Revisiting Red Stick Spice

Grind Your Own Business

RED STICK SPICE SHAKES HOME COOKS LOOSE FROM COMFORT

Story and photos by Lucie Monk Carter

We’re long past the statute of limitations on my cooking failures, so I’ll give you the worst of it in one giddy breath: I was laughed out of my parents’ kitchen when I brought home cabbage instead of lettuce; I’ve looked for celery seed in the depths of the produce fridge, dumped a cup of thyme in a chowder, and sent the residents of my apartment building down the fire escape while attempting corn fritters. Now as the mother of two under five, with twelve years of avid cooking under my flour-speckled belt, my more frequent humiliation is scraping my gourmet creations off the wood laminate floor.

So when Red Stick Spice owner Anne Milneck invited me to attend a cooking class at the culinary shop’s recently expanded teaching kitchen, I was more eager to stand at a high-end stovetop with a bunch of adults than I was to get advice. Maybe if I finish my recipe early, I can mosey around and help others…

Our group that early April evening comprised area artists and artisans, all different ages and exhibiting various levels of comfort with knives and gas ranges. “Is there ever a time you don’t want a sharp knife?” one guest asked the chef-instructor, Matthew Stansbury, as he butchered the whole salmon.

“Hmm, when you’re cutting bones, like with a chicken,” he said simply.

My cooking partner was muralist Ellen Ogden, whose work you’ll be familiar with if you’ve visited a Baton Rouge business in the past five years. Her intricate illustrations and splashy way with color bring a customer five steps closer to what a brand wants to be. For the wall of Red Stick Spice’s adjacent SoGo Tea Bar, Milneck hired Ogden to paint the perfect quote from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, “Would you like an adventure now or shall we have our tea first?”

Each pair of cooks had a portion of dinner to prepare: the couscous, the roasted carrots, the delicious cauliflower appetizer. Ogden and I whipped up three acidic components (quick pickled shallots and cucumbers, lemon-herb white beans, and chermoula sauce) to balance out the main dish, a salmon spiced with ras el hanout.

Anne Milneck’s Red Stick Spice has been a haven of artisanal food products in Baton Rouge for over a decade, and the concept continues to grow and evolve—with additional cooking classes and its recently-opened tea shop, SoGo.

Lucie Monk Carter

We were cushioned by the kitchen staff as we shaved down shallots with a mandoline and tossed teaspoons of the shop’s spices into mixing bowls. “I’ll just add in a little more oil,” murmured Lili, leaning over my skillet as it heated for the salmon fillet. “Turn the lemon this way,” said Sammy. “Ah, you weren’t supposed to season the fish in the skillet,” said Lili, as columns of smoke rose from the pan.

Do they make a dunce hat in chef-white?

The good news is I was in the right place to climb my way back. In running her spice shop, Milneck has never minded marketing her savoir in the kitchen. “I’d always lead with ‘I’m a chef…’ Essentially, you should just come in here and know that you’re going to make great food when you leave here.”

But when a customer whispered to her, “I still make red beans and rice on Mondays,” Milneck took a step down from the mountain. “She was embarrassed to say that to me, probably because of what she’d read about me. I thought, ‘Well, this doesn’t work.’

“We believe in home cooks. We want to teach home cooks. Whether it’s in a cooking class, or on the floor. I tell my staff that all the time: you’re going to hear the same question, but remember, it’s unique to that customer. We’re here to solve that problem. And we absolutely can.”

In Milneck’s teaching kitchen, pages from her late mother’s cookbooks adorn the walls, an homage to a tradition of educating home cooks passed from one generation to the next. Wallpapering by Kimberly Meadowlark.

Lucie Monk Carter

In Red Stick Spice’s current location on Jefferson Highway between Government Street and Capital Heights, Milneck envisioned a kitchen where cooks could gather and form a community. “I’ve always wanted to be the Jenni Peters of cooking,” she said, referring to Peters, the owner of Varsity Sports who has made her brand synonymous with running in Baton Rouge, primarily with free group runs in which the joggers wear their Varsity Sports tees and hit the city streets.

While cooking requires more gear and ingredients than your typical 5K, Milneck holds out hope that Red Stick Spice can become any cook’s destination—or at least a crucial stop on the way to their own stove.

She was approved for a bank loan to expand her teaching kitchen and finally open the tea bar she’s planned for years on the day the governor shut down Louisiana in March 2020. Renovations went ahead. “But my husband (Greg Milneck, owner of DigitalFX) set up a camera rig in the kitchen.” Production companies could rent the space and hang their own cameras and lights. Milneck could take her cooking and cocktail lessons onto Zoom and keep in touch with a customer base who couldn’t come closer than curbside.

“I have to give credit to the people in Baton Rouge. The calls and emails that we got … ‘If you would get flour, bread, toilet paper, and milk, we’d buy it from you.’”

Anne Milneck, founder and educator at the Baton Rouge culinary institution, Red Stick Spice.

Lucie Monk Carter

The teaching kitchen opened properly in October 2020. Milneck and her staff are the primary instructors, but she’s enjoyed expanding the catalog with authenticity in mind, whether it’s Chef Matthew’s sushi workshop—inspired by growing up in the kitchen with his Japanese grandmother—or Paramita Soha’s eye-widening walk through Indian street food. Cardiologist Satish Gadi shares his love of plant-based cuisine, while flamenco guitarist Jim Boitnott takes a break from his day job as an executive at Presonus to teach a masterclass in paella. “To watch the magic in the classroom … that’s what I want. Customers see that person as the one who has lived that food and lived that lifestyle. It’s a different experience.”

Milneck has her core customers, women in their fifties or sixties that come to her with their culinary dilemmas; they rely on the spice blends and oils she’s sold for ten years, but trust her suggestions too. With the help of her marketing manager, Chelsey Blankenship, she chases the millennial market, “smart comparison shoppers with busy lives,” who can be reached by appealing to their children and stocking truffle-infused sauces first spied on Instagram.

The tea shop, finally in operation as of earlier this year, lassoes a few demographics at once: its wares calming and crafted, traditional and tasty. SoGo also sells all the glassware, loose tea leaves, and tools you need to keep up the habit at home.

But mainly, this tea bar is a reason to linger inside a space designed to boost the enthusiasm of any level of home cook: chef-approved cookware, fresh spice blends, global condiments, and even Dolce & Gabbana Smeg toasters. (If you hadn’t yet gotten me something for the next six Christmases ...) Let your cup of Vanilla Rooibos steep for five to seven minutes and take a look around. That’s long enough to lift off.

redstickspice.com