Photo by Stephanie Tarrant
Ernie Foundas, with his partner Adrienne Bell, is the owner of Suis Generis and the Tiki Food Lab and Farm.
What happens when an attorney, who is also a flavor-obsessed self-taught cook, teams up with a creative industrial designer with a penchant for power tools?
This is the story of Suis Generis, a quirky forty-seat café in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. Ernie Foundas is the Willy Wonka of this tale, an imagination-fueled co-founder and co-proprietor. His partner is the router queen Adrienne Bell, whose talent for design takes a hard left at tropical aesthetics and all things tiki.
The couple is local to New Orleans; Foundas grew up Uptown and was friends with one of the Brennan kids. “We’d play in the courtyard at Commander’s when Paul Prudhomme was chef,” he recalled. “I was in awe of him. He’d show me things in the kitchen, showed me how to make a roux when I was ten years old.” Although he never acquired formal culinary training, Foundas has worked in restaurants since he was fifteen, first as a dishwasher, then cooking on the line. In college, he worked at the well-regarded Jasper’s in Boston, where the late chef Jasper White gave him a piece of advice. “He told me either to go to culinary school or graduate from college and learn more about cooking and the business side of running a restaurant. That’s what I did.”
In 2002, Foundas and Bell bought a building at 3219 Burgundy, intent on rehabbing living spaces upstairs and opening a restaurant on the ground level. Hurricanes, floods, and fire delayed their dream for a decade. The result, hewn from their own hands, finally opened its doors in 2012.
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Photo by Stephanie Tarrant
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Photo by Stephanie Tarrant
A Singular Vision
The couple’s vision for the restaurant is well defined by its name, which means “of its own kind” in Latin.
Suis Generis caters to adventurous eaters who don’t like to plan ahead. If you’re in the mood for a steak tonight, there’s no telling if that’s what you’ll find at Suis Generis. The menu changes weekly. It’s never the same, ever.
“I see it as food evolution.” —Ernie Foundas
Each dish is informed, not just by seasonal local produce, but by the very specific harvest of the couple’s four-acre Tiki Farm in Pearlington, Mississippi. Situated along a bayou that flows into the Pearl River, forty-five minutes northeast of New Orleans, the Tiki Farm is host to crops that are largely tropical, inspired by the couple’s travels and love of the South Pacific. Visit the farm with its mad scientist fermentation Food Lab, and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse comes to mind.
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Photo by Stephanie Tarrant
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Photo by Stephanie Tarrant
The property is anchored by a 1.5-acre lake, untamed and lovely, home to alligators, frogs, bugs and various water birds. There’s a silver UFO-looking thing made from a renovated oil rig pod, soon to have a second life as an Airbnb; same for a vintage houseboat anchored off a dock by the Food Lab. “We wanted people to have a place to stay after the food experiences,” said Foundas, an erudite science nerd with an endless interest in the natural world.
There is a greenhouse full of fruiting plants like mango, starfruit, jackfruit, bananas, dragon fruit, turmeric, red African peach, and papaya. Smaller yurts and raised beds set the stage for herbs, edible flowers, and micro greens. A raised “Chapel of Tiki”—sounds so much better than shed—houses mowing equipment and other tools.
There’s a beehive in one corner of the property, a rack of kayaks in another. The outhouse is textured with reeds and thatching. All the plants are labeled, in what can only be Foundas’s own bold script.
Mad Scientist at Work
Alchemy comes in many forms. Foundas and Bell opened the Food Lab in 2023, the original idea being to offer cooking classes and chef’s tasting menus in a cozy, intimate second floor setting overlooking the lake.
In the process, Foundas developed a fascination with fermentation—though, not just the kind that turns apples into wine. He’s brewing everything from mushrooms to foraged duckweed, creating umami rich elixirs like kosho, fish sauce, and miso. Like a mad scientist with his bubbling beakers and test tubes, Foundas has amassed an impressive number of glass bottles, each labeled in his hand with the date the aging process began.
Photo by Stephanie Tarrant
He's good at it, too. In fact, he is a presenter at this year’s Kogicon, a collaboration of international fermenters happening virtually from February 17–March 2. “We grow koji and make miso, soy sauce, gochugang, vegan cheeses, wine, and vinegar from scratch,” he said. He and Bell also educate people on microbe and probiotic rich foods that are good for the body and promote brain health.
The curious can take advantage of this through classes on how to ferment the funk in their own kitchens. There’s one March 15 on how to make kosho, “the magical condiment,” that includes a six-course tasting menu for $100. On May 17, it’s “The Invasive Species Menu: Eat the Invaders!”—featuring eight courses incorporating plants like chickweed and dandelion, for $125. And on June 21, Foundas and Bell will offer, “The Smells of Extinction,”—a six-course menu based on re-created scents of extinct species, for $125.
A Farm to Turntable Experience
When visiting the Tiki Lab, guests are, on occasion, treated to live performances by local New Orleans band Pink Teddy Bear, who perform original songs matched to each of Foundas’s specialty menu items as he prepares them.
Pink Teddy Bear was the first band to record on Foundas’s record label, also called Suis Generis—which he created in 2023 in collaboration with Pink Teddy Bear bandmember Carlos Grasso. Grasso, who art directed music videos for bands like R.E.M. in a past life, collected field recordings from the Tiki Farm, capturing the sounds of bugs, frogs, and alligators along with the sizzle of food in a pan and the syncopation of chopping on a cutting board. Then he matched the farm’s soundscape with grooves performed by the band.
The resulting album, Welcome to the Tiki Farm (available on Bandcamp and suisgenerismusic.com,) is inspired by classic exotica of the 1950s and 60s, Latin/African/Arabic/Indian grooves, hip-hop, electronic music, film scores, sci-fi, and the pure rhythms of nature. “Music and food are so intertwined in New Orleans, matching the two seems to make sense. I didn’t just want an experimental soundscape,” said Grasso. “There is rhythm in animal sounds, a tempo in nature that communicates. The idea is to use nature as a collaborator in making actual music.”
What’s On the Plate
What Foundas and Bell raise, ferment, and coax into life on the Tiki Farm directly informs the Suis Generis menu from week to week, which they develop with assistance from co-chefs Matthew Erickson and Chris DeBarr, familiar to fans of the long-lamented Green Goddess in the French Quarter.
Photo by Stephanie Tarrant
Dinner, served from Friday through Sunday evenings, unfolds in a cozy space, with its red solo cup ceiling, retro electric log fireplaces, funky art and, of course, a tiki bar. Divided into smaller dishes, large plates, and happy endings, the menu is not for the plain of palate. The descriptions are epic, long and detailed with a lot of ingredients. On the night I visited, the farmer's salad was made with Tiki field greens, mesclun greens, warm mirliton, rutabaga, parsnip and beet hash, dried apricots, white pepper almonds, and Vidalia onion, all tossed in golden Moroccan dressing. Buffalo milk burrata was served with charred shishito peppers, pumpkin brioche French toast, Tiki bee honey, and artichoke baba ganoush. A perky pickle plate serves a changing array of pickled veggies. And the main course might be garlic-injected lamb T-bones, quick seared ahi tuna, or king trumpet mushroom “scallops”—just one example of the regular vegan offerings. Dessert always includes house-made ice cream flavored with exotics like coconut, ginger, and macadamia. Prices are typical, with starters in the $10–$18 range and mains in low $20s to high $30s.
The Suis Generis kitchen is committed to creating zero waste, with every speck of food either consumed, used as a building block for another dish, fermented, pickled, or composted to make nutrient dense soil. “By fully committing to a changing menu, the ingredients we have dictate what we offer every week,” said Foundas. “I see it as food evolution.”
Suis Generis has certainly evolved since it opened thirteen years ago. Its owners remain intent on experimenting with flavor science and a grab bag of creative projects conceived squarely outside the box. As Foundas likes to say, ‘We’re the only restaurant in the world with a Food Lab, Tiki Farm, and record label.” He speaks the truth. •
