Cuisine

As Southern & Wild as Ever

As A Restaurateur

Observing Jordan Ramirez in haction is like watching Tony Hawk at the skate park. Keep your eye on him, there will be unexpected maneuvers.

Ramirez has been a fixture of the Baton Rouge food scene since he started working at Tsunami in 2006, before stepping up to manage the specialty foods section at Whole Foods. That experience, he said, opened his eyes to new ingredients, which inspired quite a bit of kitchen tinkering and experimentation.“Whole Foods was basically my culinary school,” he laughed.

It was during this time that, with the help of the LSU Ag Incubator, he fired up his hot sauce brand, Southern Wild, a luscious blend of habanero spice and olive oil, bottled and sold in local shops.

After leaving Whole Foods, he accepted an opportunity helping Galen Iverstine open his original butcher shop on Perkins Road in 2016, receiving world class training in nose-to-tail butchery along the way. In no time at all, his awards from local cooking competitions festooned the service counter.

Seven years later, on a Tuesday night close to quitting time, I’m sitting at the bar at the first restaurant Ramirez could call his own—Baton Rouge’s beloved Pan-Asian hotspot Chow Yum Phat. Opened by Ramirez and Chef Vu Le in White Star Market in 2017, the eatery found its home in the Perkins Overpass district in 2019, and still serves Southern Wild hot sauce on its Taco Tuesday specials.

I’m passing up the tacos, though, opting instead for the day’s special frozen drink and my first attempt at The Mandu: spicy beef bulgogi dumplings, fried, with melted cheese, kimchi salsa, Gochujang aioli, pickled jalapenos and scallions, and a big bowl of curried vegetables rich with lemongrass-infused coconut milk. As I scrape my chopsticks together, about to dig in, someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s Ramirez out of kitchen uniform, dressed in a pressed shirt, his coffee brown hair tumbled loose from his traditional backward ballcap, stopping by the restaurant after scooping another

Best of 225 award, the third consecutive for Chow Yum Phat.

“Crawfish put us on the map,” Ramirez says of Chow Yum Phat’s lip-tingling, Vietnamese version bathed in lemongrass butter and served with edamame, quail eggs, and handfuls of fresh cilantro—along with Louisiana’s traditional corn and potatoes. When it isn’t crawfish season, diners can experience more of what Ramirez describes as ‘fun food,’ including ‘slurping-is-encouraged’ noodle bowls, crispy fall-off-the-bone tender wings tossed with funky sauces, dumplings steamed or pan-fried crisp, and fluffy bao buns stuffed with almost anything, including a soft shell crab or hot chicken. “I love combining Southern and spicy flavors,” he said.

The pro tip for dining at Chow Yum Phat is to go with a table full of friends— allowing for a more expansive sampling experience. The enticing menu makes it almost impossible to order for a single or table for two—when this is the case, order extra for the next day’s lunch, or make plans to return again and again to get the full experience. From the small plates section, the tempura-ish salt-and-pepper cauliflower tossed with fresh jalapeño slices and Yuzu aioli is my go-to, and I can never resist the crispy fish curry.

Ask your server what the restaurant’s most popular dish is, though, and they’ll tell you the ‘Oskar’s Wild,’ ramen bowl, with its smoky broth and Korean beef, kimchi and perfectly-cooked halved egg—named for Ramirez’s now six-yearold son Oskar. His four-year-old daughter June’s namesake dish is the vegetarian version, with house-made vegetable stock. “We roast a bunch of vegetables to make the stock and blend it with soy milk to make it creamy. It’s one of my favorite things,” he said. “I pour it in a coffee cup and drink it for breakfast.”

Celebrating almost four years at Chow Yum Phat’s overpass location, the ever-adventurous Ramirez has some new things up his sleeve. Next door, the beloved old watering hole George’s is now ZeeZee’s, a neighborhood bar and eatery Ramirez opened with other community partners in December. When word got around about opening a George’s-reminiscent community-centered concept (which also nods to the old Baton Rouge institution of Zee Zee Gardens) CYP’s proximity made it a no-brainer for Ramirez to get on board, creating a slightly-elevated barfood menu. Speaking on the success of the last six months, he is quick to salute the kitchen and recommend a menu favorite. “The made-inhouse pizza rolls are insanely good,” he said. “Every game, it’s packed. It’s a really cool atmosphere.”

A pinnacle of fresh ideas steeped in respect for Baton Rouge tradition, Ramirez’s last decade seems ever-seasoned by momentum. His gears are always churning. Speaking of his family, and their impact as sustaining inspiration, he mentions his admiration for his sister Janie Ramirez’s venture as executive chef at Dai Due in Austin—a farm-totable restaurant where everything served is produced in Texas. “I’d love to go work there for a week one of these days,” he said. And I wonder to myself how long before he’ll conjure up a similar concept in Baton Rouge. It’s anyone’s guess. For now, he is happy to credit his success to his wife, Erica. “All the things I’ve done inevitably led me to wanting to open a restaurant, and my wife giving me the support to go out and do this. I blame it on her, for better or worse.” • chowyumphat.com

FRESH-BAKED Rise & Shine

When an early pandemic lay-off inspired Kanya Michelle to launch her home-based bakery, Shreveport Cottage Homestead, she started out making old-fashioned holiday pies and scones. But then, she noticed a gap in the world of small-scale specialty bakeries: handmade buttermilk biscuits.

“There were already a million people in Shreveport making pies and all of these things, but no one was specializing in biscuits,” she said. “It was kind of surprising. A good buttermilk biscuit is a staple of Southern cooking, but they’re getting harder and harder to find.”

Two years later, with her recipes wholly developed, Kanya officially relaunched her business in the summer of 2022 as Shreveport Biscuit Company. Since then, she’s emerged as one of the star vendors at Shreveport Farmers’ Market, where her towering, Instagram-ready biscuit sandwiches have on occasion attracted an hour-long line of customers. Shreveport Biscuit Company has also released several varieties of frozen, ready-to-bake biscuits that are currently sold by local marketplaces and gourmet grocers in Shreveport, Haughton, Lafayette, Metairie, and New Orleans. With her biscuit-making operation rapidly outgrowing her kitchen, she moved into a commercial production space last September, hired her first employee in the spring, and has been looking at real estate for a potential brickand-mortar location.

Kanya Michelle's biscuits are somehow dense and pillowy at once, tall, crisp-crusted, and outlandishly buttery without being greasy or falling to pieces. Each biscuit half is as substantial as a slab of focaccia, so they stand up well to toppings—making the way for Kanya’s regular releases of seasonal biscuits that incorporate “just about every fruit” as well as herbs, cheeses, and more. Her biscuits-as-strawberry shortcakes are especially popular during the scorching summer months. Blackberries (which she uses in her top-selling biscuit) “belong in a biscuit; they come out almost cobbler-like.” Peaches? “Not so much.”

On the savory side, there are Kanya’s Louisiana-made kimchi and cheddar biscuits, as well as the cheese-and-pepper variety, which features minced jalapeños mixed into the dough while they’re “still kind of raw, so they retain their fruitiness.” Asked to name her personal favorite, Kanya appointed her blackberry biscuit stuffed with good, local breakfast sausage—a combination of sweet and savory flavors that “hits every biological craving note.”

In conceiving of her recipes, Kanya sources her ingredients with care and frequently teams up with other small Louisiana food businesses, creating small-batch releases more in the style of a craft brewery or streetwear company than a bakery. Recently, for example, she collaborated with Lafayette’s Bougie Bologna to create the “Bougie Biscuit”. She’s also collaborated with several local woman-owned small businesses like Sweetport, Goody Granola, Moonlight Harvest Mushrooms, and Special Reserve Coffee Roasters. She’s served a biscuit Monte Cristo and draped a buttermilk biscuit with rainbow-shaped sprinkles for Pride month. These aren’t your grandmother’s buttermilk biscuits—except when they are.

According to Kanya, the key to making great biscuits is incorporating the butter into the dry ingredients correctly. She chills her butter in the freezer before using a handheld cheese grater (“Not a box grater, but a grater with a handle— it’s a total gamechanger.”) to shred the butter into the flour mixture. She stores her mixing bowl in the freezer between batches, which keeps her biscuit dough cooler and makes it easier to handle. If she adds other ingredients to a batch of dough, such as macerated berries or kimchi, she chills those ingredients as well, all in an effort to prevent the butter flakes from dissolving. Preventing the butter from melting, she said, “gives you even pieces of butter that produce moisture, flakiness, and pockets as the biscuit bakes.”

Kanya doesn’t quite feel like a chef, she said, but she doesn’t deny her wellearned expertise on biscuits. “It took me a good, long time before I felt like I had a solid footing,” she said. “It’s some milk biscuit less than five years ago. She doesn’t have a passed-down family biscuit tradition or fond memories of rolling out biscuits while holding onto her grandmother’s apron strings. Before moving to Shreveport, she’d spent much of her adult life in Hawaii and New Jersey—not places exactly wellknown for their biscuit cultures. In the early days of Shreveport Biscuit Company, she struggled with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and self-doubt. But the relationships that she’s established with customers, market organizers, and other Louisiana food entrepreneurs have helped her gain confidence and stay laser-focused on growing her business.

“My friend group has become filled with women like me, small business owners who are trying to do more and are capable of doing more,” she said. “I feel really grateful for the couple of years of chaos that we all just experienced, for the way it all panned out. Five years ago, I’d never made a biscuit. Now, I can’t imagine doing anything other than making biscuits for the rest of my life.” •

Shreveport Biscuit Company’s frozen, ready-to-bake biscuits can be purchased at local marketplaces and fine grocers across Louisiana, including Sunshine Health Market in Shreveport, Mahaffey Farms and Station 80 in Haughton, The Market at Tops in Lafayette, Laughing Buddha Nursery in

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November 10-12, 2023

Louisiana’s Most Beautiful Food & Wine Event

Featured Events for 2023

Friday Night Winemaker Dinner featuring Miner Family Vineyards presented by Didier Consulting

St. Francisville Saturday Night at the Magnolia Cafe & 3V Tourist Court presented by Visit Mississippi

Sunday Grand Tastings at the Myrtles

Craft Beer and Brats Garden presented by Bank of St. Francisville Spirits at the Myrtles’ Courtyard presented by Paretti Jaguar Land Rover

Country Roads People’s Choice Chef Experience presented by Williamson Eye Center City Group Hospitality Tasting Experience

Zero Proof Wellness Bar Presented by Pennington Biomedical Research Center Making Raving Fans Hospitality Group Tasting Experience

For Tickets Visit www.stfrancisvillefoodandwine.com

Presented with generous support from