Fried Chicken (8 page)

In most matters, local tastes prevail. Such entrenchment shines through brightest in the matter of fried chicken. Local boy Al Copeland introduced the spicy chicken concept to the world through Popeye's, which he founded in 1971 and which now boasts more than 1,600 locations worldwide.

There have been other contenders. Mama's Tasty Fried Chicken, which sells gizzards on a stick just off St. Charles Avenue, once had aspirations of expansion. Even Austin Leslie, whom we meet next, once had a franchise plan. But no one truly challenged Popeye's local dominance until December of 2001 when Jane and Scott Wolfe, whom New Orleanians knew as the proprietors of Wagner's Meats (their slogan: “You Can't Beat Wagner's Meat”), opened the first Chicken Box.

The Wolfes deeply undercut Popeye's on price while serving a product that purposefully lacks the spicy punch of cayenne. “Tastes Like Ya Mama's” was one of the company's first slogans. Chicken Box is expanding rapidly, buoyed by an unconventional advertising campaign. A recent Valentine's Day promotion promised free marriages performed with every 1,000-piece order. “We wanted to offer a free divorce,” Jane Wolfe told me, “but the lawyers told us that might be tricky.”

EIGHT

Austin Leslie, Creole Comet

 

 

 

 

 

 

he is the oldest cook in the kitchen by a good decade, maybe two. Gray hair mushrooms from beneath his gold-crested captain's hat. A patchwork of broiler scars—the proud tattoos of a life at the stove—blankets the underside of his forearms. By all rights he's too aged, too revered to be working the fryer five nights a week at Jacques-Imo's, New Orleans's most funkadelic restaurant. The first time I saw him perched over a sputtering vat of peanut oil, I was tempted to ask my waitress something like,
Just how did the grand old man of Creole cuisine end up at a renegade restaurant owned by an elfin New York émigré?

 

 

 

a ustin Leslie was once the most celebrated Creole-soul cook in New Orleans, and his fried chicken was considered a definitive dish in the native culinary lexicon. For much of the 1970s and '80s, his restaurant, Chez Helene, drew both Garden District swells and Creoles of Color who, emboldened by rave reviews in the press, made their way to North Robertson Street in the Tremé neighborhood for a taste of the city's best back-of-town foods.

Today, though the locus for the pilgrimage has changed, the draw for sojourners remains strong. And so it is that, early in my fried chicken quest, I seek an audience with Leslie. Seated at an oilcloth-clad table at Jacques-Imo's, we sample ruddy drumsticks crowned with his signature confetti of chopped garlic and parsley, and topped with his secret grease-cutting weapon, a slice of dill pickle. As we eat, I learn that Leslie was an unlikely media darling. Born to a mother who worked as a domestic and a father who gambled, he took to the streets at an early age, earning his keep doing odd jobs. “By the time I was around eight or so, I was working for this lady,” he says. “She grew different herbs in her yard and I'd sell them for her. I made something like two or three cents off a bunch.”

While he was in middle school, Leslie pedaled a bicycle, delivering fried chicken for Portia's Fountain on Rampart Street. “Back then, that was the black Bourbon Street,” says Leslie. “They were always telling me I was too little to work Rampart, but I proved myself. The owner, Bill Turner, he looked after me, he educated me on how restaurants worked. That's where I picked up a lot of what I know about fried chicken, where I learned how to season it right.”

After high school came a tour of duty in Korea, a turn in his aunt Helen DeJean Pollock's lunchroom, and a brief stint as a sheet-metal worker. In 1959, Leslie finally hit his stride, when he landed a job as an assistant chef at the restaurant in D. H. Holmes Department Store on Canal Street. “I had grown up walking by there, hearing the dishes clatter and smelling the food,” he says. “And then all of a sudden I was working in that big kitchen. I learned how to make oysters Rockefeller and shrimp remoulade.”

In 1964, Leslie's aunt Helen moved her lunchroom to new quarters on North Robertson Street, adding an
e
to her name for a touch of class and dubbing the little café Chez Helene. Her nephew followed. “I brought in the dishes I learned at Holmes,” recalls Leslie. “It was kind of like integration: a little bit of theirs, a little bit of ours. My aunt already had the greens and yas and jambalaya.” When Pollock retired in 1975, Leslie bought her out. In time, all of New Orleans was abuzz with tales of the little neighborhood restaurant where they served tin pie plates of broiled oysters in a velveteen Rockefeller sauce and chipped white platters piled high with the best fried chicken known to man.

At a time when America was awakening to the possibilities of marketing regional cuisine, Leslie was a hot property. By the mid-'80s, rumor had it that he was on the verge of becoming the black Creole analogue to white Cajun Paul Prud-homme. It helped that Leslie—his smiling face framed by a swooping pair of muttonchops, a diamond-encrusted crab pendant around his neck—knew he was selling more than fried chicken. “Yeah, I could talk,” he says. “When folks wanted to talk about New Orleans food, I was the man. Difference was, I could cook too, and a lot of those other people couldn't. I could back up my arrogance.”

Business partnership offers poured in. Plans were drawn up for a chain of fried chicken restaurants. Upscale branch locations of Chez Helene opened, first in the French Quarter, later in Chicago, Illinois. “Seems like every other day somebody was wanting to talk with me about some kind of great deal,” recalls Leslie. “Seems like everybody wanted to use my name to sell this, my face to sell that. I made the mistake of listening.”

In March of 1987, Hollywood came calling, in the form of actor Tim Reid, who had previously played the character Venus Flytrap on the show
WKRP in Cincinnati.
Producer Hugh Wilson and he stopped in for dinner, and when they left a few hours later, they were convinced that they had found the restaurant around which they could build a hit television show. The story line was this: Upon the death of his estranged father, Frank Parish, a black professor of Italian Renaissance history in Boston, inherits the family business, a corner bar and restaurant in New Orleans called Chez Louisiane, thus prompting a rediscovery of his own cultural and culinary heritage.

Leslie signed on as a consultant, traveling to California to supervise construction of the kitchen set. He also acted as an informal adviser, coaching the writers and actors on the vagaries of New Orleans diet and dialect. Under Leslie's tutelage, Tony Burton, who played Big Arthur McCormick, the head cook at the fictional Chez Louisiane, and Tim Reid, who played the part of Parish, came to understand mirlitons and muffulettas, Cajuns and Creoles.

Frank's Place
debuted in September of 1987. Though it was a critical success, garnering an Emmy award for Wilson and winning a loyal cadre of fans, CBS canceled it exactly a year later. Some network suits cited gritty themes and low ratings, others a budget that made
Frank's Place
the most expensive thirty minutes on television. Wilson himself admitted that the series might have offered viewers a slice of life that was too insular, too peculiar for prime time. When programmers pulled the plug, writers were finishing work on an episode starring Sammy Davis, Jr., as a Mardi Gras Indian. Incidentally, there remains no record of what tribe Davis would have belonged to, though speculation among locals was high that he would wear the headdress and feather plume of either the Wild Tchoupitoulas or Yellow Pocahontas.

 

 

 

the klieg lights of fame dimmed. Leslie pulled the local television ads he had been running, the ones that touted his restaurant as “the inspiration for the hit television series
Frank's Place.
” Business at the original Chez Helene stalled. One by one, the branch locations and fried chicken franchises closed.

Already a veteran of more than twenty-five years at the stove, Leslie shrugs off his fall from grace as if it were an Ash Wednesday hangover. “I knew I could ride it out, that it all would pass,” he tells me. “I was still cooking, still had my little restaurant. The real problem was that I was sitting on dynamite. The dope fiends and pushers were moving into the neighborhood. Now don't get me wrong, I know the streets. I've lived my whole life around pimps and whores. They've got a job to do same as me. But this was something different.”

In August of 1989, Leslie declared bankruptcy. Sales taxes were way past due. Partners with fat bankrolls and unlimited lines of credit were long gone. In 1994 the doors closed for good, and soon thereafter the corner building that once housed the hottest restaurant in New Orleans burned down. A bulldozer razed the smoke-stained yellow brick walls; three decades of sweat and toil and garlic-perfumed grease collapsed in a cloud of dust.

 

 

 

and then, like Alice down the rabbit hole, Austin Leslie was gone. Vanished from sight. He popped up now and again, cooking at the Basin Street Club one month, over at the Bottom Line the next. Somewhere along the way, he even manned the fryer at a restaurant called N'awlins just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. (Like a bluegrass picker in Japan, Leslie's ego and his pocketbook required remove from the origins of his fame.) “We had a good thing going there for a while,” Leslie tells me. “They loved my gumbo. On the other hand, there's nothing like cooking Creole food in New Orleans. That's your toughest audience, your best one.”

In the years since, Leslie has never really made another kitchen his own—until he answered a want ad in the New Orleans newspaper in 1996. “I think it said something like, ‘Looking for a Creole/Cajun cook,'” recalls Jacques Leonardi, the elfin restauranteur who owns Jacques-Imo's. “I never thought I could get Austin to cook in a funky joint like this, but he was willing.” The two men make for an odd couple: Leonardi, the joker, always ready with a drink and a slap on the back for his patrons. And Leslie, the onetime toast of New Orleans, the golden boy apparent of Creole cuisine, standing tall by the deep fryer, spearing chicken thighs from the roiling grease with an oversized carving fork.

Leslie once lorded over three restaurants and a chain of fried chicken shops. Advertising agencies plastered his smiling face on the side of New Orleans buses. Entrepreneurs heralded his story as worthy of emulation. Those days are long gone, but Leslie seems happy at Jacques-Imo's.

Since he signed on with Leonardi, Leslie has commandeered the back left corner of the kitchen. He is not the executive chef. Or the sous chef. He's the fry cook. Anything that emerges from the Keating deep fryer is his charge. Fried chicken is still his focus—and it's as garlicky good as it ever was—but Leslie now turns out some of Leonardi's more whacked creations. He's the muscle behind appetizers like deep-fried roast beef po' boys, not to mention high-wire-act entrées like Godzilla Meets Fried Green Tomato, wherein a deep-fried soft-shell crab plays the part of the monster.

Neither Leonardi's penchant for taking outsized liberties with Creole cookery, nor the swamp hut motif of Jacques-Imo's—acid sunsets airbrushed on the walls, voodoo candles on the tables, plastic alligators screwed to weathered window frames—give Leslie pause. Nowadays, he focuses his attention upon the task at hand, upon what's burbling in his deep fryer. But every couple of weeks, a reporter or savvy eater seeks him out, bent upon learning the secret of his fried chicken. Many are enticed by rumors that Leslie dips the chicken in a batter made with a brand of condensed milk that is available only in Orleans Parish. When a pilgrim presents himself and asks the question, though, Leslie just holds out his flour-covered hands for inspection, palms down then palms up. “The secret's in here,” he tells them. “The secret's in here.”