Paul Prudhomme Dies at 75 -- He Was America's First Celebrity Chef

Chef Paul Prudhomme died on Thursday, October 8, 2015 in Crescent City, Louisiana, at the age of 75. As with his wife K’s funeral in January, 1993, the services were held on a Monday — a day off for most of the hundreds of chefs who would attend. The funeral took place on October 12 in St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.

He was considered by many in the food world to be its first celebrity chef — he popularized Southern Louisiana food, received numerous awards, hosted television shows, wrote bestselling cookbooks and invented blackened redfish.

As a visiting chef, he cooked in New York restaurants and briefly opened a restaurant in Manhattan.

In 2006, he received Bon Appetit magazine’s Humanitarian of the Year award for providing free food to recovery workers and displaced residents following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

James Beard Foundation President Susan Ungaro issued a statement upon hearing about Prudhomme’s death. “As our Foundation is about to celebrate the many great chefs and cuisine of New Orleans this weekend, we will miss and mourn the passing of the great Paul Prudhomme,” she said. “He was one of our country’s first, best-loved celebrity chefs and had a huge influence on America’s love for his home city and its exceptional food scene. New Orleans’s loss is also America’s.”

Prudhomme became a key player in the elevating of restaurant chefs to superstardom status after he and his wife K. Hinrichs Prudhomme opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in the French Quarter of New Orleans on July 3, 1979. One of his employees in those early days was a 20-year-old kitchen trainee named Emeril Lagasse who would later join Commander’s Palace in New Orleans.

As colorful as he was creative, Prudhomme could capture your undivided attention with his wit, personality and smile just as easily as he could he could please your pallet with his southern Louisiana cooking.

I had lunch with him at a Chicago food-industry convention in early,1995. At that meeting, he described how he had been pranked by Dom DeLuise, a comedian and film/television actor bearing a striking resemblance to Paul. Both were bearded, both weighed over 300 pounds, and frequently wore white caps.

Prudhomme related that on a recent evening, DeLuise had stopped at the restaurant and was mistaken for Prudhomme by several customers. Graciously, he thanked them for their patronage and said, “Your meals are on the house tonight” — then he left.

Prudhomme said he was at a total loss to understand why customers at four or five tables insisted their bills had been “comped” until DeLuise visited and confessed the following day. From that day, his staff had instructions to be on the lookout for DeLuise.

A couple of years before our meeting in Chicago, Prudhomme’s 48-year-old wife K lost her seven-year battle with a rare form of cancer. She died on New Year’s Eve, December 31,1992 — more than 1,000 people attended the funeral.

Prudhomme set up a kitchen in a tent on the funeral home’s parking lot and his staff cooked foods that K had planned for her funeral — blackened ribs, blackened prime rib, jambalaya, chicken and dumplings, and macaroni and cheese with tomatoes.

He met K (his second wife) when she was a waitress and he was the chef at the restaurant in the Maison Dupuy Hotel in the French Quarter.

Born on July 13, 1940 in Opelousas, Louisiana, he was the youngest of his family’s 13 children (ten boys and three girls).

His family farmed on borrowed land, paying the landlord one-third of the profits it received from raising and selling sweet potatoes and cotton. Prudhomme said, “My father spent 42 years farming, following a pair of mules.”

He began to help his mother prepare meals when he was nine years old. Because the kitchen had no refrigeration, he was at his mother’s side as they dug up roots, picked vegetables, slaughtered animals, and cooked meals on the stove.

When he was 17, he left home and spent many years traveling around the country learning about different cuisines before returning home.

From 1975 to 1979, he was the Executive Chef at Commander’s Palace.

K-Paul’s opens in 1979

In its early days, K-Paul’s was tightly occupied by tables seating 62 people and the bar. There was no room inside for patrons to wait for seating. So customers stood in line outside — this caught the attention of tourists who assumed the food had to be good to warrant the block-long lines. Today, with the restaurant’s capacity to seat 200 and having an indoors waiting area, the once landmark outdoors line exists no more.

Prudhomme launched a very successful company in 1983 selling spices, sauces, rubs and related products.

His wrote nine cookbooks beginning with his 352-page “Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen,” published in 1984. It introduced a generation unaware of Louisiana’s Cajun and Creole cuisine to jambalaya (sausage, chicken, onions, bell peppers, celery, tasso, tomatoes, jalapenos, garlic, sauce and rice — a staple of Cajun cooking).

Other Prudhomme dishes to gain fame were blackened redfish, seafood gumbo, Cajun “popcorn” crawfish etouffée, turtle meat soup, blackened prime rib, and sweet potato pecan pie.

He was greatly disturbed when redfish was declared an endangered game species — a ruling commonly believed to be largely influenced by the demand for blackened redfish at his restaurant. (It was K-Paul’s most famous dish.) “I had to stop serving it when the law was passed,” he said. “What bothered me most was that cooks I trained left us and continued to offer blackened redfish elsewhere — they just didn’t mention its name on their menus.”

K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen is located at 416 Chartes Street, New Orleans, LA, 504-596-2530.