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Tallulah sous chef talks heritage, new menu options

Heskeith Flavien, sous chef for Tallulah inside the Renaissance Hotel, moved from a small village in Saint Lucia in the Caribbean to Gonzales when he was 18. Almost as soon as he landed, Flavien adapted to Louisiana’s atmosphere and flavors.

He went to the New Orleans Culinary and Hospitality Institute, which shut down after Hurricane Katrina hit, then took a job as a busboy at Mike Anderson’s. For more than a decade, he hopped around from job to job in the popular Baton Rouge seafood restaurant, working as kitchen manager for his last three years there. In 2013, he joined Tallulah as sous chef and started crafting a menu that highlighted Southern flavors and his farm-to-table background.

“I’ve always been interested in food,” he says. “I grew up in a small village and was raised in the kitchen. Everything we ate was farm-to-table. Our chores and stuff like that revolved around food. We were raised around a lot of one-pot dishes, similar to gumbos and jambalayas.”

At Tallulah, Flavien has crafted a few new items with his team that gets him particularly excited. On the appetizer side, Flavien created a beet and crab salad, which features jumbo lump crab, arugula and goat cheese in a basil-lime vinaigrette dressing. Among some of the new small plates is a foie gras with rabbit terrine, made with a beet confit, swiss chard and rabbit demi-glace, as well as the restaurant’s take on pork and beans, featuring Abita Root Beer-braised Chappapella Farms pork cheeks and a white bean puree. On the entrée side, Tallulah is now offering a scallop and pork belly dish, which comes with a butternut squash puree and pickled red onion and peach in a red wine gastrique.

For more information on Tallulah, visit tallulahrestaurant.com.