Person

Nine Blocks From The Dish Pit

AB Andre Beauchamp

I started washing dishes at fifteen on Elysian Fields. I own a kitchen nine blocks from there now. This is what we cook, how we buy it, and the apprenticeship that I think matters more than any of the food. Twenty six years in this city's kitchens taught me that the trade is passed hand to hand or it is not passed at all.

01 The apprenticeship

Eight paid spots a year, thirty two weeks, no tuition. Fourteen finished, eleven still cooking. This is the part of the business I would keep if I had to give up the rest.

Why paid, and why no tuition

Culinary school in this city costs more than a used car and teaches in nine months what my line teaches in nine months, except mine pays you.

A culinary certificate here runs past twenty thousand dollars by the time you have paid for knives, whites and the fees nobody mentions in the brochure. The people I most want in my kitchen cannot take on that debt and should not be asked to. So we inverted it. Apprentices are on payroll from day one, minimum wage plus a share of tips, and they never pay me anything. That is not charity. An apprentice at week twenty is doing real work on a real station and is worth what I pay them. The first eight weeks are a loss and I have made my peace with it, because the cook I get at month eight is a cook who learned in my kitchen, on my product, with my standards, and who is not going to leave for fifty cents. Eleven of fourteen are still cooking. One of them opened a snowball stand that out earns me in August. That is a better return than any hiring I have ever paid an agency for.

Thirty two weeks, station by station

Knife work, stocks and roux, garde manger, saute, grill, fry on a Friday, then eight weeks running a station on real service.

Weeks one to four are knives and prep and nothing else. You dice onions until your cuts are the same size every time, because everything downstream is built on that and no amount of talent covers for it. Weeks five to eight, stocks and roux. You will burn roux. Everybody burns roux. You will stand there for forty minutes and you will learn that walking away is the only way to fail at it. Then garde manger, then saute, then grill, four to six weeks each depending on the person. Around week twenty we put you on fry on a Friday night, which is where we find out who you actually are when the tickets are stacked six deep and the fryer is at capacity. ServSafe happens in house around week twenty four. I am a certified proctor, so it costs the apprentice nothing. Last eight weeks you run a station on live service with me at the pass. You call your own timing. I only step in if a plate is going out wrong.

Eight spots open for the January cohort. No experience, no diploma required. Priority to people from the 7th, the 9th and New Orleans East.

🔗January intakebeauchampsnola.com↗

02 How we buy

Direct from a boat out of Venice and four farms across the lake. It costs about eight percent over a broadline distributor and we have never seriously considered changing it.

The eight percent

Buying direct costs us roughly eight percent on food cost against a broadline account. Here is what that eight percent buys.

A distributor would deliver everything on one truck, on terms, with one invoice, and I would never have to make a phone call. That is a real convenience and I want to be honest that giving it up costs money and time. What we get back is this. I know what a sack of shrimp costs every week, which means I know when my food cost is moving and why. The product is better and the difference is on the plate, particularly with shrimp, where the gap between Gulf and imported is not subtle to anybody who has eaten both. And when a boat has a bad month, the money I have been sending him for nine years means he calls me first when he has a good one. We pay on delivery, in full, no thirty day terms, and we do not send loads back over cosmetic grading. That reputation is worth more to a small supplier than the price is, and they price accordingly.

Seven greens in one week

Gumbo z'herbes for Holy Thursday needs seven kinds of greens minimum, in the same week, in early spring. Sourcing it is harder than cooking it.

My grandmother said you make a new friend for every green in the pot, so nobody in my family ever made it with fewer than seven. We did nine this year. The cooking is two days and it is not complicated. The hard part is that you need seven or nine distinct greens delivered inside the same week, in early spring, in south Louisiana, and no single farm grows all of them. Collards, mustard, turnip tops, carrot tops, spinach, watercress, beet tops, cabbage, radish tops. Four farms, six phone calls each, starting in January. Forty one pounds of greens went into the pot this year. We were sold out at 1:15 in the afternoon. If you grow greens within two hours of New Orleans, I want your number before Lent, not during it.