Cody Carroll took advantage of an opportunity to cook with TV’s Top Chef contestants at the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience in May 2009. However, cooking tips weren’t the first thing on his mind. He was a student at the Louisiana Culinary Institute in Baton Rouge at the time, and a classmate had caught his eye.
He used the trip to New Orleans to get to know Samantha Neal a little better. It turns out, that was a wise decision. The two are now married and own a restaurant in New Roads called Hot Tails. And they are crushing it.
The couple graduated from LCI in January 2010 and by April of that year, they opened the doors of their new restaurant. They renovated a building on Hospital Road that had been a drive-thru convenience store before it was briefly an auto detailer shop. Now it has a rustic interior with an open kitchen, deer heads on the walls, and trophies from winning dishes in cooking competitions—including Fęte Rouge in 2011 and 2012.
The building gave them a blank canvas to create their own atmosphere for original cuisine along False River. Cody and Sam lived in a FEMA trailer behind the restaurant for the first eight months. “It was rough leaving work but not leaving work,” Sam admits. By May they hired another chef, Owen Hohl, who graduated with them at LCI, and by June another, Shelbi Corvillion. The four chefs, who cooked on teams together while in school, used their experience to create a “hardcore” South Louisiana menu.
At first, the people of New Roads and visitors were hesitant to try the more unique items on the menu. “People never thought we’d make it here,” Cody says. “But now they can’t get a table.”
The more people tried the food and talked about it, the more their palates adapted. Dishes like the fried rabbit with red beans and rice made with a homemade green onion sausage and hog lard began to fly out the kitchen. The seafood muffaletta, bayou wings—duck drumettes with pepper jelly—and oysters Rockefeller burgers were no longer scary menu items, but instead became culinary staples. Hot Tails also keeps local beers on tap.
The restaurant began on the backs of boiled crawfish and poboys. On any given weekend during the season, it’s easy for them to go through more than 5,000 pounds of mudbugs. Fortunately, Cody’s family owns crawfish ponds up LA 1 in the town of Batchelor. They control the entire process, from the rice ponds to how the crawfish are raised. They know the quality and take pride in the crawfish they boil.
Cody, Sam and company have recently hired another LCI graduate, Dominique Ricard, who impressed them as they judged the Home Plate Classic competition at the school. The open kitchen in the restaurant allows the chefs to interact with customers and get a feel for their enjoyment level. They’d like to recreate the magic of Hot Tails in Baton Rouge, but they know it has to be the right situation. There’s a lot of character in the New Roads Hot Tails, and that’s not something that can be easily duplicated. Until then, Baton Rouge residents can take the drive to False River. It is well worth the trip.
Jay D. Ducote writes the food and beverage blog Bite and Booze and hosts the Bite and Booze Radio Show, Saturdays at 5 p.m. on Talk 107.3 FM. biteandbooze.com
