The James Beard Foundation Awards recognize outstanding achievement within the food and wine industry. Considered one of the most coveted marks of distinction within the culinary community, Link Restaurant Group partners are honored to have been recognized for their culinary achievements. Link’s flagship restaurant Herbsaint earned him a James Beard award in 2007 for Best Chef South. The same year Cochon was nominated for Best New Restaurant; The James Beard Foundation also honored Link’s first cookbook – Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking from Donald Link’s Louisiana (Clarkson Potter) with their top award for Best American Cookbook. Link was also nominated by the James Beard Foundation for the prestigious award of Outstanding Chef in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Stephen Stryjewski, chef/partner of Cochon, Cochon Butcher and Pêche Seafood Grill was named Best Chef: South at the 2011 James Beard Foundation Awards. In 2014 Pêche Seafood Grill was honored with two coveted James Beard Foundation Awards Best New Restaurant and Chef Ryan Prewitt Best Chef: South. In 2017, Chef de Cuisine Rebeca Wilcomb was named Best Chef: South for her stewardship of the Kitchen at Herbsaint.

Chef Donald Link’s pivot from the European-New Orleans bistro food of Herbsaint (his first restaurant) to the rural cooking of his Cajun upbringing at Cochon (his second) turned out to be a watershed moment. Cochon opened in 2006, and in the fishbowl, post-Katrina years that followed, no local restaurant garnered more national respect (or had more influence) than the pork-centric Warehouse District canteen. With more eyes on New Orleans than ever before, Cochon’s embrace of rusticity — meat pies, fried livers, stewed ham hocks — helped usher in an era where our most skilled chefs, here and elsewhere, freed themselves to cook Southern cuisine unadorned by white tablecloth pretensions. The restaurant introduced a Beard winner in co-chef-partner Stephen Stryjewski, and the always-jammed sandwich shop Cochon Butcher. More relevant to your future dining plans, Cochon has improved over time, which isn’t to say changed. In executive chef Bill Jones’ hands, Cochon’s Cajun-Southern menu still has no weak spots — an important operational accomplishment in the wake of the popular restaurant’s capacity-doubling 2016 expansion. Rabbit and dumplings, a Cochon staple since Day 1, should cure what ails you as effectively as your mom’s chicken soup.

Times Picayune Top 10 List: 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018

Link has traveled to Guadeloupe, a French department in the Lesser Antilles, to untangle the knotted roots and branches of Creole cuisine. Originally used by colonizers to refer to people born in the New World, the term Creole can also be applied to racial identity, language, architecture, and, yes, cooking. It’s often associated with New Orleans, where signal dishes such as gumbo z’herbes and oysters Rockefeller are commonly referred to as Creole. “It’s all Creole,” Link says of those red beans and that crème brûlée, if you open your mind to the complexities of history and global trade, and to the complicated fabric of cultures that have long interwoven in Louisiana and across the Caribbean rim. He’s unsure whether trekking to South America to eat boudin will reinforce or weaken his theories. But he knows he has to go. As a native of Louisiana, called to cook and speak for his place, Link wants to get this right.

Until Chef Paul Prudhomme elevated and popularized the cuisine in the 1970s, Cajun foods were considered country cooking. As a native of western Louisiana’s Cajun Country, chef-owner Donald Link continues to push the conversation about the bounty of the bayou using white tablecloth techniques for dishes like fried alligator with chili garlic mayonnaise, pork cheek sauce piquant with hominy grit cake and catfish courtbouillon.For something a little more casual, stop into Link’s sister spot, Cochon Butcher: a sandwich and butchery featuring a killer muffaletta that will send you straight into a food coma.

When the French Acadians were bounced out of Canada by the British, they ventured down to Louisiana to make their new home. And although Donald Link’s family came to the area from Germany in the 1800s, they absorbed the cooking traditions of the region. When Donald eventually arrived on the scene, it was the food he grew up on. At Cochon, he’s taken that Cajun fare with its fried alligator, shrimp gumbo, catfish, and more and then elevated it.

The chatty, boisterous nature of the restaurant is apparent when you enter: the glee of meat-happy patrons practically bounces off the wood paneling that frames the entire dining room. Meat-lovers-going-hog-wild is the overriding sentiment here, with a mostly casual but enthusiastic crowd. It’s a place to pig out, pun intended, but behind the bacchanal is a commitment to high-quality, in-house food production. Despite the high standards, though, it feels casual and welcoming to a crowd that’s heard the hype and are looking to be impressed.

I was always in love with the idea of eating out in New Orleans, but I was never in love with actually eating out in New Orleans. The food was filling, but often uninspired. Cochon changed all that. Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski raised the bar on the rich culinary traditions of the Louisiana bayou and gave the NOLA dining scene what it was missing—a passionate, pork-filled point of view. Sure, there are roasted oysters and gumbo, but there’s also fried boudin, stuffed pig’s foot, and unforgettable rabbit and dumplings. And while too many of the city’s dining rooms feel dusty, Cochon’s postindustrial Warehouse District space is like its food: reverent of the past but definitely in the present. Even better, seven years on, Cochon’s approach still drives countless U.S. chefs to get down with all the nasty bits and play with their own traditions.

Cochon serves up traditional yet upscale seasonal Cajun dishes using fresh, locally sourced pork, produce, and seafood, but most importantly: the tried-and-true techniques that chef Donald Link has resurrected from his childhood.

Although it varies from cook to cook, gumbo is south Louisiana’s signature dish – a complex stew pot thickened by a roux, a mixture of fat and flour that’s carefully cooked into a paste with color ranging from blond to dark brown, depending on what’s going into the pot. When I was growing up, we had chicken-and-sausage gumbo or seafood gumbo, but it was rare to find a combination of the two – probably because the smoked sausage there can be a bit overpowering. However, in this gumbo made with chicken, shrimp and tasso – spicy smoked pork that’s a staple of south Louisiana cooking – the three ingredients complement one another because the distinctive flavor of tasso provides good balance, keeping the shrimp and chicken on an even playing field. Maybe you’ve heard that only little old ladies in Louisiana know how to make a roux. That’s not totally true. But it does take care and attention. I generally make my roux somewhat lighter for gumbos that have seafood in them because it helps the flavor stand out, but even a lighter roux requires vigilance and constant whisking. One little bit of flour stuck in the bottom of the pot can burn, screwing up the flavor of the whole gumbo. Just remember to whisk slowly. They call roux “Cajun napalm” for good reason: If a flying drop lands on your skin, it’ll give you a good sizzle. That shit hurts. – CHEF DONALD LINK

… But these dishes make up just one part of a year’s meals taken at the professional table, one sleeve in the accordion folder marked “2010 Delicious.” Add meals I ate out of town on assignment or off the clock or on the way to the clock, and the catalog swells. There is, for example, the sandwich of deep-fried oysters and house-made bacon I had this year at Cochon in New Orleans, served on white Pullman bread with a chili-spiked mayonnaise…

When chef Stephen Stryjewski was growing up, Easter meant pierogies, kielbasa and sauerkraut, and he has continued that tradition with his own family. “We always have some aspect of Polish food,” Stryjewski said. This year, he also brought the taste of Easter in Poland to Calcasieu, the special-event venue above Cochon and Cochon Butcher, where Stryjewski is chef and co-owner with Donald Link.

Leave it to my adopted second home of New Orleans and always unpredictable charms to provide my favorite food moment of 2006, a year in which my dining experiences in Italy and across America were exceptionally rewarding. A friend and Louisiana native had invited two-dozen guests to his home for Thanksgiving. As we neared the start of the feast and the end of our second round of cocktails, he confessed he had gotten off schedule the day before and had not allowed enough time to thaw the two turkeys he was to roast on his outdoor grill. But rather than panic, he looked around and found his solution right in front of him: the heated swimming pool. He plopped the plastic-encased fowl into the water, watched them bob back to the surface, and four or five hours later he fished the perfectly defrosted birds from their bath. We joked the chlorine had mad the beast meat a little whiter, but other than that, the taste was delicious, and we were left with a tale we’ll dine on for years. (By the way, do not try this at home; it only works if there’s New Orleans mojo involved). I also was blessed to find more traditional dining pleasures in a host of other places this year, most notably the Italian city of Torino and the surrounding Piedmont region; Washington, D.C.; both Portland, Ore., and Portland, Maine; Anchorage, Alaska; wine countries of California, Ohio and Virginia; and my home base of New York. The best of those experiences are offered here in my annual buffet of five top meals and 25 top dishes of the year (listed in no particular order). 5. Cochon, New Orleans This contemporary Cajun restaurant, an offshoot of chef Donald Link’s equally fine and more upscale Herbsaint, is probably the best eatery to open in New Orleans post-Katrina. I’ve eaten there at least five times and have made a pig of myself on each occasion. I cannot resist the signature Louisiana cochon du lait with turnips, cabbage and cracklings; roasted corn cala; fried boudin with pickled peppers; smoked ham hocks with braised greens; rabbit and dumplings; nor any of the other two-dozen items on the menu.

In a city synonymous with eating, it’s hard to know where to begin… Don’t let the phase “contemporary Cajun” scare you; there’s no trickery about the food at Cochon. Devoted to protecting old-style traditions, chef/co-owners Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski turn out splendid boudin, andouille, and smoked bacon, which you can also buy at the newly opened Butcher, located in the same building. Order absolutely anything: wood-fired oyster roast, ham hock with lima bean hoppin’ John, catfish court bouillon. And whatever you do, don’t leave without trying the fresh chunk-pineapple and cornmeal upside-down cake, slightly sticky with caramel sauce. The last bite will haunt you for days.

The Cajun Factor For those interested in the big flavors that lie at the intersection of urban New Orleans and rustic Cajun country, Cochon, a few blocks upriver from Emeril’s, is a can’t-miss stop. The chefs and owners — Donald Link, who also owns the well-regarded Herbsaint in the Central Business District, and Stephen Stryjewski, a sous chef at that restaurant — opened Cochon in 2006, a few months after Katrina. The dining room looks out through walls of windows, and its brick walls and bare wooden furniture glow in soft light. It is a highbrow roadhouse, a juke joint near Neil Young University. The food is head-shakingly good: delicate fried rabbit livers on toast points with a fiery pepper jelly; oysters roasted in the heat of a wood fire; fried cauliflower with a chili vinegar sauce; a gumbo of shrimp and deviled eggs. This is not bad for starter plates, with a glass of bourbon from Black Maple Hill and a chaser of Miller High Life. Afterward matters get serious. Main dishes include a marvelous soft Louisiana cochon, a kind of Cajun version of suckling pig, slow-cooked and then crisped, served with turnips, cabbage and crackling skin, as well as a perfect sandwich of deep-fried oysters and house-made bacon on white Pullman bread, with a chili-spiked mayonnaise. A fellow could eat that for days. And there is a simple salad: cucumber and herbs in vinegar, lightly pickled. It will be familiar to anyone who has ever eaten a banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwich.