Chef Dee Lavigne realized to prepare dinner on the age of seven. After a quick profession in accountancy, she determined to ditch the world of spreadsheets and concentrate on her true ardour: meals. Now she runs the primary African American-owned cooking faculty New Orleans has seen in over 80 years, whipping up Cajun and Creole classics for hungry travellers.
If you step inside New Orleans’ Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) within the historic Central City, you would possibly catch a whiff of one thing spicy and scrumptious coming from the kitchens.
This constructing, as soon as the house of the outdated Dryades Market, can also be the headquarters of Deelightful Roux – New Orleans’ first African American-owned cooking faculty in over 80 years. The head chef is a woman recognized merely as ‘Chef Dee’. Full title: Dwynesha Lavigne.
“I originally got a job at the museum during COVID,” Dwynesha says. “I enlisted other chefs to come give live demos and introduce their products to help grow their customer base. I started teaching cooking classes – but I was following the museum’s rules, and I found myself thinking, ‘I could change this. I could do it better.’ So one day I asked them if they’d like to make history with me.”
Dwynesha pitched one thing moderately radical to SoFAB: she would run cooking courses for the museum, serving to travellers, guests and locals grasp the Southern meals and Creole flavors of her hometown – however she needed to personal the college. It could be hers, and hers alone.
“It was something really lacking in this field, and the industry,” Dwynesha says. “Not just for minority women, like me, but for women in general. So, I said, ‘Listen, I want this to be mine. I want to own this.’ And they agreed. I became the first African American to own a cooking school in New Orleans in over 80 years.”
Not for the reason that trailblazing Lena Richard in 1949 – greater than a decade earlier than Julia Child’s tv debut – had a Black lady owned a cooking faculty within the metropolis. Now there was one other. “It’s interesting when you think about the food culture in New Orleans,” Dwynesha displays. “Although we have this massive African-American-Creole influence, we don’t really have a lot of representation and ownership. That was one of the things I wanted to change.”
Dwynesha determined to hero the dishes she grew up with, right here in New Orleans’ ninth ward, manner out on the easternmost downriver part of the town. “I started cooking when I was seven,” she says. “Oddly enough I have seven siblings. I’m one of six girls. So I mostly just watched. I sat back and watched a lot. And during that time, I’d ask questions, but never cook anything. Eventually I said to mom, ‘I want to try it’, and she said, ‘Okay, just don’t burn the house down’. The rest is history.”
While finding out accounting at The University of New Orleans, she realised that the accounting world of numbers wasn’t for her. She’d at all times loved cooking, however by no means tried it in any skilled capability. She determined to enroll at a group faculty, and shortly discovered herself on the Culinary Institute of America, the fabled CIA in New York – mainly the Harvard of cooking colleges. She graduated in 2003 and by no means seemed again.
In 2016, after working for Whole Foods Markets managing their bakery division, Dwynesha launched her personal enterprise: Deelightful Cupcakes. Using the Southern Food and Beverage Museum as her commissary kitchen she grew a worthwhile New Orleans enterprise, catering to occasions and working sugar-loaded cupcake deliveries. That is, till COVID got here alongside. “COVID really broke the business,” she admits. “Everyone was at home. There were no office parties or social events. I knew I had to figure something out.”
Wisely, she leaned into her current relationship with SoFAB, a not-for-profit instructional organisation, devoted to preserving the distinctive meals tradition of New Orleans. And that’s the place you’ll discover her right this moment, cooking up big pots of jambalaya, or making smothered okra and banana foster with guests, locals and Intrepid travellers.
The menu is generally Cajun and Creole – the meals of Dwynesha’s childhood – with loads of Southern classics on the menu. Gumbo with darkish roux, andouille sausage and rooster. Crusty French bread with home made butter. Smothered okra and tomatoes. And huge jugs of Luzianne iced tea to scrub all of it down, naturally.
“It feels surreal,” Dwynesha admits. “It still doesn’t feel like work. I want people to know that cooking is fun, and when you do it with more people, it gets even better. It’s not a serious thing. Food is made for people to eat and survive. It brings people together, and I think people feel that every single time they come to my class.”
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