Something something shrimp etouffee something ah gahr-ahn-TEE.
RIP, dude.
Awww. He was one of the giants of Cajun cooking…
Looks like he’d lost a lot of weight when that photo was taken. Being as big as he was is never a good thing. 
RIP.
I’m surprised he made it to 75. Was it him or his brother who was too big to walk around in his kitchen and had a scooter?
I believe he was a regular on Letterman.
It was Paul.
I attended a cooking demonstration he gave at a local supermarket in the mid to late eighties. He was traveling the country promoting a line of spices he’d just come out with. He was huge. I have no idea what the circumference of his legs were but I’d guess 25 to 28 inches. He got around on a motorized scooter inside the store.
During the demonstration he sat at a table set up at one end of the store, and cooked up a chicken casserole in a skillet over a hot plate while telling funny stories from his childhood and life. He also explained what he was doing as he cooked, explaining that he was adding corn at three different times during the cooking process, which resulted in three different degrees of doneness and therefore three different corn flavors. Same with onions and some of the other ingredients. And of course he seasoned the dish with some of the spices he was promoting. Everybody got a little taste of the casserole in a small paper cup and I have to say it was absolutely one of the best things I’ve ever tasted. I’m not sure but I think I actually got a bit of a jolt from it when it hit that jerked my head back a little bit, it was so good. And the flavor stayed with me. I could still taste it two hours later. His restaurant in New Orleans, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, had a reputation for people standing in line down the block and around the corner waiting to get in, and after tasting what he cooked that day I could see why. I’d have done the same.
His wife, Kay, accompanied him on the tour and was a tall, slim, attractive, businesslike, well-dressed and well put-together woman. I overheard her talking to someone before the demonstration and she mentioned that she and her husband never ate at any cajun restaurants outside of Louisiana and rarely outside New Orleans. To look at the two of them you’d think she would outlive him by a couple of decades or more, yet she died just five or six years later of cancer while he’s still been going strong all these years. He was a good guy with a great lust for life and I’m glad he got to live as long and well as he did.
RIP, Paul.
I believe you’re thinking of Justin Wilson, who had a few cooking shows on PBS and used to say things like “Ah gahr-ahn-TEE” and “I’ll tell ya for true”. He was a character and fun to watch.
Speaking as a Louisiana native, he will be badly missed. He did an immeasurable amount to make Louisiana Creole and Cajun food a worldwide phenomenon to this day and he helped usher in wide-scale appreciation of American foods in general.
Paul Prudhomme was the real deal. He grew up one of many children of poor sharecroppers in rural Louisiana and somehow managed to turn his experiences into a local then national then global industry. He didn’t just influence Louisiana food either. His roaring success helped transform the entire American food landscape from the late 80’s until today. The current crop of celebrity chefs probably would not exist if it weren’t for his influences.
Oddly enough, I met him in person but it wasn’t in Louisiana at all. I ran into him at the Fancy Food Show in Philadelphia in 1996 I believe. We had a brief chat and he was nice enough but he was scooter-bound and didn’t appear to be in good health at all even then. I am a pleasantly surprised that he managed to live to be 75.
How many people can say they caused a species to become endangered? Paul can.
He also did some great comedy records, with some jokes I’ve never heard anywhere else, which is rare.
well, …
I went to K-Pauls during the Worlds Fair, and while it was good I’ve had better in New Orleans. Unfortunately after him people got the idea that throwing spices on something and blackening it made it Cajun. When I lived in Lafayette before he got started no one blackened anything as far as I can tell.
When I went back a few years ago the food was as good as I remembered and there seemed to be no Prudhomme influence, thank Og.
This intrigues me…what do you mean?
He made blackened Redfish so popular for a time in the 80’s that it became overfished rapidly so Wildlife and Fisheries departments had to move very decisively to set up better fishing quotas to keep it from going extinct because of the extreme surge in demand. That was never an issue before he showed up.
I remember reading an interview with another Louisiana chef (maybe Justin Wilson; I don’t remember) back in the '80s. He was asked about blackening and said “Hoo-whee! Anything burned like that, we’d throw it out!”
Back when I lived in a dorm (there was a communal kitchen), I tried blackening something once with a very hot skillet and some cayenne pepper. I damned near gassed myself and everyone else in the immediate area!
I agree with the dislike of blackening especially when it isn’t done skillfully. When I worked really fancy weddings in New Orleans in the 90’s, people from other places demanded it. We had some extremely good French trained true Cajun chefs and they could barely pull off those types of dishes and I never thought they were that great even when they did. They were decent but the others were much better.
However, blackening fish and meats wasn’t Paul Prudhomme’s real contribution even though he did popularize it just through association. His major contribution was marketing a very small, niche and very indigenous American food style that was foreign to most people at the time. Let’s face facts, American food sucked in general at the time (early 20th century to the early 90’s at least) even though there were pockets of good cuisine. He opened the door to the idea that you could have extreme success by refining and improving on styles of cooking that were mostly unknown to the public at the time. That eventually spread to everything ranging from a broad range of ethnic foods to the craft beer movement that you see all around you today.
There were celebrity chefs before him. Julia Child is the most famous of the earlier ones but she just tried to teach people how to cook imported French cuisine so the thrust was completely different. Paul Prudhomme was a brilliant marketer and businessman but he was certainly no hack in the kitchen either. He was the executive chef at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans when it was at the top echelon of restaurants in the U.S. and still is to some degree. The fact that he could do that through his own interpretation of Cajun and Creole cuisine rather than classical French styles may not sound amazing today but it was at the time.
The current cuisine landscape of the entire U.S. may very well be very different today if he didn’t exist because he was a true culinary pioneer.
I’ll agree that he was important in spreading niche food. But if you were in New Orleans you didn’t get to see what a travesty “Cajun” food was in most of the country. In ‘79 when we used to visit regularly to eat I think Don’s was about the only Cajun restaurant in New Orleans. (At leas the Collins’ book didn’t list any others.) Now there are a lot more, but not awful. The rest of the country, though - yech. Not Prudhomme’s fault, the copycats fault but it shows the danger. Most people who think they’ve eaten Cajun food never have, and in a sense even those who ate innovative food from a good Cajun chef aren’t eating Cajun food.
Shame. I had mediocre boudin in Seattle, but you pretty much can’t get it anywhere.