07/23/2026
Choupique is bowfin roe. About as Louisiana as a fish gets, and about as far from a New England oyster as we could start a tasting menu up here with.
I’m a transplant twice over. I came up first on the coast of Virginia: wide beaches, a brackish bay, Tidewater flavors, in a family of Jews outside the ever-transient Naval Base. We learned about wild-horse-shipwreck folklore and the salt-marsh history behind them, including all the food history that shaped our history.
Brackish is where the salt and the fresh meet and neither one wins. It smells like low tide and green things and something feral. I didn’t have words for it then, but that in-between water, as un-kosher as it generally is, was already teaching me what I liked.
Then off to southern Louisiana for the summers. Different brackish, same lesson. A little Jewish redneck barefoot in the swamp, mud between my toes, the funk of the bayou sitting thick in the August heat, digging crawfish out of the driveway after the rain. Two coasts, two brackish waters, one kid filing it all away for a menu she wouldn’t cook for another couple decades. Food memories and nostalgia-
Everybody up here does New England seafood, obviously, and for all the years I tried to fit in with that, it never set right. It’s not my thing. What I want on this menu are the flavors that raised me: mid-Atlantic, Gulf Coast, all the south in-between- brighter, funkier, louder, harder, SEASONED.
Anyways, the caviar (I’m not calling it roe, chill out) is domestic, worked by a small Gulf fishery, not flown in from across the world. When you order it, the money stays with the people fishing those waters, carrying the baton of this prehistoric species that’s made a living for so many people, and a piece of that food heritage stays on the table. That matters to me more than I can fit in a caption.
So take the first bite as the whole night in miniature foreshadow. The dish, and the caviar itself, tastes where the cook is from. It tells you the rest of the meal is going to be careful, but playful, and little Southern, appreciative of all the cultures in my homes, and a bit of a party.
And no I don’t make the potato chips. I don’t need to be
