Keep up with Garden and Gun. By Brett Martin. Nobody is about to start arguing with her about gumbo, or anything else. But in some ways New Orleans is always in a discussion about gumbo. The past five years have been an especially fertile time for new New Orleans restaurants playing on the national stage. All this from a chef who, aside from several weeks spent competing on Top Chef , had barely set foot in the Crescent City before arriving to open her restaurant.
T here are rabbits all over the apartment that Compton shares with Larry Miller, her husband and business partner, and with their two dogs, Rocky and Hank. I need to find a way to use this. To bring these places together. That disagreement notwithstanding, Miller and Compton are a simpatico team.
Their courtship was a kind of South Beach Rashomon : Miller was instantly smitten by the chic young woman he saw arriving and departing as early and late as he did each day, and whose laughter he could hear coming out of the kitchen across the courtyard from where he sat eating lunch at his desk.
She won the postseason Fan Favorite award. Offers were pouring in at a bewildering pace. Lucia back in the day, some of the buildings are the same: the wooden cottages, the colorfulness of the houses. It felt like home. In Miami, a successful restaurant was defined by its high-flying clientele. When Compton helped open a branch of the New York Italian restaurant Scarpetta, in the Fontainebleau hotel, Mariah Carey, Alex Rodriguez, and Mikhail Gorbachev all came for lunch the first day—surely as surreal a guest list as has ever existed.
In New Orleans, she imagined something different. I wanted to be very respectful. That was the whole point. All this talk of respect, fitting in, and who gets to cook what may seem weird at a time when chefs regularly set up shop in new cities and culinary globalism reigns supreme. But the reality is complicated in the Big Easy, as it prepares to celebrate the dawn of its fourth century.
