Chef Eric Cook to Open a New Restaurant on Decatur Street

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New Orleans chef Eric Cook has a new restaurant in the works in a familiar French Quarter address.

Saint John is slated to open in September at 1117 Decatur St. with a long bar up front, a wide-open kitchen in back and a menu inspired by the types of dishes found in the back of old, spiral-bound Louisiana cookbooks.

Its address has seen a long run of restaurants, including the old Maximo’s. But the building has a much longer history, and that’s what inspired Cook to take it on as the setting for Saint John.

Cook is best known as chef/owner of Gris Gris, the Lower Garden District restaurant he opened in 2018 with an elevated take on Southern comfort flavors.

Saint John will be a Creole restaurant, where Cook and chef de cuisine Daren Porretto are taking a fresh approach to the roots of the city's cornerstone cuisine.

“When you get down to New Orleans food, why change it? That's what got us here as a great food town,” Cook said. “This doesn’t need to be global. This is about bringing back the things that make New Orleans food great.”

To develop their menu, the chefs have been pulling vintage, dog-eared cookbooks off the shelves of their families’ homes and from the racks at used book stores.

Look for dishes like cracked crab and Gulf fish courtbouillon, pork belly cassoulet with a cracklin’ crust and Creole chicken corn maque choux casserole. The chefs will have a take on oysters three ways (fried, baked and poached with Pernod-spiked cream). Fried shrimp boats with chow chow and oysters with sauce gribiche are in the works.

The front bar and dining room at Saint John leads to a second dining room and the restaurant’s most striking design feature – an open kitchen with a dining bar, giving people a direct view as dishes come together. A winding staircase leads to a second-floor dining room, and a balcony with tables over Decatur Street.

The contours of history built into the structure stoked Cook’s imagination when he first walked in.

The address is part of a row of buildings steeped in history. It was once owned by the Ursuline nuns, whose landmark Old Ursuline Convent abuts the property. By the 1920s, when this part of the Quarter was full of Italian groceries and food distributors tied to the nearby French Market, the building was home to a produce company. Outside, plasterwork renderings of fruit-filled cornucopias still attest to that era. By the 1960s, it had a stint as a head shop.

It became Maximo’s Italian Grill in the 1980s, part of the trattoria trend of the time. Maximo’s was a mainstay through the 1990s and until Hurricane Katrina. It came back a few years later with new owners, but finally closed for good. The space became the Creole restaurant Trinity in 2016. By 2019 it was an Italian restaurant again, this time called La Mensa, which closed just before the pandemic.

Through all those restaurant changes, the open kitchen has remained a defining element of the space. This is similar to the kitchen Cook runs at Gris Gris, and he’s excited to fire it up again and bring some new energy to the old building.

“This is like moving into a new place but discovering it feels like an old house you knew as a kid,” he said.

Saint John

1117 Decatur St.

Projected opening: late September 2021