re: The Work Of A Master, Warren Leruth

Thanks for the recipes.

Those recipes are classics.

A personal note about the Crab Meat dish...My in laws were the owners of the Cotton Club in Baton Rouge. Uncle Louis always made the Crab Meat Au Gratin, and wouldn't tell anyone how he made it for years. Before he passed, he gave me the recipe. When I first read it, I was aghast at the thought of using evaporated milk for this dish, and fought the recipe for years by using heavy cream. It was perfect when I finally gave in and made it with the evaporated milk. Seeing that Warren made it using the same process is amazing.

Also...on the Copelands/Taste Buds/Outback Steakhouse connection. Tim Gannon was also working for Copeland when he met Warren. Tim was the founding partner/chef for Outback. Tim told me many times that Warren was the best spice chef that ever lived. Scientific in his approach...and unwavering in his demand for the best ingredients available.

Warren also taught Paul Prudhomme about spices and therefore was instrumental in the blackening process that was Paul's signature dish for years.

Last time I saw Larry was about 8 years ago at a SPS track meet in Covington. I think he still does test kitchen work with Outback and other restaurant companies in his test kitchen in Folsom, La. I hope he is not behind the latest Outback Bloomin' Onion, topped by Aussie Cheese Fries, topped by BBQ Rib pieces...that damn thing is just a lazy attempt at innovation.


I also believe that Warren is the most underappreciated chef that New Orleans has ever had.

Here is the soup.

LINK

And a redfish

And his shrimp remoulade

Not Condensed...evaporated. Just an early morning brain fart. Thank you for pointing out that mistake.

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A personal note about the Crab Meat dish...My in laws were the owners of the Cotton Club in Baton Rouge. Uncle Louis always made the Crab Meat Au Gratin

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Would you share the recipe?

There are a good many out there which use evaporated milk. They're usually older recipes.

... and if someone somehow has the original Popeyes biscuit recipe that they could share would be awesome. Today’s biscuits are massed produced and not like how I remember.

"My favorite of LeRuth’s desserts was the macaroon bread pudding. He made that with coconut, his Melipone (Mexican-style) vanilla, an enough eggs to make it incomparably light. A big pan of it sat on a sideboard in the dining room; it was served at room temperature, without a sauce, and was still the best bread pudding in town.

The wine cellar—which was actually in the attic—was not equallyed locally for a long time. At its peak, it held over 30,000 bottles, including some very great ones. It did not start that way, however. In the restaurant’s early years, Leruth struck up a lifelong friendship with David Martin, the founder of Martin Wine Cellar. A few times a week, Leruth asked to have a few bottles of an assortment of wines that interested him delivered to the restaurant.

“I kept sending my driver way over there with those little deliveries,” Dave Martin said. “I was just about to tell him, ‘Warren, I like you a lot, but I can’t keep doing this.’ Then he called me and said, ‘I found the wine I want. Send me two hundred cases.’ From then on, he was one of my best customers.”

That wine was a Puligny-Montrachet which, along with an Aloxe-Corton, became the house wines of the restaurant (at under $10 a bottle!). But the wine I remember best at LeRuth’s was Chateau Latour 1970, which was served with roast beef poor boys one Monday evening in the summer of 1975. The occasion was the publication of Richard Collin’s “The New Orleans Cookbook,” which Collin wrote with his wife Rima. “The best food in the world and the best wine in the world!” said Collin at the party.

The Latour flowed like water that night. I don’t know, but I suspect that Leruth underwrote that. Because, as much an ogre as the earlier stories may make him appear, he was a genuinely likeable man, a lover of living well, laughing most of the time, and often startlingly generous. He founded the Chef’s Charity For Children, the first local event in which chefs got together to cook and raise money for a worthy cause, still a sellout every year. When Dave Martin remodeled his deli at Martin Wine Cellar, Leruth sent over a new professional stove of the kind he thought the place ought to have. Martin hardly needed a donation, but to Leruth a friend was a friend.

LeRuth’s rolled merrily along into the 1980s, installing along the way the first requirement of a deposit for a reservation ever seen in New Orleans. Leruth’s sons Lee and Larry, who’d worked in the kitchen throughout their childhood, joined their father in the kitchen full-time.

Leruth renovated the restaurant in the 1980s, greatly upgrading creature comforts. He replaced the old workhorse china with beautiful bone china and heavy, unique silverware. He bought a substantial collection of art, including an original Picasso. Nice new chairs came in, and with them, something new: pillows for the ladies’ feet. (Sometimes when the waiters reached down to position these, the ladies reacted with alarm.) The menu grew a little bit, too, the new dishes seeming to have been there all along.

Then he opened a second restaurant. LeRuth’s Other Place was in a renovated house across the side street from LeRuth’s. It had an Italian tilt, using the best ingredients (it was the first restaurant I remember making a point of serving Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano cheeses). The food was very good, the prices were modest, the service informal, and with all the traffic that LeRuth’s generated Leruth figured he could make a bundle here on his overflow alone.

He figured wrong. LeRuth’s Other Place went nowhere. Or maybe the story was that it was already nowhere and stayed there. You had to have a really good reason to go to that part of Gretna, and the Other Place wasn’t reason enough. It closed before a year had passed since its opening.

Meanwhile, the center of gravity in the New Orleans restaurant business had shifted. The Uptown gourmet bistros were pulling a lot of business away from LeRuth’s and other outlying restaurants. Then came a sudden shrinkage in the local oil industry. That hit the West Bank hard, and within a few years most of the great restaurants there had closed.

And the old man wanted to move on to other projects. He was heavily involved with Al Copeland’s restaurants (he created the biscuits for Popeyes, among other dishes), and he had consulting gigs all over the place. He sold his restaurant to his sons Lee and Larry. Both were excellent chefs who had apprenticed all their lives to the master. And LeRuth’s recipes were so exact that it wasn’t hard to keep the quality level up. LeRuth’s continued to do very well. Lee told me in 1985 that LeRuth’s was putting a million dollars a year profit into his pocket. That was serious money for a freestanding restaurant in a secondary location back then.

But the brothers had personal problems. Larry dropped out for awhile. Lee opened a second restaurant, Torey’s, in the French Quarter (it was where Bayona is now). He told me that it was going to be a restaurant purely of his own creations. None of his dad’s food was on the menu. This mystified diners. Torey’s did not do well, and Lee’s frustration with that took him to the breaking point. One evening a diner asked to talk to him. The diner wanted to compliment the chef, but Lee had had a rough day, and thought it was another complainer. After giving the man a piece of his mind, Lee stormed out of the restaurant and went home.

What happened there is called an accident by the Leruth family. Lee Leruth, alone in the house, was killed by a bullet from his own gun. He was still in his twenties.

Warren Leruth took over the restaurant again. He brought in a chef de cuisine and got the place back up to speed, even though Leruth wasn’t always on site. The customers and wait staff were much relieved.

But the momentum was gone. LeRuth’s lasted only two more years. Then Leruth sold everything but the name at an auction: wine, china, artwork, everything. A lot of that is still circulating in local restaurants and private cellars.

Leruth kept on working. I saw him once a year at Manresa Retreat House until he died in 2005. He was the same smiling, optimistic, brilliant guy, with a million projects and even more opinions. I loved hearing his insights. My favorite: At one of the silent Manresa breakfasts, he passed me a little note under the table.”Too much baking soda in the biscuits!” it said. Things like that were obvious to his astonishingly keen palate and encyclopedic knowledge of cooking.

One project that all his fans wished he would undertake was never done. Leruth wrote two small cookbooks, neither of which had much of the restaurant’s food in it. But he never wrote a book of his serious recipes, the ones that made LeRuth’s great. Larry Leruth still has the recipes. Maybe someday he’ll put them into a LeRuth’s cookbook at last.

In its relatively short history, LeRuth’s left behind many memories of a golden chapter in the annals New Orleans dining. It was the first serious chef-owned restaurant in New Orleans, and set the standard for all the ones that would follow.

It also left a charming building in its wake, one which was home to a number of restaurants after the LeRuth’s era ended. But now even that is gone. A fire burned over half of it to the ground around the time of Hurricane Isaac in 2012. It’s all memories now."

Great read! Thanks for sharing!

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To my understanding of if I remember correctly when Warren was at Copeland’s he oversaw the guys who are now the local tastebuds guys that worked at Copeland’s. They trained or worked under Warren if the story goes. Then the tastebuds left Copeland’s to form their group that opened Semolina’s, Zea’s and now the closed but awesome Mizado restaurant.

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this is true to my knowledge.

one of the guys is a relative of my family

OT, but kind of new to the board...where do you cook, Stadium Rat? Do you own a restaurant? You bring great reads and recipes to the this board.