Family Guy Tv Tome

The microphones are hot and so is the roux in John Folse's kitchen/studio, where it's Saturday morning and time for another installment of Stirrin' It Up, the weekly cooking show on public radio broadcast from his corporate headquarters in Gonzales.

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Today's dish: Cajun oyster stew, which co-host and fellow chef Louis Jesowshek has renamed Devil's Empire Cajun Oyster Stew. It's a playful nod to a French priest's complaints of satanic influence in colonial New Orleans--as chronicled in Folse's latest book. The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine.

The show, as usual, is unscripted and full of tomfoolery. The roux's aroma fills the studio, simmering in a cast iron pot on top of Folse's beautifully restored 1946 O'Keefe & Merritt gas range, affectionately known as Big Blue.

This is work? Yes. Aside from being an excuse to ham it up, plug a new book and give listeners a recipe to try at home, Folse's radio show--like his biweekly TV cooking spots on WAFB news and nationally syndicated PBS television show--keeps his name echoing in people's ears and the spotlight on the Louisiana culture that he promotes relentlessly.

Like the devil in New Orleans, Folse has built himself quite an empire in the process. Although his initial plunge into the restaurant business in the late 1970s was a near disaster, Folse has become an internationally known chef and restaurateur with a reputation for bringing Louisiana cuisine to the four corners of the globe. His 1988 trip to Moscow to open "Lafitte's Landing East" during the Reagan/Gorbachev summit garnered an avalanche of publicity.

Today's Folse's fingers are in every kind of pie: catering, pastry and desserts, bulk food manufacturing, dairy and cheese making, book publishing, radio and television--even teaching. At the Nicholls State University culinary institute that bears his name, Folse teaches the craft, the art and, ideally, the passion for Louisiana cuisine that energizes him.

But it's also big business. Folse expects revenues from the various enterprises under the Chef John Folse & Co. banner to exceed $30 million this year. His organization employs roughly 300 people.

The plant

On display inside the foyer of the new Chef John Folse & Co. manufacturing facility outside Donaldsonville, enshrined in a Plexiglas display case, is the five-gallon kettle Folse used to break into the business.

Ten years ago, with Folse's reputation already firmly established, he was contacted by representatives of Casino Magic on the Gulf Coast. Could he make gumbo, they wanted to know, say, 600 gallons a week? Folse almost said no, but then realized he was about to pass up an opportunity. He said yes. The only question was how. The five-gallon kettle was the answer. Today it's a reminder that big accomplishments are built on small ones.

"I want everybody walking in to see that things don't start with some great vision," Folse says. "Things start with 'Yes, I can do that.' I didn't know what a plant was. I needed a kettle."

Inside the new plant, in a giant stainless steel vat, 4,000 pounds of a dark, aromatic liquid swirls round and round: Jack Daniels Glaze, which Folse invented and has produced for TGI Friday's hundreds of restaurants around the world for the past five years. He has it to thank for the new 38,000-square-foot, $4 million facility surrounding him.

The story of the glaze contract has a Hollywood quality to it. At a trade show somewhere an R & D guy from TGI Friday's finds himself at a Chef John Folse & Co. booth, tastes some samples and goes wild. The chain is on the hunt for a dazzling new product to wield against the competition--something spectacular to spruce up ribs, chicken, steak, even fish. Folse gets a call from the R & D guy, who has a proposition. Hunkering down in his kitchen lab, Folse concocts something that says "Louisiana" loud and clear: brown sugar, cane syrup and--with a tip of the hat to congenital joie de vivre--Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

The glaze was a hit with TGI Fridays' customers and remains so five years later. Intended initially as a temporary promotion, Jack Daniels Glaze stubbornly remains on the menu. Folse is cagey about exactly how much of the substance he makes, other than to say it's "a massive amount."

"People in manufacturing tell me, 'What you did with Jack Daniels Glaze happens once every ten years.' It's safe to say that this product built this plant."

That contract got Folse noticed by an even larger chain, which chose his company to make a common variety of soup. Another homerun, it's being heavily promoted by the restaurant.

The soup churns away, 5,000 pounds at a time, 24 hours a day, inside the plant's steam-injection "Smart Cooker." From there it's packaged and quick-chilled, then put in cold storage to await shipping. The chain is touchy about releasing too many details, which is why Folse can't reveal the identity of the soup or its buyer.

He does allow that the glaze and soup together mean $1.5 million in revenue. The new plant's capacity, which is three times Folse's immediate needs, means he'll be able to handle new contracts when they come. Thanks to the success of his current contracts, he's attracting the attention of the country's largest food manufacturers--the Nestles, the Heinzes, the Pillsburys.

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The Donaldsonville plant produces about 500,000 pounds of food a week. Plans already are being drawn up for a new distribution center next door, which Folse estimates will save more than $15,000 in outside storage costs a year. Eventually all Folse & Co. divisions, including corporate offices, will be moved to Donaldsonville.

He has no doubts about competing for business against food industry titans. Folse says it's a matter of getting it right: the right people, training, equipment, focus and the ability never to miss a shipping deadline, which he insists he's never done.

"I better be able to say we're as good as these guys. We might be a little smaller. We might be a little younger. But there's nothing that they do that we don't do as well and with more passion, because the owner's on the kettle."

The book

Louisiana's Culinary Ambassador to the World, a title bestowed to Folse by the Louisiana Legislature in 1988, admits he was once clueless about the cuisine and culture that so fires his ovens these days.

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His awakening was sparked by an early mentor, a classically trained German chef named Fritz Blumberg who taught his young protege two important lessons: For starters, "Folse" was a German surname. Also, the sauce piquant Folse presented as part of his family's traditional "camp suppers" was no different than the "Sauce Robert" Blumberg himself ate as a child in Munich.

How? Somewhere in Louisiana's convoluted past Sauce Robert (pronounced RohBEAR), a centuries-old French import, collided with Spanish peppers, resulting in the peppery (piquant) sauce the Folses would smother rabbit with at camp suppers generations later. The epiphany got Folse thinking about the roots of Louisiana cuisine. His recently released tome, The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine, is the 841-page culmination of his quest to unearth the mysteries of Louisiana's culinary heritage.

"If I've learned anything about doing The Encyclopedia, it's that, as fabulous as our cuisine and culture is, very few people saw the importance of recording anything. It was just understood that we had something special. I know we have something special, and I want to record every bit of it."

Folse put together a seven-member team of researchers, writers, editors, designers and photographers. While he plowed through hundreds of recipes, Micheala York, Folse's communications director and Stirrin' It Up co-host, haunted libraries and museum archives for two years in search of historical tidbits.

The Encyclopedia, which combines sections on the culinary traditions of the indigenous and colonial inhabitants of early Louisiana with hundreds of traditional recipes, has been a hit. Fans snatched up all 10,000 copies of the first printing in the 17 days leading up to Christmas. Folse, whose other books have each taken three or four months to exhaust the first printing, admits he was blown away by the book's reception.

"We knew it was going to be a very special book, but I had absolutely no idea that we were going to sell 10,000 books in two weeks."

A second printing of the $39.95 book is scheduled for early February. Folse seems as proud as any new father.

"We did it. My team did it. It wasn't done before. If you want to know where red beans came from, it's there. If you want to know that mirliton stuffed with shrimp came on a Spanish ship into the Port of New Orleans in 1765, I have the name of the ship and I have the manifest."

The beginning

In 1978, Folse was too busy trying to stay afloat to worry about culinary culture. His first solo venture--Lafitte's Landing Restaurant, which he'd opened in July--was headed for the soup, and he didn't know why. With a dozen years of hotel food-and-beverage experience behind him, Folse had thought it would be easy: prime rib on Sunday; red beans and rice on Monday; catfish or a seafood buffet of some kind on Friday; and Veal Oscar somewhere on the menu.

Folse had brought Baton Rouge hotel food to Donaldsonville and expected the locals to love it. They didn't. No fried chicken, no T-bone steak, no business.

"They'd look around my dining room, with all these white table cloths and candles on the tables, and they'd kind of back out of the door. I didn't understand why. I was trying to create food that I though was important. I felt good about it. My customers did not."

Folse calls those days "worse than grim," so bad that he told his employees to buy toilet paper by the roll. He sought counsel from a Donaldsonville businessman named E.J. Ourso. Folse didn't know him, but did know that Ourso had built a very successful insurance business. Ourso's advice--other than admonishments to give customers what they want and to not worry about what the competition is doing--was to point to a picture he had of two buzzards sitting on a fence with the caption: "Patience hell, let's go out and kill something."

Be aggressive. Very aggressive. Folse calls it "a kick in the butt" and gives Ourso credit for "watering the seeds" of his success.

"He told me, don't hang around with a lot of patience waiting for something to happen. The only thing that's going to happen is a lock on the front door. Go out and make something happen."

Folse did just that, chasing the tour buses that rumbled through town every day. When he caught them, he'd offer the drivers free lunch if they'd dock at Lafitte's Landing instead. The first bus came. Then another, and another.

"I'd jump on the bus with my Cajun accent and tell them the story of Jean Lafitte and the pirates of Louisiana. The tour bus driver loved it. The passengers went wild."

After five years of tour buses packing his parking lot, Folse decided it was time for a change, so he passed off the bus tourist business to a competitor and revamped his menu to more upscale fare.

Ourso, namesake to LSU's business college, says he had a couple of other pieces of advice for the budding entrepreneur.

"I told him think positive, thing big and think originally. Damn, you know what he did? He went to Moscow."

Ourso donated $10,000 to fund the trip. The publicity it generated resulted in swarms of diners--mostly tourists--knocking down the doors to get a table at John Folse's restaurant.

The cheese

Folse describes his youth in rural St. James Parish in the mid-1960s as "like the Waltons." His mother, Therese, died when he was eight. His father, Royley, insisted on keeping the eight brothers and sisters together. Folse says his dad, who's 91 today, was a natural manager of children, enforcing a strict a code of morality, hard work and accountability.

Folse credits that upbringing, where nothing was free and everything had to be worked for, with molding him into an entrepreneur whose success has depended partly on holding his employees to the same code of conduct.

York, who's been with Folse for eight years and whose job description includes making sure the boss is where he needs to be when, says it takes "special people" to work for the man--people willing to work hard, because Folse is working harder. York calls him driven yet generous, often more like a colleague than an employer.

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"We are in the School of Folse. It would be wrong for me to say every day is smooth sailing. It's not, yet I thrive on it. He'll push you to your limits. We learn that anything is possible."

York says it can be frustrating when the boss explodes in a new direction no one understands--like cheese making. Some scratched their heads when Folse announced two-and-a-half years ago that they were going into the dairy business. It seemed less crazy when Folse's gourmet French triple-cream took the gold at last November's World Cheese Awards in London, beating out entries from six other continents.

His Bittersweet Plantation Dairy's triple-creams and other high-end, handcrafted cheeses today have distribution in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Folse says that when he launched the dairy he knew--based on the fact that top restaurants were rolling out cheese carts--that signature cheeses were going to be the hot trend they've become.

"What's the mystery?" he says. "If I make a good piece of cheese, all I've got to do is find a cheese shop. They're going to buy it."

The image

In Folse's business strategy, all roads lead to Louisiana, whose larder, he insists, has everything necessary for the best food anyone could want to eat. He gets his ingredients and his inspiration here and likes to lift other boats if he can. Bittersweet Dairy, which created a sudden market for local milk, is a good example.

If time has robbed some ingredients from the larder, Folse drags the past into the present. When he learned olive trees were grown here in the 1700s, Folse imported olive trees from Spain, France and Italy. He's brought back Bourbon Red turkeys from the 1870s and the Broadbreasted Bronze from the 1920s. The buff goose that traditionally graced Christmas tables in the 1700s and 1800s is back in Louisiana, roaming Folse's White Oak Plantation.

While there might not be a Chef John Folse without Louisiana, Louisiana might not be what is to the rest of the world without Chef John Folse.

Louis Jesowshek, executive chef for Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center and Stirrin' It Up co-host, says his longtime friendship with Folse grew out of a mutually intense fascination with food and all things culinary. To Jesowshek, Folse not only helped define the meaning of "celebrity chef" and advance the idea of chefs as professionals but also created new respect for Louisiana cooking and culture.

"There was Julia Child, Justin Wilson, the Frugal Gourmet, and there was John Folse," Jesowshek says. "I think he showed the world that we cook with our shoes on in Louisiana. Before that, there was this image of a bunch of hillbillies. John just smashed that."

STEVE CLARK covers health care, higher education, environment and transportation. Reach him at sclark@businessreport.com.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Louisiana Business, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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