Louisiana cooking has been on the national hotplate this week. Following Esquire magazine’s ordering two New Orleans poboys in their top 40 sandwiches in the country, New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni chose Cochon , in New Orleans, as one of the 10 best new restaurants in America . Cochon (French for pig) is the brain child of Lake Charles native, Chef Donald Link, and pays homage to Cajun cooking. The menu at Cochon reads like the offerings at a boucherie, plating house-made boudin, andouille, smoked bacon, hogs head cheese, cochon de lait, grilled pork ribs, pickled pork tongue and butter beans slow cooked with a ham hock. Bruni’s criteria were that the restaurants had to be outside of New York City, and to have opened between Jan. 1, 2006, and Dec. 31, 2007. Against all odds, Link opened Cochon in the spring of 2006, nine months after Hurricane Katrina hit the Crescent City. Bruni has high praise for Link’s authenticity to his roots married to innovative cooking:
"New York is absurdly blessed, but of course the city doesn’t have it all. It doesn’t have anything exactly like Cochon, in New Orleans, which liberates Cajun cooking from its deep-fried clichés. With its stylishly casual vibe, fatty abandon, worship of pork (cochon is French for pig) and fervent devotees, it’s a Momofuku on the Mississippi."
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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