ROUSES_Fall2022_Magazine-low-res

10 ROUSES FAL L 2022

“Louisiana Eats!”

– Poppy Tooker, Producer and Host,

finished dish.

Traditionally, tomatoes have always been the great dividing line between Creole and Cajun gumbos. Those bright, red, misshapen tomatoes growing so plentifully in the Mississippi’s alluvial soil even share the name “Creole.” But no one has ever been able to say when or why that division between brown and red gumbos and jambalayas occurred. Tomatoes balance the dish with a touch of acidity — but to Leah Chase, it was all about the color. “Creoles just love red,” Leah would say. She always took that bright accent further, adding a touch of sweet Hungarian paprika to further brighten the

and Steaks Restaurant.

ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT As the menu states, the “world’s best seafood gumbo” — and “the best fried shrimp in the entire civilized world” — just might be at Doc’s Seafood Shack and Oyster Bar in Orange Beach. You can get the gumbo and the shrimp, as well as a steak at nearby Doc’s Seafood

Lulu Buffett, who has gumbos on the menu at her three waterfront restaurants in Gulf Shores, Destin and Myrtle Beach, has shared several of her recipes, and the stories behind them, over the years. Regarding his helpless gumbo addiction, in “I Will Play For Gumbo,” Jimmy sings: “It started at my grandma’s, in her kitchen by the sea / She warned me when she told me, ‘Son, the first one’s free.’” Lulu confirmed that with a little more earnestness in an interview with the Southern lifestyle magazine in 2017. “Just about everybody who grew up on the Gulf has a story about their mother’s gumbo, or their grandmother’s,” she told a gumbo reporter. “As kids, we’d go see my grandmother once a week. She’d make all sorts of things: potato salad, cake… But there was always gumbo — and she was a great cook.” Both siblings took something away from grandma’s kitchen; Lulu made gumbo, and Jimmy sang its praises. Jimmy Buffett appeared on Jazz Fest’s official poster in 2011. Garland Robinette, the longtime WWL-TV and radio host who was enjoying a second act as a successful fine-art portraitist, was hired to paint the image that would represent both the artist and the festival for that year. The crafting of the marquee festival artwork is a collabora tive process, during which the painter and Art4Now, the Jazz Fest partner company that’s been producing the posters since the mid-’70s, toss ideas back and forth over the course of months, working to make a collect ible image that represents the featured musician, the vibe of New Orleans, and the festival itself. By 2011, of course, Jimmy Buffett was a veritable mega-industry, a brand juggernaut of sun and sandals and salted rims, pirates and parrots and pink crustaceans that had launched restaurants,

BEACH GUMBO

Garden & Gun imagery Robinette could have used to celebrate the Buffett aesthetic. But instead, he painted the singer as he might have appeared in New Orleans 50 years before — not headlining the Jazz Fest main stage or an arena for tens of thousands of Parrot Heads, but on a French Quarter street corner, in faded jeans and Hawaiian shirt, with the long hair and thick mustache that was his signature look in the ’70s. Still the unknown troubadour with no particular place to go, he’s smiling wide over the acoustic guitar strapped around his shoulders. Its battered case is open by his feet, hopeful that some passerby will stop to hear a verse or two and decide it’s worth throwing in a dollar. The cardboard sign propped up beside it is an anachronistic wink to the future: It reads, “I Will Play for Gumbo.” resorts, cruises, food and liquor products, clothing, and even a satellite radio station. There was plenty of tropical-paradise