3 minute read
605 STOPS BY | CAFÉ LOUISIANA
from June 2020
by 605 Magazine
Café Louisiana: Bringing Cajun to Yankton 605 STOPS BY
By Austin Lammers
“Our restaurant… it’s home-y. We call it our second home. We love having people in here, happy and having great food.” - Leah Nelams
There’s really no such thing as “Louisiana cooking,” Zachary Fournet, owner of Yankton’s Café Louisiana, says. There’s Creole—born in the city, from the streets of New Orleans. And there’s Cajun—contrived from the southwest Louisiana countryside, where he and his wife, Leah Nelams, grew up. The cooking styles, developed in the 19th century, vary in ingredients, and when Fournet and Nelams order gumbo in restaurants anywhere north of the South, what they say they usually taste is “a diluted hybrid of the two.”
It was 2001 when Fournet, then 18 years old, first wrote down ‘Café Louisiana’ on a piece of paper. He wanted to bring authentic Cajun cuisine to a place where it didn’t exist. In 2010, he and Nelams decided to make it happen. They just didn’t know when, or where. So they closed their eyes and threw a dart at a map. It landed on Yankton, South Dakota, where they moved three years later. But that was just the beginning of the journey.
“When we made it out here, we worked at the [Sapa Extrusions] factory (now Hydro),” said Fournet. “We grinded and saved all the money we could. We didn’t even have a couch in the house, or a TV. We didn’t go out or do anything. We were focused on what we wanted to do.”
After five years of frugality, Fournet and Nelams opened Café Louisiana on Broadway Avenue on July 1, 2019. Po’ Boys. Hushpuppies. Alligator Burgers. Crawfish Pies. Real Jambalaya. From up the Mississippi and over to the Missouri, Cajun cuisine found its way to Yankton.
It’s a small joint—the only other employee is a family friend and skilled cook named Hunter Techemange, better known to Yankton as T-Cuz, Cajun for “little cousin.” The three have the luxury of running the only Cajun restaurant in the area, but with it comes the responsibility of delivering to a meat-and-potato-palated population.
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Cravin’ Cajun? In the late 1700s, the British forced CanadianFrench settlers (known as Acadians) out of Canada and into America. Some followed the Mississippi River down to the Frenchdominant swamps of Louisiana, where they were welcomed with open arms. Thus was the birth of the “Cajuns.”
Cajun cuisine, despite its reputation for fiery and heavily-spiced plates, really just incorporates smoked meats like chicken, pork, and sausage into pot-based dishes, like jambalaya or gumbo. While Creole cooking uses tomato-based sauces and butter-based roux, Cajun cooking uses roux made of lard or oil and bypasses tomato sauces altogether. Simply put: if Creole is a soup, Cajun is a stew.
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