to say that it's modern, that it's happening now. we need people to get back in the kitchen."
—Chef Eric Cook
“We were young and thought we were hot stuff,” he remembered. “The molecular gastronomy thing was hitting and everything was sous vide. I think at one point I had like ten sous vide machines we flew in from Germany. We were reading Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure and In the Charcuterie, and everything had to be this super technical stuff.”
One day, a friend came to try out Cook’s restaurant, and he was hoping to impress him. “We happened to be doing something with rabbits that day,” remembered Cook. He decided to prepare an old school rabbit fricassee—“big hind quarters, a really deep dark brown Vermilion Parish gravy”—served with blackened cornbread. “And a lightbulb goes off, like ‘this is really, really good’.”
He started reconsidering his approach to cuisine, recalling the distinct delights of his childhood kitchen table. He started talking to his mom, digging through his grandmother’s recipes, the old neighborhood and church cookbooks. “You get into those local parish things, and those people are not putting their B-game into those books,” he said. “This is their neighborhood pride. This is Miss Mabel’s oyster dressing, you know it’s legit. Those are the recipes that I trust, those emotional connections.”
It opened up a window, he said, a big one—revealing the treasures of hyper-regional, Southeastern, Gulf Coast cuisine. “The simplicity of using what’s around you, that became my new direction,” he said. He got rid of the sous vide machines, all of them, and told his crew at the American Sector, “We’re gonna get back to cooking, y’all. We’re gonna learn how to braise things, we’re gonna learn how to sear things, we’re gonna learn how to stew. We’re gonna get back to fire.” He started ordering fresh hogs from the local butcher every week, swordfish broken down to its tiniest parts. “That byproduct usage thing really came to the forefront—tip to tail, heart to skin, cracklins and hog head cheese and bacon.”
This was the key to the Creole cuisine he’d grown up with, he quickly realized—the genius of it came straight from the resources available to this region’s ancestors, transformed into recipes passed down as heirlooms, generation after generation. “How can you not make great food with all this? You have to try to mess it up,” he said. “Traditional gathering food, that’s what we have here in South Louisiana. It’s indigenous. What they do, what my mom did, what the grandparents did, it’s been going on for hundreds of years. And it’s just simplicity.” Preserving that heirloom became the drive behind Cook’s work as a New Orleans chef. “It’s important for us to feed this story to people and let them know it’s worth preserving.”
Photo by Sam Hannah, courtesy of Chef Eric Cook.
Seared Pork Belly on Compressed Watermelon with Jalapeño demi-glace.
After twenty years working in the New Orleans restaurant business, the time finally came in 2018 for Cook to open his own place. “I kept hitting the glass ceiling,” he said. “I was ego driven, hot headed, a ruckus. A tough employee. I’ve been fired from a lot of really great jobs just because I would get so frustrated, so motivated to go further. It’s humbling to look back on. I’ve said many apologies to people I worked for since then.” Gris-Gris came about, he said, out of necessity. He had already made a name for himself; this was a way to keep climbing.
Cook’s wife, Robyn, gave him the final push—“she’s always ten steps ahead of me,” he said. She found the location for Gris-Gris on Magazine, saw the vision clear as day. “It was such an organic process,” said Cook about opening the restaurant. “I probably wrote the menu for our opening in twenty minutes.”
That menu included no-nonsense home-cooked New Orleans food, prepared with love and generations of precedence—dishes that rarely saw the spotlight in the city’s fine dining institutions. Liver, served on grits with onions. White beans and ham hocks. Redfish court-bouillon like his dad used to make and his mom’s chicken and dumplings. “And it’s not a menu gimmick,” he said of the chicken and dumplings, which appear on the menu as “My Mom’s Chicken and Dumplings”. “She cooks this for my birthday to this day, because it’s been my favorite thing since I was like four years old. That’s real stuff. That’s fifty years of family food on the table, right there, for everyone to enjoy.” The gumbo is inspired by a gumbo he ate years ago in Delcambre, Louisiana—prepared by his best friend’s mom, Dale Landry. “It took me years to understand it, but once you do, you get it,” he said. “Louisiana cooking is so much more than how we do things, but why we do them. And that’s the thing you have to teach. There’s got to be passion. It’s got to be history. There’s got to be emotion in it.”
His classic training in brigade-style kitchens helped Cook to run a successful restaurant, but at his restaurants he’s never operated strictly from recipes (and in fact wrote many of them down for the first time for his cookbook). “It’s the way onions smell in a kitchen, how things look, taste,” he said. “There’s no strict regimen. It’s like, taste it to see if we need more salt. It’s instilled in you. It’s hereditary.”
Filling an extremely narrow, nuanced niche in New Orleans’ restaurant landscape, Gris-Gris quickly became a local favorite, garnering instant recognition in 2018 as Eater New Orleans’s Readers Choice for Restaurant of the Year and Chef of the Year, New Orleans City Business’s Restaurant of the Year. And in 2019, New Orleans Magazine and TimeOut.com named Gris-Gris one of the city’s Best Restaurants.
In 2021, Cook took his philosophy one step further by opening a second restaurant, Saint John, on Decatur Street in the Quarter. Saint John would still serve traditional Creole home cooking, but the special stuff—the holiday dishes your grandmother brought over once a year: smothered turkey necks, beef daube, a rack of lamb, redfish meuniere. The Haute Creole restaurant placed an even bigger emphasis on what Creole cuisine is: food inspired by the traditions of the melting pot, prepared using local resources, with pleasure and celebration in mind.
Photo by Sam Hanna, courtesy of Chef Eric Cook.
Oyster BLT, as featured in Modern Creole: A Taste of New Orleans Culture and Cuisine.
In the eight weeks between spontaneously taking over the historic property that once housed Maximo’s and Saint John’s opening weekend (which coincided with Hurricane Ida), Cook pored over old cookbooks, and asked every member of the staff to call their grandparents and ask about their favorite holiday dishes.
“I’ll never forget, it was like October 3, and we were still looking for the right étouffée recipe,” he said. “And I’m digging around, looking through my grandmother’s River Road cookbook, and a newspaper article falls out. I open it up, and it was dated October 3, 1978. It was an article about how being a great chef can really elevate you as an entertainer or something. And I flipped it over, and it was a recipe for shrimp étouffée. And I was like ‘This is my Mamère telling me we’re doing this.’ And that was it. That was the recipe, and stayed the recipe.”
After years of financial struggles at Saint John, in May of 2024, Cook and his team sadly announced the restaurant’s closure. “We were brokenhearted,” he said, explaining that though he had hoped to see a post-pandemic renaissance in New Orleans, similar to how the city came together after the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, that relief never effectively reached the city’s restaurant industry. In addition, the restaurant’s location on lower Decatur had the price tag of the Quarter without the foot traffic. “At the end of the day, if you’re not breaking even, you’ve got to turn,” said Cook.
Cook describes the months leading up to the decision as turmoil for him. “I spent a lot of days in my backyard just walking in circles, trying to figure out the next move,” he said, admitting he’d gotten so desperate as to consider re-opening Saint John in the mall. “I was in a panic, survival mode. How do you walk away from this? I was so depressed it was dying, I was dying with it. I dyed my hair black, it was dark.” All the while, once again Robyn was ten steps ahead. “She just let me go through all that, and on the backside had been working independently planning this new location. One day she says, ‘You’re done? Let me show you something.’”
She’d found a dream location for a new Saint John, set on St. Charles on the streetcar route, right between legendary restaurants Herbsaint and Desi Vega’s, in the building formerly home to Le Chat Noir. “It was perfect,” said Cook.
“That belief in Saint John as a concept was so important to us,” said Cook. “It was an act of preserving this legacy of people I respect and came up under, and making space for the people who are coming up right now and need a future to be able to still talk about these things, these recipes that came from people who aren’t with us anymore. They’re still alive every day in these plates, these restaurants. Saint John, it deserves to be a restaurant.”
The new location’s opening this fall will coincide with the release of Modern Creole: A Taste of New Orleans Culture and Cuisine. The book, Cook said, was a much-needed reminder—amidst the disappointment of losing Saint John—of his story, and the story he’s always tried to tell. “We need to preserve this cuisine, to keep the old books, to talk about them,” he said. “And we need to say that it’s modern, that it’s happening now. We need people to get back in the kitchen.”
Modern Creole: A Taste of New Orleans Culture and Cuisine will be available for purchase on September 17, 2024 at grisgrisnola.com. A launch party will take place on pub day at Gris-Gris from 5:30 pm–8:30 pm, with complimentary passed appetizers and happy hour drinks. Chef Cook will be available to sign copies and take photos. Saint John will re-open later this fall on St. Charles Street. Get the latest official updates on the restaurant's Facebook and Instagram pages.
