The hits live on!

• Posted on 22 October 2026
• By Drew Mire
• Posted in Marsh & Bayou, Marsh & Bayou Outfitters, Recipe
• 0

A modern redfish dish pays tribute to the chefs, flavors and memories that helped define Louisiana cooking and continue to inspire what lands on our tables today.

When October leans in on the marsh, the water starts to clear and the reds get honest.
From Venice through Delacroix and on past the Causeway into Lake Pontchartrain, they slide onto the flats again. A gamefish you can chase nearly year-round if you know what the tide is thinking. Speckled trout grow finicky when the air drops. Redfish do not. They will take a cast thrown from the same blind where you were whispering over decoys at first light.

Many a hunt in Delacroix with my sons in their younger years went just like that.
Ducks at dawn, a nap at the camp, then an afternoon of chasing reds under a sun that still remembered summer. Shotguns back in their cases. Rods out. The quintessential cast and blast. A memory nearly impossible to replicate outside a Louisiana marsh.
Much like that day, some dishes belong to a certain time in your life. You may not have tasted them in years, but you remember them. The restaurant. The room. The plate. Maybe even who was sitting across from you. Food has a way of holding onto things like that.

Lately I have been looking back at the cooking of the 1980s and ’90s. Not because everything was better then. It wasn’t. But there was a boldness to the food, particularly in Louisiana, that feels worth revisiting. While other kids watched cartoons, I was drawn to the chefs on television. My reading leaned less toward To Kill a Mockingbird and more toward Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen and River Road Recipes.
Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse cooked with confidence and seasoned without apology. They helped convince the rest of the world that Louisiana cooking deserved the attention.

Prudhomme grew up in Opelousas and lifted Cajun cooking out of the back kitchen and set it on the world’s table. In the early 1980s, he took redfish, once dismissed as a coarse, bottom-feeding trash fish, and dragged it through butter and spice and a skillet hot enough to make a kitchen smell like a campfire. That move changed the trajectory of a species. Commercial fishing nearly loved the fish to death. Sportsmen and chefs kept it alive.

Years later, Chef Paul became a mentor and father figure to my business partner, Chef Aarón Sánchez, and his legacy and techniques still speckle our culinary adventures today Then came Emeril. He followed Prudhomme at Commander’s Palace before opening Emeril’s in the Warehouse District in 1990. His food was unmistakably New Orleans and never trapped by tradition. We still work with Chef Emeril and his team through the Emeril Lagasse Foundation. People say you never want to meet your heroes, but he is a better man and a kinder soul than television ever needed him to be One of those early dishes at Emeril’s was an andouille-crusted redfish. That plate sent me back down this road. I made my own version: andouille-crusted redfish over shrimp and corn maque choux, circled with a meunière cream built from toasted shrimp heads. Andouille shows up twice. The shrimp get used from meat to shell. Nothing about it is particularly restrained, and I like that. Modern kitchens are taught to edit, to let the product speak, to show restraint. But sometimes you want the guitar turned up. Redfish will stand with smoke, spice, cream, and sausage without disappearing.

The fillet gets Paul Prudhomme’s Seafood Magic and a hard sear, then a crumble of browned andouille, breadcrumbs, and Parmesan. Maque choux takes more sausage, the last of the summer corn, cream, and shrimp already kissed by the same Magic. The sauce starts with toasted shrimp heads, Worcestershire, lemon, a pinch of clove from the boil, and stock cooked down with cream and butter. On top, crispy potato strings that remind me of the canned shoestring potatoes that seemed to appear on half the casseroles of my childhood. It reads loud. It eats quieter than it sounds. Hearty, yes. Cartoon-spicy, no. The cream and the corn do the diplomatic work.

October in South Louisiana is a transition month. The first fronts make you believe summer might actually end. Waterfowl dreams begin. At the time, those camp days were just what we did. Only later do you understand that the ordinary ones were the days you would want back. Nostalgia rarely announces itself while you are living it. The same is true of food.

And of thinking about Emeril’s again. There is something fitting about watching his son, E.J., now lead the kitchen there and bring his own perspective to a restaurant his father opened more than three decades ago. The place is evolving. Evolution does not require pretending the past never happened. Sometimes moving forward means knowing what was worth carrying with you.

Chefs grow tired of their greatest hits. Musicians probably do, too. Play the same song enough times and you want to write another one. Put that song away for twenty or thirty years and the opening notes land differently. You remember where you were. Who was there. Maybe who you were then.

A piece of redfish. Andouille. Corn. Shrimp. A rich sauce. Crispy potatoes scattered across the top. Nothing subtle about it. And maybe that is exactly why it feels right.
Some dishes are worth cooking again. Some stories are worth telling again. And some of the old hits became hits for a reason.