Leslie signed on as a consultant, traveling to California to supervise construction of the kitchen set. He also acted as an informal adviser, coaching the writers and actors on the vagaries of New Orleans diet and dialect. Under Leslie’s tutelage, they came to understand mirlitons and muffulettas, Cajuns and Creoles.
Frank’s Place debuted in September of 1987. Though it was a critical success, garnering an Emmy award for Wilson and attracting a loyal cadre of fans delighted to see an empathetic portrait of black life on television, CBS canceled the series a year later. Some of the suits at the network cited gritty themes and low ratings, others a budget that made Frank’s Place the most expensive 30 minutes on television. The producer himself admitted that the series might have offered viewers a slice of life that was too insular, too peculiar for prime time.
The klieg lights of fame dimmed. Leslie pulled the local television ads he’d been running, and business at the original Chez Helene stalled. One by one, the branch locations closed. Already a veteran of more than 25 years at the stove, Leslie shrugged off his fall from grace as if it were an Ash Wednesday hangover. “I knew I could ride it out, that it all would pass” he says. “I still had my little restaurant. The real problem was that I was sitting on dynamite. The dope fiends and pushers were moving into the neighborhood. Now don’t get me wrong, I know the streets. I’ve lived my whole life around pimps and whores. They’ve got a job to do same as me. But this was something completely different.”
In August of 1989, Leslie declared bankruptcy. Sales taxes were way past due, and partners who once promised untold riches were long gone. In 1994, the doors closed for good. Soon thereafter the corner building that once housed the hottest restaurant in New Orleans burned. A bulldozer razed the smoke-stained yellow brick walls; three decades of sweat and toil and grease collapsed in a cloud of dust. Where Leslie had once stirred pots of red beans and rice, ragweed bloomed amid broken tiles and shattered beer bottles.
And then, like Alice down the rabbit hole, Austin Leslie was gone. Vanished from sight. Sure, he popped up now and again, cooking at the Basin Street Club one month, over at the Bottom Line the next. Somewhere along the way, he even took up residence at a restaurant called N’awlins, just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. (Like a bluegrass picker in Japan or Jerry Lewis in France, Leslie’s ego—and his pocketbook—required remove from the origins of his fame.) “We had a good thing going there for a while,” recalls Leslie. “They loved my gumbo. On the other hand, there’s nothing like cooking Creole food in New Orleans. That’s your toughest audience, your best one.”
In the intervening years, Leslie never really made another kitchen his own—until he answered a want ad in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The year was 1996. “I think it said something like, ‘Looking for a Creole/Cajun cook,’ ” recalls Jacques Leonardi, the aforementioned restaurateur. “I never thought I could get Austin to cook in a funky joint like this, but he was willing.”
The two men make for an odd couple: Leonardi, the young joker from New York, always ready with a drink and a slap on the back for his favorite patrons, and Leslie, the onetime toast of New Orleans, standing tall by the deep-fryer, spearing chicken thighs from the roiling grease with an oversize carving fork. For his part, Leslie seems happy at Jacques-Imo’s. Neither Leonardi nor the restaurant’s swamp hut motif—acidhead sunsets airbrushed on the walls, voodoo candles on the tables, plastic alligators screwed to weathered window frames—gives him pause. “If you grow up in New Orleans,” he says, “you’ve seen it all by the time you turn twenty.”
Jacques-Imo’s
8324 Oak Street
New Orleans
504-861-0886
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