How chef Kristen Essig walked away from New Orleans’ latest great restaurant and found herself at home.

 

Chef Kristen Essig was ready, no doubt. This was her moment, and no one doubted that either. Having worked at Emeril’s for a brief period in the ’90s, and then with Anne Kearney at Peristyle and Susan Spicer at Bayona before launching a lucrative career as a private chef and later being picked as executive chef by Robert LeBlanc of LeBlanc + Smith restaurant group: first at Sainte Marie on Poydras Street in the CBD, then at Meauxbar on N. Rampart Street in the French Quarter, and finally at the brand-new, coastal-themed restaurant Cavan in a grand, renovated townhouse on Magazine Street—Essig had arrived. The opening of Cavan in March was her big breakthrough.

“Sure was!” Essig says, emphasizing past tense.

Then jaws dropped, as she politely walked away…

What happened? Was her breakthrough really more of a breakdown? Had she been tricked somehow? Her quick exit puzzled many, and LeBlanc and Essig’s assurances of mutual respect and well wishes for the future somehow didn’t straighten out the question marks.

“I got two reactions when I quit: One, ‘Are you ok?’ And two, ‘Congratulations!’” Essig says. “The truth is that I was ready, and since I knew I was ready, I had to do something. I knew this next thing would be something I’d do for the rest of my life, so I had to make sure it was for me.

“Robert will forever be a friend and confidante, but I really wanted to do something for myself. If I’m making money for a restaurant, why am I not making money for myself? I was very well compensated, no question about it, but I wanted ownership. Robert gave me this amazing platform, but it made me hungry for my own thing, and I knew I couldn’t start planning until I was no longer at the restaurants [while busy with Cavan, Essig also remained at the helm at Meauxbar].”

At Cavan, former chef de cuisine Ben Thibodeaux has taken over as executive chef, and at Meauxbar, sous chef John Bel shouldered Essig’s mantle. She’s certain both restaurants will do great without her.

“Both restaurants were prepared for me to leave,” she says. “We had all the people in place, menus and recipes were standardized, things were costed out. I could literally have walked out in the street and got hit by a bus and both restaurants would have been able to continue to operate.

“It might not have been the best time for me to leave, but it was best for everyone else involved. I had to make my decision while both restaurants were in a good place and my name wasn’t super-attached to Cavan.”

On top of wanting her own place, Essig also wanted something else—she wanted to get back to cooking.

“Between Cavan and Meauxbar, as much as I loved my role and was having a great time doing it, it was very overwhelming,” she says. “I don’t want to be the pretend person where I’m not really doing anything. At least, that’s how I feel. If I’m not putting food on a plate, I don’t feel like I’m working in a kitchen anymore. I could write 40 recipes or respond to emails all day, so I was technically working, but what I love about food is how tangible it is.

“With Meauxbar, there was a lot of ‘hands on hips, smile at the camera,’ and although I really would do anything to get more people to come to any of the restaurants—and it’s part of being a chef—there’s a certain amount of partnership you need to have with the real world. I started cooking because I could hide in the back and didn’t have to look a certain way. You can sort of hide and make people happy without them necessarily knowing who you were, and I liked that.”

Essig takes care to point out that no one person makes a restaurant. And that she’s going to miss working with both of her well-oiled teams.

“Honestly, I don’t want to be the face of a restaurant,” she says. “I want to be one of the people in there, getting it done. Cavan was going to be sustainable for me, but I’m not someone who’s going to want two, three, four restaurants—a restaurant in Vegas! Florida!—and two was a lot. I was proud of it and fed off of it, for sure, that chef mentality, just pushing, pushing, pushing. It feels great; you’re so tired, you get great sleep.”

May 2 was Essig’s first day without a job. She stayed home, cooked tortilla soup for lunch, eyed the shiny green KitchenAid she’s never used (“not once, I think”) and tried to make a plan.

“Michael [Stoltzfus, Chef at Coquette and Essig’s partner] was making fun of me because I was making a schedule,” she says. “I felt like I needed an idea of what I was going to do every day because I don’t want to just lay here and watch episodes of Girls. But maybe I do need to just lay on my ass a little bit?

“It won’t last long. I’ve got stuff I should do; do my taxes, get some plants, do some gardening, clean out stuff I have in storage… That sounds like a lot of work! [laughs] Try to stay off of Facebook and Instagram, because I love those things… I’ll play with stuff; make pasta. Probably make a lot of food we won’t eat. Probably have people over. One of the things I put down on my list is that I really want to organize my silverware drawer. It’s been driving me crazy! My mother would be so upset if she opened this drawer. I have my wedding silver in there and all this shitty other stuff, and I love to polish silver. I also want to organize the closet in our dining room, where all the stuff goes. I just need to clean, reorganize.”

Essig says the hardest time of day is around 7 p.m. when Michael is busy at Coquette and most of her friends are working.

“What am I supposed to be doing?” she asks. “I’m so used to working. I guess I’ll go to bed early and hopefully go for a run in the morning?

“I really want to start running again. At Meauxbar we had these super-steep stairs that we used to go up to the offices. They’re scary, French Quarter-steep, really small. Completely safe! We have the handrails! But we were getting ready for New Years Eve and I was carrying 20 pounds of chestnuts down the stairs and fell. I slipped down the stairs and my left leg went underneath me, so I had this huge shin bruise and couldn’t run and it really set me back and then we were so busy I just couldn’t get back into it.”

The first thing Essig is going to do is go home and see her family in Seminole, Florida. She’s not sure when she last saw them, but it was probably two years ago.

“I’m going with my sister and her sons to Disney World,” she says. “And then I’m going to spend some time with Graison [Gill] over at Bellegarde [Bakery] who’s going to teach me more about bread making, and then my friend Maureen [Kennedy, of Bern Ceramics] is going to teach me how to make plates. I’m going to a dairy farm out in Covington to learn how to make goat’s milk cheese.

“As a chef, you do so much every day you get caught up in the day-to-day grind, and that’s part of the reward for a lot of people, I think, but I want more. I want to reconnect with all the parts of running a restaurant on a personal level. Maybe I’m the most amazing potter that’s ever been and I’ve never put my hands on a piece of clay. Who knows? I like the idea of trying things I haven’t done before, as if I’m living my life and not just getting through it.”

Stoltzfus and Essig will continue to run their pop-up restaurant Little Bird at the whiskey bar Barrel Proof (another LeBlanc + Smith property). They’ve also talked about expanding Little Bird, or doing something else altogether.

“By the end of June, I want to have a plan for what I’m going to do, and then I’ll probably have six to eight months to execute,” Essig predicts. “I might need to renovate a building, figure out parking for my imaginary place that doesn’t have a name, but all I know is that I want to be prepared. I’m definitely not leaving New Orleans.”

Essig realizes that she probably will make less money opening her own restaurant than she did before. But since giving anything less than 110 percent isn’t an option and giving 110 percent doesn’t make sense if you don’t ultimately get what you want, she’s both excited and scared.

“I might have committed professional suicide,” she says. “But the main reason I could afford to quit my job is that I don’t spend money. I’m a frugal person by nature. We eat soup a lot. Right now, I really want soup. Probably will move on to beans next…”

In many ways, the departure from Cavan has been bittersweet.

“Now that I have nights off, which is the craziest thing ever, I drive by Cavan and am just so excited that people are eating there,” she says. “It feels like someone’s home, you can just let yourself in. I know every electrical outlet, every single thing.”

Essig knows her next restaurant will include an open kitchen where she can cook while spying, friendly-like, on guests. She says watching people eat with pleasure still gives her goose bumps. By seating single diners and two-tops at a large, communal table, Essig also wants to reframe the very culture of dining.

“Put simply, I want to get back to why people sit around a table,” she says. “It’s about the people around you, not just what’s on your plate. I’d also love to have some kind of feed-me table for 10 or 12 where there’s no set menu and we do it maybe once a week or once a night, and you get to meet the people at the table.”

By bringing guests closer together, she hopes to remove some of the anonymity that permits every diner with a smart phone to be any restaurant’s worst critic.

“You’re essentially walking into my home when you’re walking into my restaurant,” Essig explains. “I would never walk into your house and say, ‘Hey, it’s great, but your wife is wearing an ugly dress, and she doesn’t know how to seat people or open a bottle of wine.’ People look for problems. How about just being a nice person when you come to dinner? The last thing I’d want is for someone to come and have a bad meal—ever.

“We’d read reviews every week at Meauxbar and Cavan. We’d read our Yelp, OpenTable and TripAdvisor reviews. If something is repeatedly talked about, those are constructive criticisms that we can use. But when someone comes in and says, ‘This is just garbage. I don’t know what all the hype is about.’ What does that do for you? It doesn’t do anything for me because I can’t fix it, or talk to you. Do people really think I want to work for 15 hours a day and have you come in and have the worst experience of your life? I want the exact opposite of that, and I want you to let me try.”

Essig also envisions a minimalist menu that changes on a regular basis.

“At Meauxbar, people were like, ‘We love this dish and it can never come off [the menu]!’ And you know what, it’s never going to come off. And you’re like, ‘God, now I have to make this dish forever. FOREVER!’ And as long as this restaurant is here we’ll be cleaning out bones of their marrow so we can stuff escargots in them. It’s delicious and I’d still eat it to this day, but I just don’t want to do it anymore. It’s hard, though, for a manager to look at the situation—‘This dish is 19 percent of our sales, we can’t take it off…’ But don’t you think we’d put something else on there that would also be amazing? That’s a creative barrier. I understand it from a business point, but there has to be a little bit of ease, a little bit of cooperation.”

And that’s exactly what she has time for now.