Answering THE CALL
Chef Jeff Strikes the right tone with Heard Dat Kitchen
CHEF JEFFREY HEARD SR
BY: JADA F. SMITH It hasn’t even been five years since Chef Jeffrey Heard Sr. left his job as a banquet manager to open Heard Dat Kitchen, but already it’s become one of the most popular chicken joints on the New Orleans food scene. Locals who live near the Felicity Street location have embraced it for it’s unique offerings that remain authentic to traditional New Orleans cuisine. Tourists have flocked to it after a glowing write-up in the Times-Picayune. Foodies from an array of backgrounds have fallen in love. When organizers for the New Orleans Fried Chicken Festival noticed that Heard Dat Kitchen, which won the festival’s fried chicken contest in 2017, hadn’t signed up to vend in the 2018 festival, they called up Heard personally to ask him to attend. “They called looking for us to see why we weren’t participating,”
Tia’Nesha Heard-Dorest, Chef Jeffrey’s daughter and personal assistant, said. “It’s meant to be if they’re calling you.” The whirlwind rise that Heard Dat has experienced over the past few years could be dizzying for others, but the Heards have embraced it with a steady hand, pacing themselves before each next step. Less than one year after Ann Maloney of the TimesPicayune described it as “a modest take-out restaurant with just four tables, three on the sidewalk in front, and a pick-up window where orders are served in Styrofoam boxes,” Heard Dat is opening a remodeled sub-compartment to make room for a much bigger crowd. The addition could potentially help to take the endeavor from “a modest takeout restaurant” to the New Orleans chicken behemoth it is primed to become.
Heard Dat Kitchen has been family owned and operated since 2015. The restaurant adds vibrant flavors to traditional New Orleans cuisine.
And just in time for Black Restaurant Week. The newly opened space seats up to 40 guests, “which is a huge thing for us,” Tia said. The theme is best described as barnyard-chic, with lots of wood accents and framed sayings espousing the joy of good food. Expressions like “let’s cook!”, “let’s eat!” and “food makes me happy.” All of the new interior designing was done by Tia’s sister-in-law, who runs an event planning business called Nyce Events. In addition to consistently good cuisine and hospitality, relying on family seems 7
