Fix Yourself a Plate

By David W. Brown Photos by Romney Caruso

When Linda Green was young, her grandmother would cook ya-ka-mein, a creole dish for which New Orleans is now famous. All the neighbors in her Central City community would smell the spicy noodle soup cooking and show up with a bowl in hand—literally. They’d sit on the porch until the ya-ka-mein was ready, and everyone would get their share, eat and shoot the breeze.

“Ya-ka-mein is one of New Orleans’s best kept secrets,” says Linda, who is herself a New Orleans institution: an acclaimed chef who is called “the Ya-Ka-Mein Lady” for her success in bringing her family’s recipe to the world.

Her culinary repertoire covers the whole span of down-home cooking. Food, family and community are intertwined, and a single bite of some special dish can transport us across decades. Her smothered duck, for example, takes her back to her childhood. It is an old family recipe resurrected for New Orleans festivalgoers. And like the ya-kamein for which she is celebrated, she learned the recipe from her mother and grandmother.

“It’s all about family,” she says. “My mom, my auntie, my grandma—they showed us how to be a family, and that’s what I am with my children and grandchildren. They cooked and that’s how I learned to cook.”

As a child, her job in the kitchen was to chop vegetables next to her mother. “Oh Lord,” she says, “I used to have a big ol’ knife and a chopping board! I had to cut the stalks of celery, peel the garlic, chop the parsley, cut the green pepper— I had to do all that.”

Her smothered duck was born of a Thanksgiving tradition.

They always had turkey and duck alongside oyster dressing, mirlitons and bell peppers. (“And you’ve got to have gumbo, definitely,” she explains.) When she was a child, though—seven or eight years old—she couldn’t quite get on board with the idea of eating duck. It scared her, so her mom took the oyster dressing and used it to stuff the duck. “Oh my God,” she says. “Let me tell you something: My mama cooked that duck, and every year after that, they could have anything they wanted on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but they had to have a duck in their house for me. I’ve been with duck ever since.”

Her mother taught her how to cook it. “It’s tender,” she says. “It melts in your mouth.” The recipe is simple, she says, because many of the spices lining store shelves today simply weren’t available when she was young. They used salt and pepper and fresh vegetables, and she still does. The duck is quartered and washed, well-seasoned and set aside. Meanwhile, she prepares the roux: the goal is a caramel color, made with flour, duck fat, onion, green bell pepper, parsley, garlic and celery. She sautés her roux, getting her seasoning tender, and once it hits the right color, she adds water until the gravy is just right: not thick, not thin, but rather, where it can hug the rice just so. Once it’s ready, she pours the gravy on the duck, covers it in foil, and bakes it in the oven for an hour and 45 minutes. Once it’s cooked, she removes the foil and lets it roast just long enough to get a golden-brown color.

“After that, baby, you’re good to go. You’re going to get you some smothered duck with gravy and rice, and a little potato salad on the side.”

Her smothered pork chop recipe goes much in the same way. “When I tell you— mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm—it’s nothing nice. It’s delicious.” Serve it with potato salad, greens, cornbread and bread pudding.

As for the cuisine for which she is most famous, she says it is a result of the great diversity of the city of New Orleans.

“Ya-ka-mein is a Chinese dish,” she says. “But you have to understand that, even though it’s a Chinese dish, it’s an African American dish, too. What we did was take it, put our own spices and herbs in it, and elevate the dish. It has always been in the Black community.” It is especially popular, she says, late night when bars are getting ready to close. “That’s the first thing people would get: a plate of chicken and a ya-kamein. And ya-ka-mein—another name for it is Old Sober. It is a hangover cure.”

And for that kind of medicine, sometimes only the best will do. “I’ve had many call me from Tipitina’s and tell me, ‘Help me—I’m hungover and I need a ya-ka-mein!’ and I fixed it for them because I know what to put in it and the right amount to put in it.” They would later call her back and let her know how much better they feel. “When you’re out there drinking and having a good time, the salt is coming out your body, and you’ve got to put a little bit back to feel better,” the Ya-Ka-Mein Lady says.

The dish is sometimes served in a cup. In the broth is meat, chopped green onions, noodles and a hardboiled egg. (There is also a vegan version, and you bet it’s popular. In 2013, she won the PETA-Food Network Vegan Gumbo Fest.) Under no circumstances do you eat ya-ka-mein with a spoon. It is eaten with a fork, and then you drink the broth. A few years ago, Linda says scientists from California came to New Orleans, curious about the curative powers of ya-ka-mein. They studied it and found, yes—it sobers you up! “The liquid, that part is the part that sobers you up—that juice. And I happen to have that old-school flavor,” Linda says.

And that flavor is all over the place these days. Her food has been featured everywhere from The New York Times to Rolling Stone. She was one of the first people from New Orleans to win “Chopped,” a culinary contest on Food Network in which chefs compete against one another, preparing dishes that are evaluated by a panel of judges. She was even featured on the late Anthony Bourdain’s show “No Reservations.”

That happened the first year she served her food at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Already, her ya-ka-mein was famous locally. A woman named Diane stopped by her area and said, “I need to see Ms. Linda.”

“This is Ms. Linda,” said Ms. Linda.

“Anthony wants to try this,” said Diane.

“Anthony who?” “Anthony Bourdain.”

Linda recalled: “I almost dropped my cup. Anthony Bourdain?”

He was a fast fan of her cooking, and featured her on the “Cajun Country” episode of "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations" in 2011. She recalls a conversation she had with the culinary superstar.

“Ms. Linda,” he said, “I’ve eaten everything all over the world, but I’ve never had this particular flavor before. You need to do something with this.”

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Linda Green’s mom, Shirley, was “an amazing cook and caterer,” says Linda, who worked for 33 years in Orleans Parish school cafeterias, a path Linda would later follow.

The path did not last forever, though. When Katrina hit and the levees failed, Linda lost her job of 25 years. Her last school was Edgar P. Harney in Central City. When the water came, their jobs vanished in an instant. “It was a hurtful thing,” she says. “We thought we were going to go back to our jobs, but they never did call us back. They never said anything, even up until today. They never said anything to all the teachers, principals, nurses, social workers, the cafeteria, custodians—nobody.”

When Linda returned to New Orleans after the flood, Tipitina’s—the worldrenowned music venue—asked her to cater for them. One of the jobs she did was cook for disadvantaged musicians. “I did that, and I loved it. I had something to do every day.”

She already had a stellar reputation as a chef from her work feeding ya-ka-mein to the Mardi Gras second lines every year. She would go stop to stop with them, and when they didn’t see her at a stop, it was common to hear someone shout, “Where’sthe ya-kamein lady? Y’all seen the ya-ka-mein lady?”

She says: “That’s how I became the Ya-Ka-Mein Lady.” If she missed a stop, she said, it was because she was still serving at the previous one. “If they didn’t see me at the second stop, I would get to them at the third one—unless I was out of ya-ka-mein!”

Her phenomenal popularity with the second line garnered her an invitation to Jazz Fest to do a cooking demonstration. “I was excited,” she said of her first, anxious year there. “I didn't know what to do. I started asking around, and everybody I talked to said, ‘Oh you can do this. You go get it. You can do this.’ And I started doing cooking demos at the Jazz Fest, and believe it or not, my line was longer than some of the vendors out there! I didn't know what to do, or how to do it. But I do a lot of my thinking when I'm laying down, and I just did a lot of praying. And I just asked God to guide me. And the first year was a success.”

After Katrina and her work at Tipitina’s, global success would follow. She still cooks at several festivals every year, including Jazz Fest, the Bloody Mary Festival, and the French Quarter Festival.

“I was grateful for Tipitina’s. When they knew I had lost my job, they came up with a game plan for me. I was able to come back to New Orleans. I went to Texas—we were over there for the night of the hurricane,” she recalls. When she came back to her city, a new life awaited. “I went out on faith and I never looked back. I’m enjoying the blessings that have been bestowed upon me,” she says.

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Today, it can be hard to find someone in New Orleans who doesn’t know Linda Green. She is a New Orleans icon. Every year brings new awards and acclaim—and not just her ya-ka-mein. Best po’boy in New Orleans? She won that one in 2017. Best bloody mary? 2017, 2018 and 2019 at two different festivals. In 2018, Ms. Linda received the Dream Achiever Award, granted by State Farm Insurance. She even won best non-traditional dish at the 2014 Sushi Festival. Perhaps most notably, she was awarded a CultureBearer Grant in 2019 from the New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund.

The pandemic badly disrupted the city’s culinary activities and festivals, though things seem finally back on track, and Linda isn’t wasting a moment. “I can’t stop now,” she says. “I have to continue. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff. We were feeding the homeless and the seniors with the city. They just finished.” Now, she is working with the Louisiana State University AgCenter Food Incubator in Baton Rouge, and with Rouses Markets, to get her award-winning bloody mary recipe, Ya-Ka-Mary, on store shelves.

“It’s a long time coming,” she says, and it has taken a lot of work to bring the product to fruition. She is thrilled to get her famous recipe in people’s homes.

You can try her other dishes at Rouses at 4500 Tchoupitoulas St. in New Orleans, where you will find her every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 in the afternoon. She also does curbside ya-ka-mein service through her company, Ms. Linda's Soul Food Catering, and caters for businesses, private events, families and festivals across the city.

“You know,” she says, “they have people that live here that still don't know what ya-ka-mein is, and they've been living here in New Orleans all their life!” She is very quickly educating those poor souls.

Her fame and acclaim are nice, but she remains grounded and focused on her work. “I’m aware of it, but I’m not aware of it,” she says of the world’s approbation. “Cooking is what I do—it’s my livelihood. I have responsibilities, and I do these things because it is my job.”

She has some well-honed and battletested advice for the next generation of New Orleans chefs: “I tell a lot of young chefs nowadays that what you have to do is listen to your grandmothers, moms, dad, and older uncles and aunties. The people who raised you, they knew how to cook back then. They can tell you what to put in this and that.”

When you taste her food, she says, “you can taste all the stuff my mother did. Everything has its own taste—that’s what she taught me how to do. If I’m cooking, everything is going to have its own taste. I’m grateful she taught me how to cook.”

As for New Orleans, with its boundless love for the cultural icon that is Linda Green, she returns the love and then some. “I live in this city. I was born and raised in this city. I love my city,” she says. “I have so much support from my city, and whatever I can do for it in return, I don’t have a problem doing it, because my city is good to me. New Orleans is a good city and I love it.”