Cajun Cuisine

COOKING CAJUN: AT TOUPS’ MEATERY, A CELEBRATION OF THE LAND OF BAYOUS, BOUCHERIES, AND ROWDY FAMILY FEASTS

Raised deep in Cajun country, chef Isaac Toups draws inspiration from his family’s 300-year-old ties to the region—and its rich, pork- and seafood-laden cuisine

By Crystal Shi

Isaac toups has deep roots in Cajun country. He grew up on the outskirts of the south Louisiana town of Rayne, population 8,000, in Acadia Parish; his ancestors first settled there in the Atchafalaya Basin in the 1700s.

Toups’s mother grew up a Prairie Cajun on flat plains where rice, corn, and sugarcane grew in abundance and people bred pigs and hunted wild game. His father came from a family of Coastal Cajuns, raised by the bayou on a bounty of fish, crab, shrimp, and oysters. He reaped the best of both worlds.

Cooking Cajun means eating from the land, Toups said, and Cajuns are a resourceful bunch.

“We started cooking what we do out of necessity. But then we decided we liked it, and traditions were born,” he said.

Toups’s whole family grew up learning to hunt, fish, and cook.

“You get into it so early that you don’t actually have a first memory of it; you’re just always into it,” he said, before referencing when he began cooking professionally at age 21. “I had a leg up because I could shuck oysters better than a lot of chefs.”

After a decade of cooking under Emeril Lagasse in New Orleans, sharpening his fine dining experience, Toups opened Toups’ Meatery with his wife, Amanda, in 2012. The food takes a sophisticated approach to rustic Cajun cooking—a tribute to his family recipes and deep-rooted heritage.

The charcuterie is housemade; the cracklins are legendary. The Couvillion, a stew of local Gulf seafood served with a gleaming mound of crab-fat rice, is based on his grandmother’s recipe—and

A perennial

best-seller: the double cut pork chop with cane syrup gastrique.

Toups’s gulf

seafood couvillion is based on his grandmother’s— Maw Maw Toups's—famed recipe.

Cracklins,

a boucherie staple, are another restaurant favorite.

TOUPS’ MEATERY

Location:

845 North Carrollton Ave., New Orleans

What to Order:

Double cut pork chop, Couvillion, cracklins, meatery board

Phone:

504-2524999

Website:

ToupsMeatery. com

Isaac Toups, Louisiana “born and braised’ chef and owner of Toups’ Meatery in New Orleans.

was declared by Lagasse to be the best he had ever had. Another best-seller is Toups’s own creation: double-cut pork chops glossed with cane syrup gastrique, served with caramelized meat-streaked dirty rice.

“I’m super proud of my heritage, what my parents and my family and my culture have brought,” Toups said. “I see a lot of dilution in culture nowadays; I see a lot of things get lost.”

He’s working to keep it alive, both in and out of the restaurant. Take boucheries, traditional whole-hog roasts, which are experiencing a small revival. Toups didn’t grow up with them, but later made them a twice-annual family tradition, feeding anywhere from 20 to 100 people at a time. He has a picture of one of his daughters, Poppy, when she was 3 or 4 years old, handing out cracklins at her first one.

They’re not much like the practical rituals of yore, which were community efforts to share the labor and use every scrap of the pig. Now it’s “more of a party, a get-together”—with plenty of whiskey to go around.

But it’s also “a remembrance,” Toups said, something that brings you closer to the land and the past. It’s a reminder to “have a little more respect for your ancestry, and the things you have now.”

“This is what we used to do, and we should remember that,” he said.