Brian Landry
Photo provided by Brian Landry
After stints as executive chef of Galatoire’s and ambassador for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, chef Brian Landry created QED Hospitality with Emory Whalen in 2017 when they broke off from the Besh Restaurant Group. QED runs The Bayou Bar, Jack Rose and Hot Tin in the Pontchartrain Hotel, as well as restaurants in Nashville and Kentucky.
Landry grew up in New Orleans, and he enlisted childhood friend and bassist Peter Harris to program live jazz at the Bayou Bar. They recently collaborated on “Rhythm & Roux,” a coffee table and cookbook with more than 100 food recipes, 25 cocktail recipes and interviews with 31 musicians who have performed at the Bayou Bar, including Branford and Jason Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, John Boutte, Dee Dee Bridgewater and more. The book will be released Nov. 3. For information, visit rhythm-and-roux.com.
Gambit: How does the book reflect what you’ve done at the Bayou Bar?
Brian Landry: The Bayou Bar has great bones. The Pontchartrain has lived many lives in the 99 years it has been open. The Bayou Bar has worn a ton of different hats. There was a little bit of music taking place when we got there (in 2018). Part of us getting there, with the addition Hot Tin, and Jack Rose replacing the Caribbean Room — we also wanted to modernize the Bayou Bar’s music program.
Peter Harris has been a friend of mine since middle school. I went to him and said, “Would you come check out the Bayou Bar? I would be interested in having you program some music for the space.”
He came, and the first thing he did was look at the very old, beat-up Steinway piano. They had actually added a wooden drink rail to the outside of the piano for people to rest their drinks.
He said, “I would love to play here, but I can’t get a serious musician to play this piano. So if you can get a piano, we’ll do some music.”
I said, no problem, but I had no idea what a piano cost.
It started very humble. He’d bring a bass and a drum kit from home. He started with one night, and then two nights.
Then Covid happened, and we converted the Bayou Bar into a livestreaming music studio. We got some more music equipment and let musicians use the room for free so they could play music and sell it online.
Fast forward to after Covid, there was pent-up demand for live music and real experiences, so Peter starts doing music four nights a week. The cast of musicians exploded. The musicians you see in the book are the musicians who were playing the room.
Gambit: What types of recipes did you include in the cookbook?
Landry: It is mostly based on the food we cook at the Pontchartrain, whether at Jack Rose or the Bayou Bar. Some of them are specials that people are really attached to. Some have been longstanding menu items, like the fried chicken Parmesan. It has been on the Jack Rose menu since we opened in 2018.
The conception of the book came from constant conversations with the musicians. There were a lot of themes that came up, but one of them is true in both New Orleans food and music culture. We are very much tied to our past in a beautiful way that I think most other cities in North America are not.
I think the recipes tell that story. I do have a red beans and rice recipe in there. I have gumbo in there. There are some classics. That’s what I grew up eating, the first Creole dishes I learned how to cook. I also fast forward into a modernized version of what I think modern Creole cuisine looks like.
An example would be the shrimp cassoulet. I grew up eating a lot of beans. But then I learned how to cook classic French dishes and learned what cassoulet is. It’s slow stewed beans with some sausage in it. The modern take on it is that we can lighten that up and use shrimp stock and shrimp and white beans, all things that are very familiar to a Creole version. But you have a new version of white beans.
One of my favorite dishes in the book is pompano with broken romesco. Pompano is a phenomenal fish. One of the reasons I like this dish is that it leans into Spanish influence. It is olive oil based, heavy on the garlic, lots of acid, and it eats so light. But you’re not missing any of the flavor. Most people’s introduction to the fish was probably with a beurre blanc or a cream sauce or something that’s pretty heavy. Those dishes are still delicious, but not all Creole food has to be that heavy.
Little Aloha is John McSpadden’s passion project.
Gambit: What are some of the recipes stretching beyond familiar Creole dishes?
Landry: Venison saltimbocca. We eat venison all the time. All my friends hunt. There’s not so much in the repertoire for what to do with it when they get venison. But there’s so much Italian food in New Orleans. When you use venison and country ham and make the sauce with bourbon, all of those things make complete logical sense in terms of what it is and how we eat.
There are nods to (former) New Orleans restaurants because I want to keep the past and the present connected as a continuous thread. My version of Muddy Waters is not really close to the Uglesich’s version, but that was the first place I had a dish named that. I remember it vividly. I loved it.
With those restaurants, I don’t think I would make it the exact same way, but I think it is important to remember that those places existed. Without them, I probably wouldn’t exist in the way I do.
The book feels like a snapshot of how I cook. Peter and I have joked that if this book does well, Peter has 30 more musicians he’d like to interview, and I have 100 more recipes. But I think it is a little taste of what I like to cook.
Dining and Cooking