For nearly 20 years, John Besh has been helping to breathe new life into the cuisine of New Orleans.
He opened Restaurant August there in October of 2001 and has since been a pioneer in taking the food of that city in new directions by using local ingredients in ways that go beyond the city’s traditional Creole repertoire.
Recent menu items include huitlacoche agnolotti with smoked chiles and rabbit from Mississippi, crawfish étouffée with lemon grass and fermented pepper, and grilled octopus and pig tails with farro and olives.
Besh operates nine other restaurants, including two-unit Lüke, an homage to the Franco-German brasseries of New Orleans; seafood restaurant Borgne; Italian restaurant Domenica; Pizza Domenica; French restaurant La Provence; Besh Steak; Johnny Sánchez, which features the Mexican food on which business partner Aarón Sanchez was raised and Shaya, an Israeli restaurant with partner Alon Shaya.
“John keeps re-energizing what we do,” New Orleans restaurateur Ralph Brennan said, “and because of his national exposure he’s a great ambassador for the city.”
Brennan said Besh’s diverse restaurant offerings bring a “dimension of the city we really don’t have a lot of.”
Besh grew up in Louisiana and got fine-dining training in Europe — with Karl-Josef Fuchs at the Romantik Hotel Spielweg in Germany’s Black Forest region and under Alain Assaud at St.-Rémy in France’s Provence region — and life training in the United States Marine Corps, during which, as a noncommissioned officer he led an infantry squad of the company that liberated Kuwait International Airport in 1991 during the first Gulf War.
Shortly after opening August, Besh told NRN that Fuchs had taught him about “truly local” cuisine.
“If we had veal on the menu, well, then, the whole calf was brought in from the village,” he said. “If it was wild boar, then the wild boar was shot somewhere in those mountains. If we served it, it was from that small microclimate.”
That approach put him at the crest of the local food wave that had started rising across the country. He also was one of the first chefs to raise his own eggs for his restaurants, and an early advocate of using bycatch as well as more commonly sought- after seafood from the Gulf of Mexico.
Besh has won about all the national accolades available to a chef.
Even before he opened August, Besh was named one of the country’s 10 “Best New Chefs” by Food & Wine magazine in 1999. In 2006 he won the James Beard Foundation Award for best chef in the Southeast, and in 2007 August was inducted into Nation’s Restaurant News’ Fine Dining Hall of Fame. In 2014 Besh was inducted into the Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who in Food & Beverage in America.
He continues to work on sustaining southern Louisiana’s culture. He is working with the National Audubon Society to help restore area wetlands, and he has his own “Milk Money” program of microloans to local farmers.
“We offer farmers not only credit at no interest, but we partner them with MBA students to make sure they have the business acumen that they need to make sure their farming operations work,” he said.
“[Another] part of making sure that we have a sustainable culture is making sure that inner city kids have access to top-of-the-line culinary school and mentorship to go along with it,” he said.
Besh’s ChefsMove! Scholarship program pays students’ tuition to The International Culinary Center in New York and offers externships at John Besh restaurants.
He’s also still using bycatch.
“We’re very diverse in what we’re purchasing,” he said. “The exciting thing is we have a lot more control than we ever thought with our purchasing power, not just as chefs, but as people. The more aware of what we’re putting in our bodies, the better decisions we’ll make not just for ourselves and our bodies but for the health of our food supply.”
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary