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Café Des Amis “I remember in my early 20s, 30s, they were eating boudin for breakfast and I’m going, Wow. Man. Golly, boudin for breakfast. Well, I mean what is it? It’s pork, which is bacon; it’s rice, which is cereal. You know, you’re getting everything that you normally get for breakfast in the boudin.” – Dickie Breaux Never in his first fifty years of life did Dickie Breaux, né John Richard Breaux, imagine that he would be tied to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, by a bowl of duck gumbo—or anything else for that matter. Though he was born in that town, he spent his teenage years living in Jeanerette forty-some miles to the southeast. Or, as Dickie puts it, “a million miles away.” A preservationist and former politician, he returned to Breaux Bridge in 1991 for the historic building that now houses his restaurant, Café Des Amis, as well as his home upstairs. Dickie’s son, Brett Breaux, a professional chef, opened the restaurant with him and helped establish a menu that’s at once Louisiana-cosmopolitan (New Orleans-style BBQ shrimp and turtle soup are specialties) and traditionally Cajun (you’ll find boudin sausage and cornmeal-based coush-coush at breakfast). At the time of this interview, the café’s current chef was sourcing the boudin from Dickie’s favorite outlet: Charlie T’s in Breaux Bridge. Along with harkening to the communal boucheries of his childhood, starting the day with boudin fits the romping mood of Café Des Amis’ Saturday morning Zydeco breakfasts. NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here. Subject: Dickie Breaux --- This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Wednesday, August 13, 2008. I’m in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana with Mr. Breaux at Café Des Amis. Could I get you please to say your name and your birth date? Dickie Breaux: My name is Dickie Breaux and my full name is John Richard Breaux. I was—December 16, 1937—and I’m 70 years-old, and I’ve been living here in Breaux Bridge since ’91. The café opened in ’91. And can you say your relationship to the café? I’m the sole owner and I’m not that active in the restaurant. By the grace of God I have really interesting and dedicated people who really enjoy working here. Can you, to start out—describe the restaurant? Well, the history of the restaurant: I was married back in ’91 and we bought this building solely to live in. We had no—there was no concept about doing a restaurant. And I was in the restoration business. I was working for HRI [Properties] out of New Orleans, and the company did most of the Warehouse District, and so my primary interest was restoration. And my ex was working in Baton Rouge, and we moved in upstairs, and what started out as a coffee house evolved into this. And so here we are. [Laughs] Can you tell me about your history, where you’re from? I was born here in Breaux Bridge, and at the age of 14 my parents moved to Jeanerette which is south of here, but it could have been a million miles away. [Laughs] The customs and all are so completely different down there than they are up here. I didn’t never see myself coming to Breaux Bridge; my ex is the one that picked this building. And she was working in Baton Rouge and I was working in New Orleans and we wanted to stay in this area. But my history, after finishing high school I--I did some college at the university here in Lafayette, and I was elected to two terms in the Louisiana Legislature representing Iberia and St. Mary Parish. And I was in the development business, and also you know I was very—always extremely interested in restoration. And I worked with HRI, I think it was about 10 years, and we did a number of—my primary function was sort of trying to revitalize the community. We did the East High School in Hammond, which we converted to live/work space for artists. So that’s been sort of my interest, is in revitalization. Can you describe for the record the kind of food that’s served here? Well that--that was one of the things I did know something about, maybe quite the expert at it. My family has been dealing with food almost all of their lives. My family is from Breaux Bridge, so coming back here I knew one thing: That whatever we did we would have to do it in such a way that—well, I mean you can walk 20 or 100—three, four, five miles—everyone knows how to cook here. And then on—and it ain't just cooking. I mean this is, you know, drop-dead smashing the-best thing-you-ever-ate cooking. So we took a bold step in doing what they were doing at home, and not nearly as good as them by the way because when mom is cooking for the family she’s trying to show love. I mean hmm; I mean get out of here. You’re not going to compete with that. So what we did is we did Buffalo china, we did silverware, we did napkins, and served the same food that you could get for $4.95 at the grocery store and--and we did some other additions. We did—the dishes that I had become accustomed to from being entertained in the Legislature. You can probably imagine. You know we ate all over New Orleans. You know we’ve been recognized by The Times-Picayune [New Orleans newspaper]on three different occasions of having the best BBQ shrimp, which is out of the question because it’s a Manale’s [Pascal’s Manale Restaurant] dish; it’s--it’s Yugoslav. It comes from the mouth of the river and it—but we have a great BBQ shrimp. We have an excellent turtle soup, which has been ranked—which is not Cajun food. So we’ve introduced some of the other foods from around Louisiana. And my--my son [Brett Breaux] was the one that really started the restaurant. Brett probably is the only chef that has a true Cajun background, Acadian background. And in his—other than prairie [an unofficial branch of Acadian cooking]; prairie would be Paul Prudhomme. Brett’s influence is from here; Prudhomme’s influence of course is Germany. Over here it’s black, and--and that’s why in New Orleans when you start talking about Creole, which is you know, I’m sure you’re aware—what’s the definition of Creole? It just all depends on who’s giving it. [Laughs] And but what he learned from here is the way--the way I tell the difference is when Prudhomme is cooking he’s cooking from smoked items. Growing up here, there’s no such thing as smoked meat in this area. It’s either salted or it’s put into cauldrons where they cover it with hog lard and seal it, and--and that’s why the cooking here I think is so exceptionally good, is because everything has salt influence—everything. As Emeril came to understand—you know a Portuguese from New Jersey coming to New Orleans and cooking Cajun [Laughs], he picked up early on and used to always say pork rules, pork rules, pork rules, and—. He got that from Marcelle Bienvenu in St. Martinville, who taught him how to cook Cajun. In France it’s butter; down here it’s pork and it’s in everything. You may not see it but it’s in—and I think what sets this area apart, or us apart, is everything is well-seasoned. You can go down to the grocery store on the corner, which I do a lot, and you eat the beans and the rice and gravy, and I mean everything has such a fantastic flavor. And all of them separate and distinct flavors; they’re not just, you know, one flavor. So I--I’d say Brett is probably the only true Central South Louisianan chef on the market today. Certainly what Paul Prudhomme does is outstanding, in [every] way shape or form, but that’s an influence which is way to the north of us—Eunice, Ville Platte and that area. I’ve never had anybody explain to me that there isn't a smoked tradition in this area. What do you attribute that to, the lack of German influence or—? Oh yeah; yeah, if you go to the--what we call the prairie Cajuns, you’ve got Mouton Cove which is just nothing but Germans. There was a strong influence here before the Cajuns arrived, and over here what you had was—the main dish in this area was, primarily because of poverty [interruption] was coush-coush. And the reason for that is they grew corn in this area. It was a labile crop, rather than sugarcane, so you could take it and you could plow that under and—. But also the corn was used to feed the mules that pulled the plows. So they learned to make coush-coush from that. Can you describe for me what coush-coush is? Uh-hm. It’s--it’s ground up corn, yellow corn—you know, the one that you feed the animals. And then they take and they put it on the mustard grinder at the mills. And then it’s fried; it’s fried, and back then it was fried in hog lard—and with salt and cornmeal, and it’s served with milk. It’s probably a takeoff on couscous which is made from wheat of course. But a couple of writers who have been here, international writers, [say] there’s only two places in the world where you can get coush-coush today. It’s here and Senegal, Africa, so—. By here do you mean at the restaurant? Yeah, we serve it, uh-hm. What is your ancestry? On my mother’s side it’s French, but you know the--the working class, Bordeaux area of France. On my father’s side it’s pure Cajun and it—I’m Breaux and Guidry, which is two prominent names here. And my mother is Thebent and Thibodeaux—T-h-e-b-e-n-t. And they were a very poor—well by today’s standards it would have been—they were a pretty influential family in the sense that they were blacksmiths, gunsmiths, which is very rare to have that concentration of France families up amongst Cajuns because there was just nothing in common. [Laughs] I mean that’s why Cajuns wound up down here and didn’t--didn’t hang around New Orleans, is that the French would have nothing to do with the Cajuns. It was—you know we came here; we were very illiterate, didn’t fit in anywhere. But by the time your parents’ generation came around they had merged cultures? No, oh no; no, it’s still that way today. You go to St. Martinville and those [Laughs]--those French people there think they’re really something. Let me ask you about boudin a little bit. In what form do you serve boudin here at the restaurant? Only one. We buy the boudin unpacked or out of the casing, and we serve it with eggs—breakfast. It’s a boudin patty that they grill, and then however you want your egg cooked. We--we’re experimenting with boudin as hors d’oeuvres and what have you but it just—it hasn’t been a big, big thing. Now we sell a hell of a lot of it for breakfast, you know. We open for breakfast Friday and Saturday and Sunday and it’s a big, big item. And it’s, you know it’s a great breakfast dish. I remember in my early 20s, 30s, they were eating boudin for breakfast and I’m going, Wow. Man. Golly, boudin for breakfast. Well, I mean what is it? It’s pork, which is bacon; it’s rice, which is cereal. You know, you’re getting everything that you normally get for breakfast in the boudin. And but that’s--that’s really a mystery: Who does the best boudin. And then again it’s--to me it’s how much liver that they’re putting in, in ratio to the actual pork meat, and again the way that it’s cooked. Some boudin(s) are a little too powerful for me; I’m not a big liver person. But it certainly was nothing but what was leftover after the boucherie. And that brings up another interesting point because I remember as a kid, boucherie is one of the neighbors butchered a hog, so all of the neighbors came. And that was for preservation. Well this week we’re going--we’re going to butcher the hog, and they divided the meat up amongst the families. And that way, you know, they would use everything up in that week—during the summer months. And--and then they started the salt meat, which was packing it in salt. But I think also what happened is, you may have had seven, eight, maybe ten families who came together and shared recipes. And--and in every case there was always some black person there who was actually instructing them on how to do the boucherie. And then their influence was added, so it—. The recipes became absolutely perfected in--in a sense here in this area—became perfected out of necessity. And it was just you know, they certainly wasn’t waiting for somebody like yourself to come and interview them. It was just, I like what you’re doing, so I would like to do it, you know, and it is so, so important. And it’s like my aunt who was an absolutely fabulous, fabulous cook. She’s the one that had the most influence on Brett. I asked her one day, I said, How much powdered red pepper do you put in your étouffée? You know what, she kind of backs up; she was a little bitty thing. Well, you put enough. [Laughs] Which means, You idiot, you just keep adding it until you get it to where you want it. No such thing as measuring; I mean never. Were you part of a boucherie growing up? Oh yeah; oh yeah. Oh it was a way of life, absolutely. I mean it—they’d make the fresh pork sausage, the cracklings; oh I mean it was a big, big ta-do. It started off like at 4 o'clock in the morning, killing the hog; they had to bleed it, you know, and it went on all the way into the night—a big, big affair. Did your family or your neighbors make boudin when they would do the boucherie? Oh well you did everything. I mean you had blood sausage. You had the white sausage. You had hogshead cheese. You had cracklings. They even made soap. After--after the cracklings were cooked the hog lard was turned into soap. I guess you had lye. I think that’s what they would do, and store that. Did you have a job during the boucherie as a child? Yes, to give everybody enough crap to where they’d punish you. [Laughs] The one thing that happened to me—good or bad, I don't know but—we were eating the hog cracklings and it was warm and we were running around and I got sick as a dog. So I didn’t--I didn’t eat cracklings for a long time. [Laughs] But now you do? Oh yeah; well to a point. I’m--I’m trying to deal with everything else that my over-abundance has caused me. [Laughs] Where do you buy your boudin? There’s a little grocery store right on Berard Street about three blocks down on the right. It’s called Charlie T’s. I like his. Well but it’s always up to the chef [at Café Des Amis]; I mean he decides what influence he wants, you know according to his tastes. So I was noticing here that it seems like your lunch clientele today is—seems local. Oh yeah; oh yeah. Oh yeah probably so. I’m not sure who these guys are [gestures]. The tables that you saw lined up here, they were all from [around here]. If you walk outside you’ll see literally license plates from all over--all over the country. I think we’ve got--we’ve gained a lot—most of our attention has been because of the Zydeco breakfast thing, and it’s a big, big, big thing outside of Louisiana, although it’s pretty strong here. But we get somewhere around 800 hits a day on our computer because when they look up “Zydeco breakfast” or when they look up “Zydeco,” “Zydeco breakfast” is the first thing that you see. And there’s so many bloggers out of California and New York and—. The Wall Street Journal did an article some years ago and they pointed out this tremendous interest that there is. And there’s--there’s so many people who just, you know they constantly want to know where the musicians are playing, where they’re going, and I guess we have kind of been adopted as the cathedral down here. [Laughs] Because you know for the longest of time whites didn’t go to the black dance halls. In fact they’re fixing to put this one—the Smithsonian is interested in it; I think they’re going to finally move it to Vermilionville. It was Hamilton’s Nightclub and on Wednesday night they had white night, so the whites could go and dance on Wednesday night. And so what’s happened here purely by accident is, you’re seeing here—well I guess we probably are--we certainly were the first white place that black musicians came to play. In fact that’s what the Wall Street Journal said. The phenomena consisted of—they likened Zydeco to where Jazz was at the turn of the last century. And they said the difference here at the Café Des Amis is that the musicians can come in through the front door. [Laughs] And how long have you been doing that? About eight years. Do you also have Zydeco at night? Wednesday nights we do primarily Cajun or Swing type music and Saturday morning [Zydeco]. That happened—Festival International [de Louisiane] in Lafayette is a big--truly big international festival rated way up in the top three in the world probably. And there were two members of Parliament from France and two from England who were visiting here and they wanted to put on a typical Cajun breakfast. And Philippe Gustin with the City of Lafayette—he’s with the Consulate from France and Canada--French. He brought these musicians here and it just caught on. Everyone else has tried it and it doesn’t seem to work. The synergy that occurred—well you saw it. Yeah, yeah, it’s great. I mean it’s just—and what it is, it’s an interaction with the band and the dancers you know. The band knows every dancer and the dancer knows everybody in the band. I mean it’s just—so it’s almost like a Broadway play when you come here. The interaction between the two of them is just phenomenal and I’ve never seen anybody walk out of here that wasn’t at least smiling. Do you dance? Yeah, uh-huh. I haven’t been dancing in a while. My position is—they’re often teasing me they’re going to bronze me in that chair. I sit right here. What we have--our biggest problem here is keeping it flowing. Everybody wants to--to see what’s going on over here and they--they congregate right there. And see where that line is right there? And my job the whole day is [to say], Guys, they can't get in and out of the kitchen as long as you’re standing there. So I mean I’m really getting worn out. You’re the bodyguard? It’s about that, and you know after you’ve told them six times to move, you know it gets aggravating and I lose my temper. But I mean it’s—the only thing that has saved us is that the--the Fire Marshal doesn’t work on Saturday [Laughs] because they’d close us down sure as shit. All right. I could talk to you forever but I’m going to let you have the day. You need to eat something before you go. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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