SUSAN SPICER:
True to Herself By Kim Ranjbar
Despite founding several successful restaurants, winning local and national awards, and making television appearances, Chef Susan Spicer remains d own - t o - e ar t h , sincerely genial, and passionate about making great food.
Right up there with Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse, Susan Spicer has earned her position as one of New Orleans’s most notable chefs. Though she’s been a part of the local restaurant scene since 1979, earning her chops while apprenticed to Chef Daniel Bonnet at the Louis XVI Restaurant and taking the helm at the intimate Bistro at Maison de Ville, her career started to soar in earnest when she partnered with Regina Keever to open Bayona inside a 200-year-old cottage during the spring of 1990. Only three years after opening her famous French Quarter restaurant, expanding diners’ expectations and palates with creative, globally influenced cuisine, Spicer won the award for Best Chef Southeast from the James Beard Foundation. While still heading the kitchen at Bayona, Spicer launched Spice, Inc., a specialty food market and artisan bakery that also offered cooking classes, a venture that morphed into WildFlour Breads. In 2000, Spicer joined forces with Chef Donald Link and two other partners to co-found the popular Warehouse District restaurant Herbsaint, an eatery which earned Link his own James Beard Award in 2007. In 2010, Spicer was not only inducted into the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America, she also opened Mondo in Lakeview, which remained a neighborhood favorite for almost a decade until it shuttered only late last year. A condensed version of Mondo was set to reopen in the brand-new Louis Armstrong
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International Airport, but COVID-19 and its effects on travel and tourism have temporarily put those plans on hold. Most recently, in 2016, Spicer opened the casual neighborhood joint Rosedale inside a building that formerly housed the Third District Police station, which served Lakeview, West End, and Gentilly for over half a century. Though Bayona has been on hiatus since the shutdowns began in March of this year, Rosedale is still going strong, offering dine-in and takeout for both lunch and dinner. With all of these achievements under her proverbial belt, including many other accolades and accomplishments not mentioned above, one might expect this chef’s head to be a touch too big for her toque, but in fact, quite the opposite is true. Spicer is ever-ready with a laugh, open, and genuinely in love with food. Growing up, Spicer was the second youngest in a family of seven children, “Navy brats” who were all born in different cities, ranging from Key West, Florida (Spicer’s birthplace), to Newport, Rhode Island. The family even spent three years in a small village in the Netherlands before moving to their final destination in New Orleans in August of 1960. “We moved to the Westbank, near the Naval station over there,” says Spicer. “I just remember all of us getting off the plane and getting smacked in the face with the heat. We were like ‘Whoa, what is this?’”
