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the “pop-up” restau- rant as we know it today. In 1983, Prud- homme took K-Paul’s on the road, setting up a residency in- side the Old Wal- dorf nightclub in San Francisco and revo- lutionizing how chefs think about sharing their cuisine, with a “have knife, will travel” energy. “It’s the first time anyone’s been nuts enough to try taking a restaurant on the road,” Prudhomme told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Vlae Kershner during the pop-up, which saw the likes of Jimmy Buffett in attendance over the course of its culture-shift- ing, 32-night West Coast residency.

trying to get a seat at a table. By the time Prudhomme opened a permanent New York location in 1989, the branding synergy of television spots, a spice empire and pop- ups had turned Chef Paul into a culinary and cultural zeitgeist. A snapshot from an April 1989 New York Times article about the harried excite- ment that fueled the opening of K-Paul’s in New York captures the energy Prudhomme brought to the city. “‘This is the closest I’ve been to the source since I first saw his Cajun Magic powder at the grocery,’ said Mario Rizzo, a retail coordinator who lives in Bay- side, Queens. After an hour and 45 minutes, he was close enough to be caught in the blue light of the Paul Prudhomme cooking video that played by the front door. Shards of zydeco music and roadhouse smells fol- lowed the departing customers and seemed to fade over the technicolor cooking lessons. ‘I like TV,’ said Lilly Bunn [while waiting in line], ‘but my legs are tired.’” It’s often noted that Prudhomme did not consider his food to be Cajun, exactly, but instead thought of it as Louisiana food. And no wonder: The man embodied and em- braced the whole of the state through and through. Even as his brand grew in stature and global reach, the key components of the Prudhomme empire all remained centered in Louisiana, his permanent home base. His nationally televised shows were all filmed at WYES in New Orleans; his internationally renowned seasoning company continues to be based out of Harahan; and, for pop-ups, it was his local staff who traveled right along- side him to cook across the country. But perhaps most important, Prudhomme was able to take the Cajun flavors and jovial spirit of the cuisine on which he was raised and make it something com- pletely fresh and all his own — a little French Quarter Creole, a little sourced from the Cajun bayou — for a brand, and a way of thinking about Louisiana cooking, that changed everything.

painting by George Rodrigue

ing his beloved blends of herbs and spices with a kind of flavor-based populism that was theretofore unheard of. “When we first opened the restaurant, we were using seasonings and I think we had maybe six or seven blends. The customers would come in and say, ‘Man! This is good! What are you putting on this?’ So we’d actu- ally give them some in foil; take a piece of foil, dump some in and wrap it. They’d come back and want to buy it,” Prudhomme told OffBeat magazine in 2005. And from the classic blackened redfish seasoning blend, to gumbo filé, to cured specialty meats like tasso, it’s not a stretch to say that the Magic Seasoning Blends brand is now ubiquitous, available in all 50 states and 37 countries around the world. “The way we work is that the blends are developed — actually next to my house I have a research and development kitchen, and that’s where I work at. We do the blend there, we send it here, they re-blend it and then they send it back to us and we taste it and if it matches, then [we] start blending it,” Prudhomme explained to OffBeat . “Ev- ery blend that we do is tasted. It’s looked at, it’s tasted and tested against the last blend. That’s our system of being consistent. We do about 15 or 20 batches a day. If you like that kind of thing, it’s fun.” Prudhomme was also one of the first chefs — if not the first —to embrace the culture of

“The San Francisco version of K-Paul’s Lou- isiana Kitchen had lines out the door nightly, with waits of three to six hours. Chronicle restaurant reviewer Patricia Unterman asked Prudhomme, who was holding court at a small table, why he’d allow customers to wait so long. He couldn’t answer at first because of the stream of customers coming up to tell him their waits had been worth it,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle ’s Bill Van Niekerken in a 2016 tribute to Prudhomme’s pioneering pop-up spirit. “Thirty years later, the dozens of restaurateurs opening pop-up spots in the city should tip their chef hats to Prudhomme and K-Paul’s.” But cooking for the masses with Prud- homme in an unfamiliar space had its pitfalls — just ask Chef Frank Brigtsen. “I was the ‘blackened’ guy. So I’m blackening redfish, prime rib, lamb chops, and making barbe- cue shrimp,” Brigtsen recalls in a 2005 in- terview about his experiences cooking for Prudhomme at the San Francisco pop-up. “The place didn’t have a very good exhaust system, so I had to wear goggles. Every 15 minutes I’m dumping the sweat out of my goggles. It was brutal.” Soon, the East Coast came calling, and Prudhomme set his sights on New York City. His five-week, Manhattan-based pop-up in 1985 was even more intense and impactful than the San Francisco iteration, with lines often stretching block after block of people

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