From Mississippi to Beyond Brandt Cox: On the Cutting Edge BY KATHY K. MARTIN
B
randt Cox’s culinary path was paved with a few roadblocks and detours, but it ultimately led him to a career as a chef and an entrepreneur serving the culinary community called CoutelierNOLA. Coutelier is a French word for “cutlery workshop,” and Cox says that the name is a way to show respect to the French heritage of New Orleans and his French culinary training. Cox and his partner, Jacqueline Blanchard, opened the flagship shop in New Orleans about six years ago. The shop provides an array of professional knives, sharpening stones, honing rods and other fine kitchen tools and accessories for restaurant chefs and home cooks alike. CoutelierNOLA resides in a purple-colored building with a bright orange door in the historic Carrollton and Riverbend neighborhood. They also opened a second shop in Nashville in 2018. Their motto is “Serious cooks need serious tools,” so their mission is to offer an accessible, friendly and informative knife shop that helps demystify much of the misinformation regarding Japanese versus German/Western knives. “We essentially wanted to create a culinary candy shop, filled with all of our favorite tools, cookbooks and knives, and be a one-stop shop for culinary professionals,” Cox says. They were both tired of ordering knives online and being disappointed by the poor quality, fit and finish, as well as the lack of customer service or ability to hold and feel the product before buying it. “Your knife is the most essential tool in your entire kit. You use it all day, every day. It’s pivotal that this tool functions properly, feels comfortable and is reliable,” explains Cox. He believes that it’s also extremely important to have the knife professionally sharpened, edged and serviced when needed. “Just as important as a paintbrush is to an artist or a hammer is to a carpenter, the knife is the same for a chef.” Growing up in Oxford from sixth grade through college graduation at Ole Miss, Cox says that his Southern upbringing, especially his grandmother, shaped his passion for cuisine. He worked alongside her as she spent her later years as a waitress at a country restaurant. He recalls the salad bar adorned with black kettles of daily soups, meat and three vegetable options, and a menu featuring fried chicken, country ham with red-eye gravy, chicken-fried steak and meatloaf. “As a young child, my main responsibility was to stay out of the way, but soon I found myself filling ketchup and steak sauce bottles and salt and pepper shakers. I even helped vacuum the floor in the evenings to pick up all the crumbs.” As he grew up, his interests shifted more to sports, school and girls, he says, but by his sophomore year at Ole Miss, food found him again as he was changing majors and trying to figure out what he wanted to do. He decided to pursue a degree in history but found that he was spending more time watching
34 • October/November 2021
Coutelier’s Konosuke knife, some Sakai, Japan. $220 the “Food Network” on TV and dreaming about new recipes to try. “The big breakthrough happened almost by accident,” says Cox when he decided to study abroad in 2004. His roommate, Scott Dessells, was an accomplished pastry chef who took him along on pastry journeys across Paris and later to Belgium and Holland to complete the culinary adventures that summer. When he returned, Dessells helped him land his first kitchen job in Oxford. “Before I knew it, I was a 22-year-old head chef of a restaurant on the town square.” He moved to New York in 2008 to attend the French Culinary Institute, where he graduated top of his class and where he also became part of the first staff of the renovated Townhouse Restaurant in the city’s upper east side. He moved to New Orleans a year later to work with renowned chefs John Besh and Michael Gulotta at Restaurant August. He met Jacqueline there and became schooled in Cajun and creole cooking since she grew up in Louisiana and was the executive sous chef and also his boss there. After working as the opening sous chef of Borgne restaurant and Monsieur Benjamin in San Francisco, he returned to New Orleans. The couple shares many interests in music, travel and a sense of culinary adventure. They’ve traveled the globe together, but their biggest adventure was when they took off work for five weeks to visit Southeast Asia, where they toured Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore and Japan. “For the first time in my life, I truly realized the difference between vacation and travel. It was in no way easy, but that trip would forever have a
