OffBeat

“The other day at brunch I was expediting over at Mondo, and [sous chef] Paul [Chell] put something up in my window. I did a garnish on it and said, ‘Take a picture of that shit, my friend!’ He looked at me, and I was laughing. I liked that line.”

Chef Susan Spicer is referring to a moment on HBO’s Treme, quoting Kim Dickens’ chef, Janette Desautel, the character she inspired. Because the show brings real and fictional people together, there has been a tendency to read some measure of biography in the show, despite the numerous significant differences between the characters and their “muses,” as Treme’s producers call them. Spicer has taken the association with the show in stride.

“I’m pleased about it,” she says before lunch service starts at Bayona, the French Quarter restaurant she opened in 1990. “I think it’s nice, as long as people realize it’s not me. Kim and the sous chef [Ntare Mwine] came and spent time in the kitchen. We taught them how to handle food. I told her how to expedite: ‘More urgency, more urgency!’ It’s fun being on the set and working with them.”

Still, the on-screen relationship between the character she inspired and the character Davis Rogan inspired caused some to try and put two and two together, Spicer’s husband included. “It caused a little issue between Chip and I. ‘Chip—it’s fiction.’ My restaurant obviously hasn’t gone under. I don’t use the ‘F’ word quite as much anymore. He wasn’t too pleased.”

She’s bemused by the story, and as she reflects on the state of her life and her restaurants—Bayona and the newer Mondo on Harrison Avenue in Lakeview—she does so with the centered air of someone who’s at peace despite recent turmoil. Mondo opened in May, so it’s still in process, and she filed a class-action lawsuit against BP in June for damage done to restaurants and the seafood industry. Even the suit has its place, though. “I’m a little more mellow now.”

 

What’s the status of the lawsuit?

I don’t know the answer to that question. There’s a panel of judges up in Idaho somewhere that are deciding the venue where the actual cases are going to be heard. I thought that was going to be a short process, but apparently it takes quite awhile.

[The suit] was a survival mechanism for me. It was the big “What if”? What’s going on with this thing? What are the long-term ramifications going to be? Is it going to affect tourism in the long run? Is that going to affect my business? People come to New Orleans to eat; they come to eat the seafood. If the seafood isn’t good, will they come in the same numbers? Ultimately, even if we are supported by the locals, that would affect my business. I’ve worked 20 years to make this business a success, and I don’t want to see it go under because of some arrogant oil company.

The ones most in need will be the ones to get compensation. If we are not affected and I don’t get compensation, I don’t care. If tourism is not affected, and my business is fine, I’m not looking for anything I’m not entitled to.

BP is starting a whitewash campaign, and I think it will be important to stay on top. I sit on the board of the Gulf Restoration Network, and they are pretty good at keeping an eagle eye on what goes on with the oil.

Now they’re reporting that they can’t find any more oil.

Isn’t Mother Nature miraculous? [smiles sarcastically] I’m just concerned with the day-to-day, and trying to be informed through all the mire of information and misinformation and conflicting information.

I don’t think Bayona today is feeling the impact. Maybe some impact and more for seafood. The variety is less, although this morning there was a pretty good list of seafood and I asked, “Where is the drum coming from?” and it’s out of the Gulf. That’s good because I haven’t seen drum around for the last month or so. If everything is miraculously A-okay, that’s great.

When will you be able to gauge the spill’s impact?

Summer is a slow time. It’s October, November, December that we start gearing up for the busy season. We’ll see how that looks this year.

You know, we struggled to come back from 9/11. That affected tourism a lot. People didn’t travel for the first year and a half after that. After that it’s like, “Okay, we’re coming back strong,” then Katrina hit. 2005 was going to be the best year since 2001. Katrina came along, and you scratch your way back up, start building up the business again, we’re starting to look really good and boom, we’re smacked down.

I’m sure you know the old saying, “How do you make a small fortune? Start with a big one and open a restaurant.” [Restaurants] are not a high-profit business. Maybe if you’re a chain or corporation where you’re so beloved by our American population. Independent restaurants struggle.

How was Bayona affected by Katrina?

We were lucky. We were here in the French Quarter so we didn’t flood, and the building was pretty much intact. We lost our wines because they were all up in the attic. The key thing was people, getting employees back. We got some key people back and because some other restaurants were still closed, we were able to employ some other people that were out of work.

What do you remember about the first menu back?

It was smaller. The other thing was, I also am a partner in Wild Flour Breads, which I started through Spice, Inc., and I partnered up with Sandy Whann from Leidenheimer [Breads]. It’s a wholesale artisan bread bakery, and that’s the bread we use. Of course they were shut down. A couple of my signature items use that bread, so I was like, “Okay, what am I going to use for my goat cheese croutons?” Our original baker showed up out of nowhere: “Oh do you need a hand?” So I had the bread right as we opened, and that was a beautiful thing. It was important for me to be open by Thanksgiving, because we always serve Thanksgiving and have never missed one.

I was commuting from Jackson, Mississippi. My house flooded, so my husband and my two stepchildren went up to live with his brother and my sister-in-law and their two children, and our two cats, and their dog for two or three months. We put our kids in school up there and rented an apartment, and I would come here for four days, sleep at my mom’s house, run the restaurant, and then drive up to Jackson Sunday morning or after service Saturday night if I had the energy. I listened to a lot of books on tape.

I remember going out to eat in the Quarter in the fall of 2005 and seeing dining rooms full of men—no women.

I never thought about that. I’m usually surrounded by men anyway. There’s some women, but it’s a male industry.

I was working so I didn’t get out and about that much. That’s the sad thing: I work so much. I used to, in my younger days, go out and partake in the music a lot more. My husband loves music. We managed to snatch a Tuesday night last week and had a late night at Boucherie and stopped at Banks Street Bar and heard a country band from Vermont. I can’t remember what they were called [J.P. Harris and the Tough Choices], although my husband did put their sticker on the back of my car in a drunken fit, which I peeled off the next day. They were good! We used to do that a lot, and hit Rock ’n’ Bowl. I miss that.

Do you not go out because you get out of the restaurant so late?

It has a lot to do with working 15-hour days and being a parent—a stepparent—and being married. You have a reason to go home, as opposed to being a single.

 

This year, Bayona is celebrating its 20-year anniversary, and its place in the restaurant scene has changed over the years. It’s not the buzz restaurant it was in the early 1990s, and sous chefs that have passed through Spicer’s kitchen have opened their own buzzworthy restaurants—John Harris (Lilette) and Donald Link (Herbsaint, Cochon) among them. Bayona has become part of the dining establishment, and its menu speaks to another day in fine dining. An item is described simply—grilled duck breast with pepper jelly sauce and wild rice, for example—rather than encyclopedically, with every ingredient sourced as if we’d recognize the best farm for free range ducks in Mississippi. Spicer’s dishes are similarly unfussy, gently enhancing and framing the flavor that drew diners to a dish in the first place.

 

Has Bayona developed enough momentum to go on its own?

No restaurant is a machine that rolls on its own, unless it’s one of the corporate things. I tend to micromanage, so it’s hard for me to delegate. I have a really good sous chef right now, a really good guy in the evening, but I’m looking for somebody strong in the daytime to help support him.

I’ve been trying to get off the schedule for about 10 years now and it isn’t happening. I still love being in the kitchen, but it makes it hard to do it all and still have a life. Which you don’t really expect to have if you’re a chef, anyways. Fortunately, my husband was in the business for about 15 years, so he can’t bellyache too much.

What does your workday entail?

It changes depending on what the situation is. Right now, I’m here early in the morning and I either stop at Mondo on my way here or my way home. I was four days here and two days there, but now I’m like six days here and two nights there.

I come in, I help get the specials ready, I help determine the special menus. At dinner we have our signature items, but we also have a list of things that change on a daily basis. Not every single item changes every day, but I buy my seafood every day. We always have scallops and rabbit on the menu, but we change the preparation according to season and whim. We have a lot of regulars for lunch, so we want to keep it interesting. And we have pasta of the day, fish of the day, scallop of the day. We do a mixed grill with different things, we do an omelet or egg dish every day, and at night there’s a couple of appetizers, a salad. I have some good people that have been with me for several years, so they help me with the ordering and the receiving and keeping things rolling.

Sunday we’re closed, so I always had Sundays off until we opened Mondo and had Sunday brunch. So now I can count on having Sunday after four o’clock off till about eight Monday. But that will change.

How does the grind affect you?

It’s hard to stay fresh. I feel like I would go out to eat more, think about dishes more, but it’s hard to do that when you’re in there all the time. And when I do have spare time, I do things like this, or PR stuff, or special menus or the other things that go along with running a restaurant.

With all of that, why start Mondo?

The neighborhood. I’d been living out there 20 years, and I felt a little surge of energy in the last two years. I’d always had my eye on the spot because it’s been a lot of different restaurants.

Just the idea that you can have some place that you can take kids. The food is casual, but the quality of the food is really good. The things it’s made with are fresh. It’s not a bunch of Sysco cole slaw, or potato salad. You can get a good glass of wine, reasonably priced, or a good margarita. That’s what I want. I want to go out and have a variety of good food on the menu and get a good glass of wine. That’s all I drink pretty much.

Does the shift toward casual mean that the days of dressing up for dinner are passing?

No, I think by and large most people don’t want to [dress up] except on special occasions, unless you’re having a business dinner or you’re used to doing that. It is kind of fun to get dressed up if you don’t work all the time or have kids. We’ve never had a dress code. If we ever had a dress code, none of my friends would be able to come.

When we go out, we tend to not dress up like suit and tie, but I want to get out of something that looks like a uniform. I like putting on a dress. I don’t necessarily want to put on heels. I still try to dress nicely when I go on to an airplane. I can’t get into the sweatpants. I’m serious! My husband and I are of like minds when it comes to that. It used to be such a big event to go on an airplane.

What are the challenges in opening a new restaurant?

I was talking to Frank Brigtsen about it, because he went through it with Charlie’s. I think you don’t realize, if you’ve already had a restaurant, all the systems and all the things that being opened for a few years—how hard it is to get that going right from the get-go. Just the way you interact with people and the way you move around people and how you get used to the space. There are some real subtle things you don’t realize.

Then knowing how to staff. We didn’t know how slammed we were going to be. We didn’t have enough prep people. We had everyone staffed for the service, but it was the sous chef and I coming in and making the food every day. We were working 16-hour days for a couple of weeks, cooking as fast as we could to get ready to open at 5:30 and make it all again the next day. But you don’t want to overstaff because labor is the biggest cost.

I have a wonderful manager out there; she’s the best. We can get some people who are learning; you don’t have to pay top dollar. If I’m charging $15 for an entrée, I don’t want to have to hire $14-an-hour line cooks. We figured we could teach people, but then you get people who don’t understand how a kitchen runs, and they don’t know how to label and consolidate. You do need people with a little bit more experience and know the basic stuff to check.

Air conditioning has been a big issue. It’s been really hot, hot, hot. We opened in the hottest summer, and we have a western exposure. We have a 20-foot hood in the kitchen that was sucking up all the air conditioning. We had to bring in temporary air conditioning. You can anticipate, try to think ahead, but it’s not until it’s up and running…

I’d imagine a restaurant eventually develops its own culture.

Obviously this kitchen is not as high-testosterone as most are. We have a pretty helpful kitchen. It’s not an “every man for himself” situation. I figure there’s a lot of stress anyway in a restaurant environment; you don’t need to manufacture more. I yell occasionally, but not that much. Only when absolutely necessary. I lean more towards sarcasm.

What do you cook at home?

Ice cream. I start my day with PJ’s granita and I end it with coffee Häagen-Dazs. I’m a one-trick pony. One’s just a little sweeter and creamier, and the other has a better kick.

If I were to ever endorse any product, it would be PJ’s granita. It has gotten me through more long days, hangovers, whatever. I have a relationship with my granita. A medium will get me through any day. A medium is extreme for me. I put them in the refrigerator, so it’s a time-release thing. I go, and they stay pretty frozen.

Where do you go out to eat?

There are so many new restaurants, but I still really like Herbsaint. I’m not a partner there anymore, but it’s still one of my favorite restaurants. We’ll go eat Vietnamese because the kids like that. I like Mona’s. If I’m there shopping for my pita bread, or my curry paste, or feta, I’ll grab a falafel or something. When I am off, I try to cook at home, something simple. I try to get green vegetables in the kids, something with green beans or broccoli. My stepdaughter is a vegetarian.

My husband is really good at cooking a lot of things; he’s much faster than I am. At home, you’ve got to peel the onions and peel the garlic. It took me a while to get used to that, always looking around for the stuff that was already prepped.

 

When discussing Mondo and Bayona, Spicer talks about the trials and challenges with good humor. She’s been in the chef business since 1979 and earned a James Beard Award in 1993, so she’s got some perspective. A brutally hot night in Mondo this summer is a story she’ll laugh about five years from now. When asked if cooking in a restaurant takes the fun out of cooking, she laughed as if the question’s ridiculous.

 

What ingredient inspires you?

I love eggplant. I know that seems very pedestrian. It’s usually produce as opposed to a piece of meat or fish. You can do Asian, Mediterranean, Southern—it goes in a lot of different directions. A lot of times when I go to the Asian market they have Thai ones, which are good for curry and hold their texture a little bit more; they’re firmer. Then you get the white ones and the Japanese ones and the fat Italian ones. I just love the flavor and texture. The texture is very sexy.