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243 The Missing Link Donald Link Opens Second Cochon in Lafayette Brett Anderson Donald Link barely gave the chickens a chance to stop sizzling before he put his hands around them, subjecting each to a tactile examination that looked like nothing so much as a quarterback blindly feeling his way to a football’s seam. One of the chickens looked like wild game, its flesh darkened by injected Cajun spices vivified by the flames in the wood-fired oven behind it. The other, which had been brined overnight, wore the more typical mottled goldbrown armor of roasted farm-raised fowl. Both stood upright in cast-iron pans, impaled by beer cans. Link appraised them while sucking the grease off his fingers. “Turns out there are a lot of ways to cook a chicken,” he said. That statement of the obvious prompted laughter in the peanut gallery behind him, at the edge of the open kitchen inside Cochon in Lafayette. The opening of the restaurant, a spin-off of the original Cochon in New Orleans, was still three weeks away, but on this hot August night, Link and his team had crossed the threshold where obsessive planning gives way to undressed rehearsals. Ryan Prewitt, until recently chef de cuisine at Herbsaint , Link’s flagship New Orleans restaurant, explained, “We talked about [cooking chicken] for like three hours last night.” “It got pretty heated,” chuckled Stephen Stryjewski, who is, along with Link, chef and co-owner of both Cochon locations. Cochon Lafayette has more than just a name in common with its New Orleans counterpart. The most important similarity is a concept that encapsulates Link’s vision of what, to use his words, “Cajun food has become.” Not since Paul Prudhomme opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen more than three decades ago has New Orleans seen a new restaurant elicit such a pheromonal response from such an array of diners. That both happen to hang their hats on the food of Acadiana is a topic ripe for academic inquiry. brett anderson 244 Evidence of Cochon’s success goes beyond the crowds that regularly congest the restaurant’s corner of New Orleans’s Warehouse District. Since Cochon opened in 2006, both Link and Stryjewski have won prestigious chef awards from the James Beard Foundation. In 2008, the New York Times ranked Cochon the third best new American restaurant outside New York. Link also won a Beard for Real Cajun, his provocatively titled cookbook that delves deep into the pot that inspired Cochon’s creation. Gossip Girl star Blake Lively was so besotted with the restaurant’s sweet potato sauce at a recent visit that she tried to persuade staff to circumvent FDA regulations by sending her some inside a disemboweled teddy bear. (The response she received from Cochon, according to Glamour magazine: “We are not the drug cartel.”) Still, the new Cochon is a re-creation of the old one, not a straight replication . (An item not central to the New Orleans Cochon repertoire: roast chicken.) The fine distinction begins to explain why Link’s journey back to his native Cajun country—Lafayette is its putative capital—has been filled with trepidation as well as joy. The chef’s family roots run deep in the region: he was raised in Lake Charles, on Cajun country’s southwestern edge. But as much as Link identifies with the cooking of his—and perhaps as important, his family members ’—youth, there is no erasing that he became a big shot in a city whose relationship to Cajun country has dysfunctional dimensions. As Billy Link, a Crowley soybean, rice, and crawfish farmer, put it, “New Orleans is New Orleans, and there’s a line between New Orleans and here. They don’t mix well, in a way.” Billy Link, who is either Donald’s third or fourth cousin (it depends on whom—and when—you ask), was leaning against the poured-concrete counter separating the restaurant’s kitchen from one of two main dining rooms. He’d arrived with his wife, Becky, and their two young sons to feast on the dishes Cochon’s chefs were fine-tuning while test-driving the new kitchen equipment. The banquet included the two roast chickens, along with one that had been cooked in an outside smoker built by Dwane Link, another cousin; two darkly crusted pork shoulders; a whole rib-eye roast cut into bite-size strips; a pan of shrimp in a butter sauce spiked with the Brazilian peppers...

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