At 68, he’s the oldest cook in the kitchen by a good decade, maybe two. Gray hair mushrooms from beneath his gold-crested captain’s hat. A mottled patchwork of scars blankets the underside of his forearms. By all rights he shouldn’t be here five nights a week, perched over a sputtering vat of peanut oil in Jacques-Imo’s, the shabby-chic New Orleans restaurant of the moment. Few customers recognize him; the ones who do shake their heads in wonder. Some even go so far as to ask their waitress, just how did the grand old man of Creole cuisine end up working the fryer for an elfin New York émigré prone to plying customers with kamikaze shots?
Austin Leslie was once the most celebrated Creole-Soul cook in New Orleans. Among the cognoscenti of the Crescent City, his fried chicken and stuffed bell peppers, seafood-sausage gumbo, and rum-gilded, pineapple-studded bread pudding were considered definitive dishes in the native culinary lexicon.
For much of the 1970s and ’80s, his corner barroom-cum-restaurant, Chez Helene, drew Garden District swells and Nikon-necklaced tourists alike. Emboldened by rave reviews in the press and a two-page photo spread in the Time-Life Foods of the World volume American Cooking: Creole and Acadian, they crossed the proverbial tracks to North Robertson Street in the Treme neighborhood for a taste of the city’s best back-of-town pot foods.
Leslie was an unlikely media darling. Born to a mother who worked as a domestic and a father who gambled, he took to the streets at an early age, earning his keep doing odd jobs. “By the time I was around eight or so, I was working for this lady,” he recalls, seated at an oilcloth-clad table at Jacques-Imo’s, sampling a piece of his own handiwork, a chicken drumstick sheathed in a ruddy mantle of crust and crowned with a confetti of chopped garlic and parsley. “She grew different herbs in her yard and I’d sell them for her. I made something like two or three cents off a bunch.”
While he was in middle school, Leslie pedaled a bike as a delivery boy for Portia’s, on South Rampart Street. “Back then, that was the black Bourbon Street,” explains Leslie. “They were always telling me I was too little to work Rampart, but I proved myself. The owner, Bill Turner, he looked after me; he educated me on how restaurants worked. That’s where I picked up a lot of what I know about fried chicken, where I learned how to season it right.”
After high school came a tour of duty in Korea, a turn in his aunt Helen DeJean Pollock’s restaurant, and a brief stint as a sheet-metal worker. In 1959, Leslie finally hit his stride, winning a job as an assistant chef at the restaurant in the D.H. Holmes department store on Canal Street. “I had grown up walking by there, hearing the dishes clatter and smelling the food,” he says with a weary smile. “And then all of a sudden I was working in that big kitchen. I learned how to make oysters Rockefeller and shrimp rémoulade. And I learned that there wasn’t much of a difference between what the restaurant called a Swiss steak and what us black folks knew as a big ole hamburger patty smothered in gravy. It got me to thinking.”
In 1964, Helen Pollock moved her establishment to new quarters on North Robertson Street, added an e to her name for a touch of class, and dubbed the little café Chez Helene. Her nephew soon followed. “I brought in the dishes I learned at Holmes, the trout meunière and oysters Bienville,” recalls Leslie. “It was kind of like integration: a little bit of theirs, a little bit of ours. My aunt already had the greens and yams and jambalaya.”
When Pollock retired in 1975, Leslie bought her out. In time, all of New Orleans was abuzz with tales of the little neighborhood restaurant where they served tin pie plates of oysters enrobed in a velveteen Rockefeller sauce and chipped white platters piled high with the best fried chicken known to man.
As America woke up to the possibilities of marketing regional cuisine, Leslie became a hot property. By the mid-’80s, rumor had it that he was being groomed as the black Creole analog to white Cajun cooking’s Paul Prudhomme. It helped that Leslie—his smiling face framed by a swooping pair of muttonchops, a diamond-encrusted crab pendant around his neck—knew he was selling more than food. “Yeah, I could talk,” he says. “When folks wanted to talk about New Orleans food, I was the man. Difference was, I could cook, too, and a lot of those other people couldn’t. I could back up my arrogance.”
Business partnership offers poured in. Plans were drawn up for a chain of fried chicken restaurants. Upscale branch locations of Chez Helene opened, first in the French Quarter, later in Chicago. “Seems like every other day somebody was wanting to talk with me about some kind of great deal,” recalls Leslie. “Seems like everybody wanted to use my name to sell this, my face to sell that. I made the mistake of listening.”
In March of 1987, Hollywood came calling when actor Tim Reid and producer Hugh Wilson stopped in for dinner and left a few hours later, convinced that they had found the restaurant—and the cook—to build a hit television show around. The story line was this: Upon the death of his estranged father, Frank Parish (played by Reid), a professor of Italian Renaissance history in Boston, inherits the family business, a corner bar and restaurant in New Orleans called Chez Louisiane, thus initiating a rediscovery of his cultural and culinary heritage.
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