Photo by Brian Pavlich.
Our Small Town Chef Award Winner Chef Michael Dardenne of the The Saint Restaurant & Bar at the St. Francisville Inn.
Just last spring, the St. Francisville Inn—an eggshell blue Gothic Victorian tucked into the oaks of a small-town crossroad—was transformed via extensive renovations under the guidance of owners Jim Johnston and Brandon Branch, a couple whose talents in design and hospitality helped revamp the inn into one of the go-to destinations in the South. Inside, every inch effortlessly integrates the building’s Old World charm and its contemporary quirks—period-era portraiture intermingling with Hunt Slonem’s rabbit paintings, themselves clinging to the jewel-toned wallpaper climbing to reach luxuriously high ceilings. In the Inn’s Saint Restaurant & Bar, rays of natural light stream through sapphire-blue glasses on bistro-style dining tables.
The restaurant wasn’t originally part of Johnston and Branch’s vision. But the need for an established dining experience emerged following the Inn’s remarkably successful re-opening last spring. Amongst a flood of customers, the hunt for a full-time chef began.
For Baton Rouge native Chef Michael Dardenne, the timing couldn’t have been better.
“I had been looking for the perfect fit for about a year,” said Dardenne, who, after a career spent racking up credentials in Baltimore, Atlanta, New York, and London, craved the small community feel of his home in Louisiana. He settled down in Zachary, where much of his family currently lives and where his specialty seasoning business, Louisiana Spice Company, is based. “As soon as I sat down with Jim and Brandon and saw how great they were and the plans they had for the Inn, something just clicked, and I knew that this was exactly what I was looking for.”
Photo by Christina Leo.
Dardenne’s Lamb T-Bone with mint-basil pesto and toasted garlic parmesan potatoes, served with curried tomato jam and seasoned with Greek-inspired herbs grown on the Inn’s property.
The first couple of months after the restaurant’s November 2019 opening were a time for experimenting, said Dardenne, as he worked to figure out the desires of his new customer base and whether they lay in fine dining, comfort food, or—as fate would have it—a subtle balance between the two.
But the grind toward success is just part of a lifelong routine for Dardenne, who began operating as his own household’s chef by the time he was nine years old.
“My brother is also a chef, and we’ll often say that we started cooking out of self-defense,” said Dardenne, laughing. “My dad loved to eat, but my mom didn’t care much for cooking, so my brother waited the table and I prepared the food, and that was kind of how we played together.”
Dardenne also recalls his great grandmother, Maw Maw Babin, and her near-constant laboring over the kitchen stove, an atmosphere which helped foster the notion of food as a social and familial necessity. By the time Dardenne was a senior in high school, he had attained the position of sous chef at White Oak Plantation under the tutelage of Chef John Folse, an education he approached purposefully, with every intention of turning the job into a career.
"If you ask a musician how they write a great song, they might say that they struggle with it and write bits and pieces over a long period of time, or they might bang out a hit off the top of their head based off a little bit of inspiration, and suddenly they've written a masterpiece. That's definitely happened to me—many of my best specials come from off-the-cuff ideas."
“I used to watch Julia Child and Jacques Pépin for fun as a kid, so I guess the interest was always in me,” he said. “After school, I would just head straight to White Oak Plantation to work full-time, and I loved it because I knew it was what I wanted to do with my life.”
Even additional interests in marine biology and journalism—pushed slightly to the backburner once Dardenne realized he likely wouldn’t be jetting off on sea vessels and contemplating octopi like Jacques Cousteau—eventually played a role in his culinary journey, both in the seafood-centric education he received after high school at the Baltimore International Culinary College, and as a writer for House & Home magazine, a freelance position he held for several years.
“I did their ‘food spotlights’ and a monthly recipe that would accompany an article,” he said. “I’d also do food styling for them, when I’d prepare and arrange a dish and they’d send over a photographer.”
As a young man, Dardenne knew that traveling away from Louisiana and its stalwart stance on Cajun and Creole cuisine would ultimately widen his horizons, a freedom he found working at the restaurants of Renaissance Hotels, whether cooking for the Baltimore Orioles or waiting out blizzards in Times Square. Every move was an opportunity for growth and knowledge. For Dardenne, the creative impulse behind his calling lies not just in technique, but in the belief that every recipe is an opportunity to create a work of art.
“For me, designing a dish is very similar to being a musician,” he said. “If you ask a musician how they write a great song, they might say that they struggle with it and write bits and pieces over a long period of time, or they might bang out a hit off the top of their head based off a little bit of inspiration, and suddenly they’ve written a masterpiece. That’s definitely happened to me—many of my best specials come from off-the-cuff ideas.”
Photo by Brian Pavlich.
Chef Dardenne’s “Citrus Mambo Jardiniere”: farm eggplant and heirloom tomatoes, topped with Gulf shrimp, lump crabmeat, wild mushrooms, and a lemon basil vinaigrette.
One such offering includes the recently concocted Yardbird Sandwich, a smorgasbord of ingredients almost certainly pulled out of a Chopped picnic basket—toasted brioche buns, fried spicy chicken, applewood bacon, Creole honey mustard, house-made pickles, pimento cheese, and a slathering of hot honey with house chips—but which culminate in the perfect balance of the salt, fat, acid, and heat that every chef aims for.
One taste of the way Dardenne’s Voodoo Shrimp’s savory blackening mellows against the sweet spiciness of pepper marmalade and the crunch of crispy angel hair, or the lightness imbued in a creamy Crab-and-Brie Soup via the merits of a well-seasoned stock, and any diner will understand why Dardenne prides himself on a mixture of tones and textures that straddle the line between the surprising and the familiar.
“I like to present dishes elegantly, but also from a comfort-food approach, so that no customer is too afraid to take a risk,” said Dardenne. “I can put in the ingredients that I want, but tone down the language of how I’m writing them, so to speak. You can write all kinds of flourishes on a menu, but if I can introduce customers to something in a more subtle way, and use some restraint, I get a real creative kick out of that.”
Photo by Christina Leo.
In addition to his work at the St. Francisville Inn, Dardenne also joins his brother as an owner of the Zachary-based Louisiana Spice Company.
Take, for example, his Lamb T-Bone with basil-mint pesto and toasted garlic parmesan potatoes, served with curried tomato jam, seasoned with Greek-inspired herbs grown on the Inn’s property. A T-bone feels familiar, though elevated when cut from lamb, and the tomato jam, though flavored with Indian spices that might—under less practiced hands—overwhelm or conquer a dish, is as vibrant and sweet as the vegetable alone.
And then of course there’s the true Southern favorite Dardenne can’t seem to make enough of: key lime pie, this time with a berry coulis for extra warmth, and in constant battle for supremacy with The Saint’s other dessert rival: blueberry bread pudding.
“Food ties into memory so strongly,” he said, shortly after a couple paused our interview to extend their complements to the chef. “It’s great to hear that something is delicious, but being able to transmute an ingredient into a memory that stays with people—whether through taste or smell or even the social event of eating with family—is what I ultimately love to do.”
The Saint Francisville Inn
5720 Commerce St.
St. Francisville, Louisiana
