Southern Comfort (2 page)

Upon returning to Abita Springs, we hadn’t a clue what would be waiting for us. We had given friends in town who did not evacuate the key to the restaurant in case the worst happened. They had cleaned out the walk-in cooler of food to sustain themselves and their neighbors for the week, so thankfully we didn’t have to deal with rotten, moldy food. We found that most of the trees on the property had fallen, and the cottage we were living in was in very bad shape. The restaurant building, however, looked mostly unscathed. The energy company was there to turn back on the electricity, so we began cleaning up. Longbranch quietly opened one week later.

For dinner, we served the same food that garnered us attention at Jack’s. Our Sunday brunches were an instant success, and we even had a two-piece jazz band come play. (They had lost their steady gig at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, which had not yet reopened after the storm.) We hoped what we were offering at Longbranch would give our recently scarred customers a momentary escape away from it all. But a fine dining restaurant with no history in the area and very high overhead eventually got the better of us. We closed the doors after a turbulent year-and-a-half-long run.

Before we closed Longbranch, a customer, Frank Zumbo, asked if we would be interested in opening a restaurant in a Marriott hotel in New Orleans. MiLa—named for our respective home states, Mississippi and Louisiana—was born in November of 2007 in the
Renaissance Pere Marquette. We are still serving our Southern-flecked cuisine, although the menu is considerably bigger than that first menu at Jack’s (which had one entrée and one dessert). The dishes we created back then, such as
Oysters Rockefeller “Deconstructed”
and
New Orleans–Style Barbecue Lobster
, have traveled with us from Jack’s to Longbranch, then to MiLa, and now to this book. For simplicity’s sake, in the book we have broken down a lot of the dishes we serve at the restaurant into separate components. We’ve also sprinkled some favorite childhood recipes in between. We hope the food in this book represents who we are, where we are from, and the places we have been.

Five years after opening MiLa, life is sweet again. We have four beautiful bloodhounds, an old fishing boat with lots of character, a home where we can lay down some roots, and a brand new baby girl. The delicate balance of work and play has become a reality. And the food tastes better, too.