James Fox-Smith
On a misty January day, Chef Jason Roland took a break from preparing beef bourguignon for 150 long enough to show a visitor how life as a top-flight catering chef moves to a different beat than that of his restaurant-bound brethren. It was 8 am and, with clients expecting a three-course seated luncheon fifty miles away in a few hours’ time, prep work had started early.
The high-capacity commercial kitchen that is the beating heart of Heirloom Cuisine stands in rural solitude on Roland family land in northern West Feliciana parish, with kitchen gardens, a grassy field full of contented-looking chickens, hardwood forests, and rolling pastures. As inconvenient as that might sound, for a catering company serving clientele throughout Louisiana and Southwest Mississippi, there are worse things than being headquartered in the crook of the Louisiana “L.”
Jason and Caryn Roland have been in the culinary industry for a long time. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1992—part of the same class that produced influential New Orleans chefs Bingo Starr, Scott Boswell, and John Besh—Jason cut his teeth in the kitchens of Crescent City landmarks, including Mr. B’s Bistro, Muriel’s on Jackson Square, and the Windsor Court Hotel, where he served as Executive Banquet Chef for eight years. At the Windsor Court, Roland worked alongside René Bajeux, the revered French Master Chef who helmed the Grill Room during the period when the Windsor Court was named the Best Hotel in the World (1998). Jason and Caryn met at the Windsor Court in 1999, and during the years that followed, the couple made their way through a succession of hotels and restaurants that took them to Aspen, CO; Newport, RI; and Naples, FL. Along the way they discovered that their compatible skill set (he a chef, she a catering manager) constituted the ingredients of a successful catering business. In 2003, the birth of their first child got Jason and Caryn thinking about returning to Louisiana to be closer to family. Then came the opportunity to build a catering kitchen on Jason’s family property near Lake Rosemound. You can’t get much closer than that.
Anyone who has ever tried to serve an ambitious picnic in the backyard or on a beach knows that, the farther from the kitchen the meal needs to travel, the less likely it will taste—much less look—as its preparers intended. Meat dries out; sauce congeals, vegetables wilt and lose color and flavor. So consider the lot of the catering chef who, in addition to needing to be able to cater to the dining predilections of 150, 300, or 500 people simultaneously, must do so in unfamiliar surroundings, miles from the home kitchen. In the normal course of business, the Rolands are called upon to serve three- and four-course dinners for hundreds at venues with few or no kitchen facilities on-site—a logistical nightmare they overcome by prepping as much of the meal as possible at their kitchen headquarters, then cooking/finishing the dishes on-site using a fully equipped kitchen trailer that enables them to deliver quality and consistency to the remotest locations. “Not long ago we catered a wedding in a field off River Road with no water or electrical service on-site,” said Caryn. Everything had to be one-hundred percent cooked and served from the mobile kitchen.” Jason concurred. “Whether it’s a luau to a cochon de lait, to classic French, Spanish, or Italian, I have to be there for whatever the client wants.”
Such flexibility enables the Rolands to deliver unusually high quality dining experiences to beautiful, decidedly un-restaurant-like locations. Uncannily similar to the motto of the Country Roads Supper Club, don’t you think? For our Valentine’s Day dinner Chef Jason channels his thirty years’ experience into a menu of haute French classics of which his former mentor, Chef René Bajeux, would be proud. Crab Vol au Vents and Filet de Boeuf en Croûte to begin, followed by a classic French Onion Soup, Salade Niçoise with Gulf tuna; and finally, Coq au Vin—the quintessential Gallic contribution to the culinary arts made famous in this country by Julia Child, for whom it came to be seen as a signature dish. To finish: that conical tower of choux pastry puffs bound together with threads of molten caramel known as the croque-en-bouche. Indeed, it’s every French patissier’s monument to excess, and on Valentine’s Day, why would you settle for anything less?
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