allison’s New Orleans blog

The saddest news to come from New Orleanians in exile is the passing of Austin Leslie, one of the best chefs to ever good a meal in New Orleans. He had stayed two days into Katrina, hiding out in his house, and then evacuated to the Convention Center and then to Atlanta…he had a high fever and went into the hospital on September 28 and died the next day. He apparently suffered a heart attack.

My first encounter with chef Leslie was in 1993 at his place called Chez Helene. Jess and I met him eating crawfish etouffe that was incredible…Jim had taken us and he came out and sat at the table with us, a big, gentle man who was all about the food.

Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times obit:

Mr. Leslie grew up in the city’s kitchens. He started delivering fried chicken and eventually cooked with his aunt Helen DeJean Pollock, who owned Chez Helene in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. He took over her restaurant in 1975.

At Chez Helene, Mr. Leslie fused Creole cuisine and the casual food of the local African-American cooks. He made gumbo thickened with filé, served oysters Rockefeller on tin plates and stamped every plate of fried chicken with a smear of chopped parsley and garlic and slices of dill pickle.

(Photo out of the times from 1988, during the time they were making his TV show…)
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…he worked at Jacques-Imo’s Café in our uptown neighborhood and most recently at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen. He was only 71. He will be greatly missed.

Tom Fitzmorris posted this (it’s an excerpt) on his site (see link at right re: new orleans restaurants):

I met Austin near the beginning of my career, when I wrote about Chez Helene for a review in the old Courier newspaper in 1973. He was already laughing, even when you asked why it was that from the time you placed your order till the time any food arrived was something like a half hour. His answer: “I guess you never fried chicken before!” It was a good answer, and opened my eyes for the first time to the truth that fried chicken prepared to order takes awhile, and is incomparably better than chicken that was fried before you arrived and has been under a heat lamp ever since.

Austin’s famous dish was three pieces of chicken (never four–always three) with a stuffed bell pepper and jambalaya. I learned quickly that the red beans and three pieces of chicken was even better. And that he put out great fried fish, delicious oysters Rockefeller and Bienville (colored with, respectively, green and yellow food coloring, enough to color the shell), and a textbook example of that unique property of the soul food restaurant, Creole gumbo (somewhere between a seafood gumbo and chicken and sausage gumbo).

What was the recipe for the chicken? I asked him. “I learned it from Miss Portia,” he said. (Portia’s was a fine old kitchen on South Rampart Street, a remnant of the historic black jazz club district that was torn down to widen the street in the 1950s. Portia’s was lucky enough to be on the right side of the street, and continued to serve until the late 1970s.)

“Miss Portia said that you had to use the small chickens, season it up right with salt and pepper, and keep the grease clean and hot,” is what Austin told me. Did he marinate it? He laughed at that and shook his head. “Good fried chicken is simple,” he said. “You just have to pay attention.”

It looked as if Austin was riding high again at the very popular Pampy’s. And then this. It’s the worst food-related news I’ve heard since the storm.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2005 at 1:19 pm and is filed under New Orleans Restaurants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.