Us folk Down Under share a lot with our brethren in America’s Deep South. We’re both people with a natural, laidback sense of hospitality. We both love cooking and celebrating our produce from both the land and sea.
There is something unique about America’s southern states that Australians long for. We love the way they celebrate life with food down South – the air thick with the perfume of magnolia and the smoke from backyard barbecues, the heady scent of Cajun spice. Cayenne, paprika, thyme and garlic wafting from cast-iron pots. Meals stretch long into the evening, strangers become friends and laughter rolls like thunder across the porch.
Some clever Australian restaurateurs have captured that southern magic. Having driven the backroads and bayous of Louisiana and explored the streets and boulevards of New Orleans, they’ve returned from this hero’s journey with dishes that capture the essence of the South to feed a new audience hungry for southern fare – gumbo, po’ boys, beignets, fried chicken and jambalaya.
One dish in particular is really bubbling away on our southern stoves at the moment. A dish of crabs and prawns, sausage and vegetables, drenched in spiced butter and eaten by hand. The seafood boil is fast becoming one of the hottest trends on the dining scene, inspiring chefs and entrepreneurs alike to bring a taste of the South to Australian shores.
One of the biggest fans of the seafood boil is way up in the steamy Top End – some say our own Deep South. Darwin chef Courtney Hill has a dedicated fan base that follows her brightly painted food truck, Food Mafia. She embraces the humid climate and celebrates regularly throughout the year by cooking up a monster Louisiana-style seafood boil. Kilos of seafood cooked with sausage and vegetables and served in a rich butter broth seasoned with southern spices. The Food Mafia seafood boil bag is a tropical hit.
“It is beautiful,” says Courtney, originally a fine-dining chef in Tasmania. “We set up before sunset on the foreshore at Nightcliff overlooking the Arafura Sea,” she says. “Looking out you can see tables set with tablecloths topped with flickering lights.” She also sets Food Mafia up in a leafy park in the nearby community of Palmerston.
“It is beautiful,” says Courtney, originally a fine-dining chef in Tasmania. “We set up before sunset on the foreshore at Nightcliff overlooking the Arafura Sea,” she says. “Looking out you can see tables set with tablecloths topped with flickering lights.” She also sets Food Mafia up in a leafy park in the nearby community of Palmerston.
Customers order ahead online and meet her food truck at a set time to pick up an aluminium tray containing gloves and a double-layered five-litre ziplock bag. Into this goes cooked blue swimmer crab, lobster, prawns, mussels, sausage and vegetables, all soused with over a litre of rich, spiced butter broth. “People take it home or sit and watch the sunset, breaking open the crab and lobster, dipping it into the broth and sucking out the sweet flesh,” she says. “There’s something quite satisfying about eating all that rich food with your hands.”
Courtney, together with her partner Alexander Howard, runs an ever-changing menu shaped by social media trends. “Our food has to be fun and every dish has to wow!” says Courtney. But no matter what’s trending, the southern theme keeps returning. “The word ‘Southern’ just keeps coming up,” she says. “There’s something about that cuisine that captures the imagination of Australian eaters.” Although Food Mafia’s seafood boil bags are offered only a few times a year, Courtney and Alexander build anticipation until demand guarantees sell-out nights. “There’s a lot of preparation involved,” says Courtney. “We go through 60 kilograms of butter each session so they’re a big investment.” She grins. “But a whole lot of fun.”
Down south of Darwin, in the old Eastern Market quarter of Adelaide, sits a bustling bar called Nola. In Louisiana, the sultry city of New Orleans has a few nicknames. The Big Easy is one. And NOLA is another – short for New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Adelaide Nola sits in an old sandstone building, near the iron-lace balconies of Rundle Street and the sprawling trees of the parklands. Inside, it’s dark and moody. The staff have tattooed sleeves and wear denim dungarees. There are sixteen craft beers on tap, over four hundred whiskies and ryes – and a menu straight out of Bourbon Street. Nola hums with the spirit of the Deep South. The slow, smoky rhythm Australians seem instinctively drawn to.
Josh Talbot founded Nola with three mates ten years ago. They wanted a brewery and with no experience in hospitality ended up with a bar and a 60-seat dining room. “We loved beer but the brewery just didn’t stack up,” he says. “We loved whiskey and we wanted to find something that complemented both.” That year, Josh’s mate and co-owner OJ Brown went on a trip to New Orleans and came back with a massive smile and a fistful of recipes – gumbo, jambalaya and po’ boys. “No one else was serving up that style of cuisine in 2015,” says Josh.
Josh’s instinct that southern shared-plate service and this laid-back style of hospitality were exactly what Adelaide diners would respond to was spot on. “We had to capture that southern spirit and give everyone a bloody good time. We have to make someone’s day. The people we hire for front-of-house are real professionals. They have great banter and know how to turn it on. The secret for us is to hold on to those people who get that spirit. We look after them and that works – they stay with us, four years on average with some of our opening team from 2015 now taking on management roles in the other venues we’ve opened.”
At the heart of Nola is the menu. “The best southern fried chicken in Adelaide,” Josh proudly boasts. “Brined for 24 hours, soaked in buttermilk, double-dipped in Nola’s special seasoned flour to soak up the buttermilk and deep-fried in neutral oil,” he says. Served with aioli or rolled through spicy garlic butter and accompanied by blue cheese sauce, it’s incredibly popular – as are the pulled-pork or smoky-brisket po’ boys. To finish, there’s a plate of square beignets, just like the ones at Café du Monde in New Orleans, fried to order and served with a generous pot of bourbon butterscotch sauce.
“Southern food is so popular that people now know what they want. It’s become part of our dining scene here,” says Josh. “In fact, we’re somewhat victims of our own success in that we struggle to change the menu without customer pushback.” Their latest dish is an ultra-boujee plate of six fried boneless chicken thighs topped with crème fraîche and caviar – an ode to the accessible luxury of old New Orleans.
Over in Sydney’s west, another operator has seen great success in bringing southern-style hospitality into a quick-service restaurant format. Ravi Singh is a globe-trotting businessman who, along with his business partner Sami Karras, risked it all on a New Orleans-style boil-up restaurant called Kickin’ Inn. While this national brand of restaurants offer dishes like boneless chicken wings, Cajun fries, shrimp martini, fish and chips and salt and pepper prawns, the core of their business is the Louisiana-style seafood boil, served New Orleans Creole-style in a no-frills plastic bag at the table. No crockery or cutlery, just a bib and a pair of gloves.
After years of planning, research and recipe development, Ravi and his business partner and good friend Sammi Karris opened their first Kickin’ Inn in Petersham in September 2015. “People loved it,” says Ravi. “They loved the fun, family feeling of eating together. They were reticent at first about eating in the casual, hands-on southern style but for three months we were busy.” Then something happened. The good vibes turned sour and diners took to social media – not in a good way. The posts were negative and the river of customers all but dried up. “I realised I needed to tell a powerful story to bring them back,” says Ravi.
Ravi rallied and worked tirelessly to tell the story of what he wanted to achieve and to build the concept of value in the customers’ minds. “There’s been great success in Australia with American dining formats and what we were bringing was something different – a new great taste, a new great experience, a life-changing experience,” he says. “People love seafood but they worry about the price. What we were offering gave them a great experience – loads of quality seafood at a good price.”
Ravi gave himself thirty days to build patronage back up. He walked the streets of Petersham and told his story – a story of hard work, passion and the quest to build a place where families could come together and dine in a really fun way, eating great seafood at a good price. People responded. The story got out. They came back. But then another problem. “We were fully booked and people couldn’t get a table,” says Ravi. So he and Sammi borrowed more money and opened another venue in Canley Heights with 84 seats. On the first weekend, 17,000 people rocked up. Emergency services were called to deal with the crowds.
“At the heart of the menu is our incredibly memorable experience – the Mixed Bag,” says Ravi. A spiced Cajun buttery feast of prawns, mussels, octopus, pippies and crab – plus corn and potatoes. “The sauce took us three years to perfect,” says Ravi. “We could cook seafood but we needed somehow to get that flavour of the South right. We’re talking about recipes passed down from grandparent to grandchild for hundreds of years in America’s South,” he says. “We had to work on a truly authentic taste. Our Cajun seasoning was the result of years of trial. We had to make a sauce that you’d want to lick off the back of a spoon. We did it – and people keep coming back.”
While Down Under it’s the scent of jasmine and the ticker-tape of falling wattle that frame our gatherings, our subtle differences are our strengths. Across Australia, smart operators and passionate cooks are crafting our own take on southern cuisine — where the waft of redgum smoke and Cajun-spiced meats melting low and slow in steel smokers has become part of the local landscape.
And just as the Louisianan coast is laced with bayous and estuaries that are teaming with life, Australia too is, not only, girt by sea – but surrounded by oceans teeming with some of the finest seafood on earth. So it’s little wonder we’ve taken so fondly to dishes like the seafood boil. Because, really, north or south, it all comes back to the same thing – celebrating great produce and serving it with care, letting the flavours speak for themselves.
