“Susan Spicer, the acclaimed New Orleans culinarian, began her cooking career in New Orleans as an apprentice to Chef Daniel Bonnot at the Louis XVI Restaurant in 1979. Her resume includes staging with Chef Roland Durand in Paris, extensive travel in Europe and California, as well as stints as chef at Savoire Faire and the Bistro at Maison de Ville in New Orleans.”
“Spicer and Regina Keever partnered together to open Bayona in the French Quarter in the spring of 1990. With solid support from local diners and critics, Bayona soon earned national attention, countless awards and has been featured in numerous national and international publications. Susan received the 1993 James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Southeast.”
“Susan’s first book, entitled Crescent City Cooking: Unforgettable Recipes from Susan Spicer’s New Orleans, was released in 2007. New Orleans Magazine awarded it Best New Cookbook, and it was also included in Food & Wine’s Best of the Best recipe collection
In May of 2010, Susan was inducted into the prestigious James Beard Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America.”
“The same year (2010) she launched Mondo, a casual, family-style restaurant which opened in Chef Spicer’s neighborhood of Lakeview. (It was sold in 2019.) In October 2016 she opened her third restaurant, Rosedale, a neighborhood joint in a unique and historic building that serves her own style of Louisiana home cooking. In the Spring of 2019, a new version of Mondo joined other great New Orleans restaurants in the new terminals at Louis Armstrong International Airport.”
Susan Spicer takes another break from her busy kitchen at Rosedale to continue with us.
This is Anne-Marie Panerinkin, Culture OC's food columnist. You can follow me online at cultureoc.org. When I want the best in food and dining news, outside of Orange County, of course, I tune in to the SoCal Restaurant Show on AM830KLAA. - And welcome back. It is our two of SoCal Restaurant Show, and we're here with you every Saturday morning from 10 AM until 12 noon right here on AM830KLAA. The home of Angels Baseball 2024, and you can also catch us on the AM830 Angels app. I'm Andy Harris, the executive producer and co-host of the show. Welcome, my colleague, Chef Andrew Gould, will be joining us a little later in the show with his usual Ask the Chef segment, and we're gonna be talking about Asparagus, and we're enthusiastically presented each and every week by Melissa's World Variety Produce. We are journeying back to New Orleans, and speaking with James Beard Award-winning chef, Susan Spicer, who really knows the territory. Her first restaurant in New Orleans goes back 34 years, and it is a pleasure to welcome Susan Spicer back to the show. Susan, thanks for hanging in there. - My pleasure, Andy. - Now, we know that you mentioned in the other segment that you like to focus on one of your empire restaurants at a given time. - Small empire, which is a very small empire. - Hey, you know, you're still a multi-unit operator, Susan, which is pretty gosh darn nice 34 years later. But, Rosedale is a restaurant where you're spending most of your time now. It's really special to you, but let's back up a little bit, and it's in a very historic building in Rosedale. Kind of set that up for us, if you would. - Yes, actually it is, oh my goodness, it has a very colorful past. It was originally on a canal, a couple of blocks away from here, which is now Canal Boulevard, which was actually a canal running north to the lake. And the original building was built there, and then it was moved to this location, then it was a police station, and then it burned down and then they rebuilt it, and they used it mostly up until Katrina. It was used mostly as a kind of like a holding tank. So when they would have somebody who needed to sleep off a drunk or whatever, they had cells here and all the cells, my former landlord, we just bought the building. But he kept one of the original cells and turned the other ones into restrooms. But it also was located next door to a property that was the colored waves home, which is where Louis Armstrong was said to have spent time in one of the places where he learned to play his instrument. So, and we're also down the street from a cemetery where another jazz great, but he bolden, is supposedly buried. So we are, and we're right by, we're near one of the major cemeteries in New Orleans. And so, Rosetail Drive is a very small street that runs kind of in a residential neighborhood. So we're a little bit hidden away, but we love our location and we love, it's kind of like a little bit of the country in the city. - Now, you have some menu items because Rosetail is a little bit more casual than Bione. - Yeah, definitely. - Really caught my attention and we wanna share this with our listeners. So, one thing that caught my eye was the pimento cheese sandwich. You gotta tell us about that one, Chef Susan. - Well, I've had traditional Southern thing. It's not specifically New Orleans, but it's a real Southern staple that people like to eat on crackers or with pepper jelly and things like that. And it's made with, we char our own, you can make it with canned pimentos, which is how it originally came to be, but we roast our own, we grill red peppers on the grill, and then it's mixed with grated onion, cream cheese, a little bit of mayonnaise, lots of cheddar cheese, and the pimentos all mixed up together. And we finish it with a little bit of black pepper and cayenne pepper. And I sort of modeled my recipe on the recipe of an old chef friend of mine who cooked in South Carolina. And I'm trying, Lewis, trying to remember his last name, but it's a really great recipe. His was the best that I ever ate. - Susan, send one over. Now, you know, it's New Orleans, so you gotta have a po-boy on the menu. Tell us about this crochean de la po-boy. - Well, crochean is, it basically means kind of a suckling pig, but we don't have access to suckling pigs that often. So we make ours with a pork, you know, Boston butter pork butt. And it is, the whole thing bone-in is braised, and roast, slow-roasted for, gosh, about four to five hours, and we use beer, and Worcestershire, and crystal hot sauce, and jalapenos, onions, garlic, all kinds of good things. And then that is, you know, slow-roasted in the oven, and then we pull it apart. And that goes on a Leidenheimer-Pistollet, and Leidenheimer is the pinnacle of po-boy bread in New Orleans. They've been, you know, they're a business that's been around family-owned for, you know, generations and generations, and they make the best French bread. You know, the New Orleans-style French bread, which is, you know, lighter and crispier, a little bit airier, but with a nice, you know, crispness on the outside. So we make a, kind of a creole-aise, creole mustard and mayonnaise, and layer that. And then we do a slaw on top of the coshon, and that is served with fried pickles, and it is delicious. - Susan, oh, wow. Now, before we run out of time, because this is Hollywood, you've had your brush with Hollywood. In 2010, HBO had a wonderful series that ran for four seasons called "Tramey." And "The Star" was a wonderful actor who's also a musician by the name of Wendell Pierce, but one Susan Spicer, there is a character in "Tramey" that is based on you, and you are actually in this series. Just give us a little bit of the insight there, because, again, I believe the creators of "The Wire" did this series, and it was excellent, and it really showcased New Orleans in an honest way. - Yeah, they did a great, great job. They really did. They were quite a presence in the city for and around the city, I should say, for, you know, several years, and just really contributed a lot to the city and helping to, you know, just portray some of the good, you know, a lot of the great parts, especially highlighting the musicians and the culinary community. So everybody was really grateful for that. And the fabulous Kim Dickens, who has just been in everything, you've seen her, you know, in so many different movies and TV series, like "Deadwood" and all those things. She played a woman named Janet Decetel, and she was a chef, and people like to say she was based on me, but I like to clarify that by saying that her restaurant experiences were based on some of my restaurant experiences. Personally, we were a little bit different. She was kind of, you know, see, I was happily married at the time, and she was a lot more of a, a loose, you know, bachelorette, shall we say? So my husband doesn't like it when people compare. She slept around, let me just put it that way. - Well, also she was a little saltier than you are, Susan, so we get it. - But it was fiction. I keep telling them, honey, it's fiction. But they did consult me. I got to, the fun part, Andy, for me, was I got to read the scripts every week. So before they were filmed, I got to read the scripts and give them my feedback on all the kitchen scenes, you know, in the various places. And I also had Kim and her, her, you know, sousheff in the production. Both of them came into my kitchen at Bionna and worked with me, and I tried to teach her, you know, expediting with a little sense of urgency and, you know, how to, the sousheff was a vegetarian. He's a lovely, lovely man, but at one point, I had to cook pork chops. And I had to, like, show them how to, you know, kind of throw the pork chops on the grill without, like, picking them up between his thumb and forefinger, you know, like, icky. - Oh, my, yes. - To pork. I like, no, that's not how you could do it. So it was pretty funny, and I got to be on the set, and I did actually get to play myself in a couple of scenes, so. - All right. It was a really great experience, a lot of fun. - Sousheff, we need to say goodbye, and we're out of time. We do also want to mention that you are represented in the Louis Armstrong International Airport with a version of Mando, which was a restaurant you had previously, and when the lease ran out, you moved on, but Mando survives in New Orleans. Ladies and gentlemen, James Beard Award-winning chef, Susan Spicer, when you get to New Orleans, see her at Rosedale, or, if you want a blast from the past, enjoy Bayona. You are listening to the SoCal restaurant show. When we return, we're talking steaks. We're proudly presented by the Mrs. World Dragon Produce. Don't wander far. - Angels Radio. - A.M.A. 30. (upbeat music)
