Magazine - summer 03 - St. John's College

36
{Alumni Profile}
A Taste of New Orleans
Sara Roahen’s Restaurant Reviews Capture all the Flavor of The Big Easy
by Sus3an Borden, a87
When is smoked meat
not just smoked
meat?
When it’s barbecue,
the emblem
of Southern food
culture and the subject of a cover story for
the New Orleans Gambit Weekly by SARA
ROAHEN (SF94).
Still, despite barbecue’s stronghold on
Southern appetites, the story was not a natural
match for the Gambit. New Orleans,
although rich in food culture, is not much of
a barbecue town. As Roahen points out in
her article, an informal study published in
the spring/summer edition of South at the
Center puts New Orleans dead last among
Southern towns in barbecue-restaurantsper-person.
Nevertheless, Roahen managed
to turn this low-priority topic into a vibrant
story, weaving history, statistics, sociology,
oral history, regionalism, race, and politics
into its 4,000 words.
“Writing about food isn’t just about writing
about food,” Roahen says. “It’s also tapping
into something everybody can relate
to. There’s a lot of room for social commentary.
Discussions of race, wage issues, values—those
came up a lot while I was
researching the story.”
Roahen’s articles capture all the flavor—
historical and social as well as gustatory—of
New Orleans’ food culture. She has won a
number of awards for her work, most recently
first place in the critical review category
for the New Orleans Press Club Awards
2004 and first place in the food writing category
for the Association of Alternative
Newsweeklies 2003. In addition to the food
news, restaurant reviews, and feature stories
she writes for the Gambit, she is also a contributor
to Wine and Spirits magazine and
Tin House (a literary magazine), and has
been published in Gourmet. Her essays can
be found in 2003 Best Food Writing and an
upcoming anthology, Cornbread Nation II.
Roahen brings a solid background of
restaurant work to her job. As a Johnnie in
Santa Fe, she was a cocktail waitress at La
Posada and worked after graduation at
Cloud Cliff as a waitress and assistant manager.
She was a line cook at restaurants in
Wisconsin, San Francisco, and Wyoming. In
1999, she moved to New Orleans where her
“I can count the number
of truly mind-bending
meals I’ve eaten on
two hands.”
Sara Roahen, SF94
then-boyfriend, now husband, MATHIEU DE
SCHUTTER (SF94) began medical school.
Burnt out from cooking, she decided to
resuscitate an old love, writing.
“I knew I wanted to make the move to
writing, but I didn’t know how to do it,” she
says. “I feel like luck was on my side,
because the weekly paper ran an ad for a
restaurant critic, and Mathieu pushed me
to apply.”
The ad asked applicants to submit published
clips but Roahen had none. Undeterred,
she wrote a restaurant review, a
recipe feature, and an autobiographical
essay and sent them in. Three months later
she was offered her first in a series of assignments
that lasted six months before she was
officially offered the position.
“I found out that I got the job in part
because I went to the trouble to make up
clips and in part because the editor of the
paper, Michael Tisserand, went to St. John’s
for one semester and wanted to see what a
Johnnie looks like,” Roahen says. “I certainly
never anticipated that St. John’s was
going to help me get a writing job, but it
did.”
Roahen’s work as a food writer gives her
an unusual relationship with food. For her
weekly column she eats at the restaurant
she’s reviewing at least three times.
Research to find new places adds a few more
restaurant meals, and occasionally she eats
out for pleasure.
“I love dining out. Sometimes I get physically
tired of it, but there are a lot of great
moments to be had in dining out even if you
do it for a living. I’ve given up looking for
the end-all-be-all meals, those are always
rare. I can count the number of truly mindbending
meals I’ve eaten on two hands. But
I‘ve gained an appreciation for certain pivotal
moments or dishes or mouthfuls. I can
find something exciting in more than you
would think.”
On her list of mind-bending meals is a
dinner she ate at a cider house in the Spanish
town of Astigarraga near San Sebastian.
Cider houses can be found throughout the
Spanish countryside, each serving the same
traditional menu. Meals are eaten standing
up around tables and the food is brought in
courses: first, a tortilla de bacalao (a sort of
omelet made with salt cod); then, bacalao
(salt cod) smothered in roasted peppers;
next, rare ox grilled over an open fire; and
for dessert, Idiazabal (a slightly smoky
sheep’s milk cheese) with quince paste and
walnuts.
“Throughout the meal everyone at your
table walks up to big casks of cider and fills
their glasses with just an inch of cider,
drinking it quickly before it oxidizes.” As
the meal continues, Roahen says, the fun
escalates. “You’re standing up digging into
hunks of meat, getting tipsy, and everyone
around you is doing the same thing. You
start talking to people at other tables. Then,
every 15 minutes or so, the owner walks to a
secret door in the back and unlocks it.
That’s where the really good cider is.
Everyone leaves their table and stands in
line to get a spot of cider. They toast each
other, slam down the cider and go back to
their tables.”
Roahen, who was eating with her husband,
his father, and his father’s wife, says
that the meal had all the elements of a great
restaurant experience: great food, great
ambiance, and people you love.
As for great moments and mouthfuls,
Roahen says they often come during meals
in New Orleans’ many neighborhood
restaurants. “In New Orleans, neighborhood
restaurants generally serve the same
menu,” she explains. “There’s always going
to be a gumbo, very likely there will be raw
oysters, always red beans, especially on
Mondays. They serve po boys, smothered
pork chops, spaghetti, fried chicken, and
probably a shrimp remoulade. In these
restaurants they’ll do a couple of dishes really
well and the rest will be mediocre. You
end up going to these places just for those
couple of things they do well.” x
{ The College • St. John’s College • Fall 2004 }