Chefs On Boats: Finding the Feeding Waters

Massive walls separate the city of New Orleans from the marshes and estuaries that have helped make this place a culinary marvel. What happens when chefs venture beyond the barricades?

Words by BOYCE UPHOLT | Photos by RORY DOYLE

(Banner photo) Chef Erik Nunley looks out at the remains of a Native American mound near Empire, Louisiana. (Above) New Orleans native Troy Gilbert is the force of nature behind the sustainability initiative Chefs on Boats. 

Gilbert grew up in New Orleans, and in his early years, like most New Orleanians, he had little awareness of all the surrounding waters. His first career did little to change his ignorance. As he was failing out of college (“fucking off,” as he puts it), his father, a successful medical salesman, intervened to install his son in the family business. Soon Gilbert was shilling cardiovascular devices as an independent rep, a job he found mostly miserable. The only virtue was that he got to rove a five-state territory.

When one day a buddy called him up and invited him on an adventure — “You wanna hop on my dad’s boat and drink beer while we race?” — Gilbert was happy for the distraction. Being on the water “changed the trajectory of my life,” he says now.

Gilbert became an avid sailor. Eventually, he began writing dispatches about his life on the water for small magazines. He launched a blog in 2005: “Your newest and hottest resource for information on sailing and racing throughout the Gulf Coast is now online!” the first post proclaimed.

After 10 days, the blog’s tone shifted substantially. A hurricane was headed for the coast, and Gilbert declared his intention to hunker down and narrate the results. Thus he became a front-lines reporter, offering dispatches of the city in the fraught days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

After the storm, he and an old friend conceived of a book project that would combine recipes with the stories of how chefs and restaurants fared through the storm. That eventually became New Orleans Kitchens, the first of four cookbooks Gilbert co-authored. By the time another disaster arrived, 15 years later — a pandemic, this time — Gilbert was ensconced in a life as a freelance journalist focused on food and maritime adventures. Knowing his restaurant friends were suffering because of the Covid shutdown, Gilbert called up a few and suggested they use their kitchens to make meals for first responders. The initiative, which Gilbert eventually dubbed Chefs Brigade, crowdsourced $80,000. Gilbert used the funds to pay 40 restaurants to crank out meals.

The initial pool of money ran dry in early May, after 42 days. But in late June, the city of New Orleans and FEMA requested proposals for a much more ambitious meals program: up to 60,000 meals each day for homebound people at high risk of contracting Covid.

Gilbert figured he’d built the core apparatus the city needed. So he leveled up. After partnering with several other institutions, his nonprofit and coalition won the contract. Soon 90 restaurants — from award winners like Cochon to humble food trucks — joined the effort. The one-month contract was renewed several times, keeping Chefs Brigade churning for a full year, with a total of 3.7 million meals distributed across the city.

Gilbert’s off-the-cuff calls to his restaurant friends had reshaped his life. He appeared on CNN. He accepted several awards on behalf of the organization. The book he was writing, about three centuries of maritime history on the Gulf of Mexico, got put on indefinite hold. 

In the spring of 2021, Gilbert knew the FEMA funding was going to wind down. He began to think about his next move. A phone call from an old colleague prompted an easy next move: the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, another nonprofit, had since 2014 been taking emptied oyster shells from restaurants and recycling them as green infrastructure, meant to anchor Louisiana’s fraying coastline. The program had been stalled by the pandemic; Chefs Brigade helped CRCL kick back into gear, covering the cost of the shell pickup for interested restaurants.

The idea to take culinary workers onto boats emerged in April 2021, over dinner with staff members from CRCL. Gilbert was happy to do it: He himself hadn’t been on a boat in almost three years. At first, he saw these trips as a chance to say thank you. He’d never met most of his restaurant colleagues since, by necessity, the pandemic relief work was being coordinated remotely. On a boat, he figured, he’d have a couple of hours of face time, a chance to make clear that even with the FEMA contract wrapping up, Chefs Brigade would remain intact, finding a way to support the industry.

Not long afterward, while sitting at one of the raw bars along Lake Pontchartrain, Gilbert conducted a surreptitious test: He asked the shucker where the oysters came from — and got that simple answer of Texas. 

This test confirmed a notion he’d already begun to develop: He needed, once more, to level up. He didn’t need to take a couple of chefs out on the water, he needed to take all the chefs out. And more than chefs: bartenders, managers, and, yes, shuckers.

“These are our culinary ambassadors,” Gilbert says, “and they don’t have any experience with the delta. Most of them haven’t even been on a boat.”

So a new initiative — “Chefs on Boats,” Gilbert called it, simply — was born.

(Top left) Oysterman Mike Arguelles on the water near Ocean Springs, Mississippi. (Above) Richie Blink, who captains the Chefs on Boats expeditions, pulls up a crab trap in Empire, Louisiana. Born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, he’s the son of a commercial fisherman.“I learned the delta on the bow of his boats. We would be shrimping, oystering, crabbing. The better we understood the delta, the better we ate.”

The boats depart from Empire, Louisiana, a hardscrabble village of 900 on the west bank of the Mississippi River, 60 miles downstream of New Orleans. Venice, an even smaller village, lies a bit farther downriver. Together, despite their modest stature, the two ports comprise one of the country’s top fisheries. Outside of Alaska, only one other town saw more seafood landings in 2020. 

The drive from New Orleans to Empire can feel grim. The wind carries coal dust off stacks at the refineries; as you head south, exurban mansions give way to trailers jacked up on pilings. Gas pipelines finger up from the ground. I sometimes tell people Louisiana looks better from the water. That’s true enough in Empire, though once you hit the water, there isn’t much of Louisiana to see. An open bay — the tremulous waters of the Gulf of Mexico — lies just a half mile from the river. On the Chefs on Boats expedition I joined, we were onto one of the Gulf’s sheltered inlets within minutes. 

From sand and silt dropped by slowing water, the Mississippi River built the soggy domain that is Louisiana’s coastline. It’s an inherently unsteady place: Each new delivery of mud lays a weight on the older sediment below; slowly but inexorably, the ground sinks under the pressure. The place has survived because eventually the river shifts, turning its attention elsewhere. So as the abandoned riverside ridges sink, as the surrounding marshland fragments, as the heartier bits of sand are captured by the tides and reworked into barrier islands, the river is building somewhere new. Over the past few millennia, the Mississippi has switched through various routes, and the resulting river-built swamp and marsh now spread for more than a hundred miles from east to west. 

Unfortunately, the levees along the Mississippi River prevent the river from finding new paths. And the current channel reaches so far south that most of the mud tumbles down into the abyss beyond the continental shelf. Meanwhile, canals that slice through the marshland act like straws, slurping up saltwater — poisoning fragile stands of grasses. 

One result is what Richie Blink, the tour guide that Gilbert has contracted to captain the Chefs on Boats expeditions, calls “ghost bayous.” The ghost bayou we’re traveling is visible at the water’s surface thanks only to the bamboo reeds and PVC pipes oyster harvesters have jammed along its edges. They mark a route of safe passage, deeper water carved out by the bayou’s former flow. 

“If you look off on the horizon, you can see more of these signs,” Blink says to the assembled chefs and journalists. Signs of a disappearing place. Rotting pilings reveal the sites of former fishing camps. Once there were 150 in the vicinity, Blink says. Now there are seven. 

Blink was born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, which clasps the river along its final hundred or so miles. His father is a commercial fisherman. “I learned the delta on the bow of his boats,” he tells us. “We would be shrimping, oystering, crabbing. The better we understood the delta, the better we ate.” 

He graduated from high school a few months before Katrina made landfall. After the storm, he found work running boats to offshore oil rigs. He quickly rose from deckhand to captain. At the same time, he was conducting what he calls “guerrilla restoration projects”: planting thousands of trees to help fight his sense of powerlessness — against the storm, against his disappearing homeland. Eventually, he began to take boatless friends out into the fragile landscape. These small adventures grew into his current business, Delta Discovery Tours. 

The route we’re traveling, despite its ghostliness, is still marked on some maps as “Bayou Cook.” When Gilbert first came down to Plaquemines Parish to scout the itinerary for these expeditions, he immediately recognized this name. In his culinary research, he’d come across early advertisements for Commander’s Palace — one of New Orleans’ most venerable restaurants — that enticed diners with an offer of Bayou Cook oysters. (The price in the 1890s? Ten cents a dozen.) With Blink, Gilbert suddenly realized why he’d never heard of Bayou Cook — “because it doesn’t fucking exist!” as he says. 

Bayou Cook’s disappearance suggests the trouble local restaurants will face in the years to come — and restaurants in other parts of the country, too. In a typical year, Louisiana’s seafood industry brings nearly 30 percent of commercial landings in the lower 48 states, as much as 1 billion pounds, sometimes more. The estuaries — the places where the tide meets the freshwater streaming down off the continent — are especially important nurseries where most of our coveted seafood species spawn, rear, and feed. 

No one is quite sure what will happen if the marsh is lost completely. But even now, before that apocalypse arrives, fishing communities are suffering. The marshes serve as buffers against hurricanes, so every bit that disappears makes it harder to live in the few bits that are left. James Beard Award-winning chef Melissa Martin noted to me in 2019 that her hometown of Chauvin — from which she sources much of her seafood — could be wiped away at any moment. Four hurricanes crashed through Louisiana in the following two years. The last of these storms, Ida, left Chauvin in tatters. Wrecked shrimp boats plugged the bayou; the winds ripped docks loose. In total, according to one estimate, the two violent hurricane seasons of 2020 and 2021 cost the state’s seafood industry as much as $700 million.

(From top left): Deckhand Jessica Frelich at the helm of a shrimp boat in the port of Empire, Louisiana; Frelich makes her nimble way down onto the deck; Chefs on Boats participants stroll a tenuous comma of land near Empire.

In 2005, in the wake of Katrina, the state of Louisiana launched a new agency, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, with, as its name suggests, a mission of restoring ecosystems and reducing flood damage. After we leave Bayou Cook, Blink steers us toward one of the CPRA’s projects: a barrier island that had been reconstructed, at a cost of $110 million, using funds BP paid after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Pelicans roost along the edge of the sandy spit; crabs scurry away from our shadows. Still, Blink notes, the sand here had to be pumped 22 miles. “Not the most carbon-friendly way to build a beach,” he says.

There are other ways to build, which Blink demonstrates during the second half of the tour. He steers his skiff, New Delta, through a lock in Empire that offers access to the Mississippi River. Then we head downriver, into Neptune Pass.

There are no levees along the final miles of Mississippi’s east bank, which has left the land here vulnerable to the river’s power. And in 2019, during the longest-lasting flood on the lower Mississippi since the Great Flood of 1927, the river demonstrated that force. The rage of water pouring widened a narrow gap in the riverbanks and scoured open a new channel. Now as much as a sixth of the water exits through this shortcut into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s enough flow to build new marshland — a pretty swamp-meadow filled with cattails and even a few young willow trees, in a place that until recently was open water. 

“This is how all of south Louisiana was built,” Blink says, as a roseate spoonbill slices through the sky. The new land, then, serves as a reminder of what the river can do if it’s set free.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, worried about the effects on navigation, plans to partially close this channel with an underwater rock wall. Across the river, though, on the west bank, the Corps has given the green light to a human-managed equivalent. Construction on the first of several “sediment diversions” began in mid-August: sets of gates built into the levee that open onto a concrete spillway. According to computer models, the water flowing through the gates and beyond the spillway will carry enough sediment to build tens of thousands of acres of new marsh — though the models also suggest that as the decades go on, and the seas rise, the land will begin to dwindle again.

The project is despised by most of the local fishers. The blast of river water will push shrimp farther out into the Gulf — which means longer trips, which means more fuel and higher costs. Scientists believe that shrimp may grow more slowly, too, in the less saline conditions; oysters, too, will likely get washed out from the receiving bay. When the Corps of Engineers studied the diversion, they concluded that one way or another the price of locally caught seafood in Louisiana is likely to rise in the coming years. The new diversion, though, will deliver that price hike decades earlier. Representatives from the fishing industry have vowed to sue. Here at the end of the river, there are no easy answers.

One key stop on the Chefs on Boats tour is, at first glance, unassuming: a slight hump of soil that rises from the water a bit north of the tattered remnants of Bayou Cook. Skeletal tree trunks emerge from the dirt; killed by saltwater, the trees have lost their bark and leaves, and now stand as barren and silvered as bones.

“That higher spot, that was sediment — mud — that was placed here by First Nations people, Indigenous folks,” Blink tells our group. “It’s possible there could have been 2,000 years of occupation here.” 

The reproductions of old photographs he passes around show that a hundred years ago, several carefully built mounds emerged from a thick carpet of grass here. This is a sacred place. There are thousands of such sacred places across North America — carefully arranged piles of soil and shells. But here, as the marsh has disappeared, waves have torn at the mounds. Now just one remains.

This stop is meant in part to demonstrate the power of oyster-shell recycling: CRCL has built a reef here out of stacked mesh bags filled with restaurant oyster shells. The reef may have helped the last remaining mound survive Ida without much further damage. 

But the mound itself — and the broader history of such monuments — is essential to understanding the delta. This architectural tradition can be traced back more than 5,000 years in Louisiana, where, amid the rich landscape along the southern Mississippi River, the first complex arrangements of earthworks arose. 

There is a common notion that human civilizations began when people went to work as farmers. Across the world, though, the first sedentary cultures were not farmers; instead, people gathered in swamps, where the richness of the landscape made it easy to survive. In a delta, you don’t need to waste energy chasing deer or bison, nor do you need to commit to the hard labor of farming. The brackish waters running through delta estuaries, the muddy water in the Mississippi River’s swamps — these are so rich with life that eating becomes easy.

Louisiana’s earliest earthwork complexes were built long before anyone bothered to plant a crop — a fact that surprised archaeologists when they discovered one early site, built more than 3,000 years ago, that featured trade goods carried from as far away as Yellowstone. It was, almost certainly, the most famous and important place on the continent at the time. And even as white settlers spread across the continent, they kept finding people who remembered the delta as a particularly important place: Tribes as far away as modern-day North Dakota told stories about Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies, a spiritual figure who guards the world’s plants and who’s said to live on an island at the Mississippi’s mouth.

So while New Orleans is famed as a doom-wracked city — foolishly fashioned amid an all-but-impossible geography, by many accounts — from another point of view it’s a fine place to live. Perhaps the best on the continent. But, as Blink had noted to the group that morning, it’s a place that requires a kind of care and attention and collaboration that does not always fit in well with a regime of individual property rights.

The chefs on the expedition I joined, Jordan and Amarys Herndon, own Palm & Pine, an acclaimed restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter. During the tour, Amarys told me she’d come because she thinks chefs have responsibilities, and from time to time it’s important to reground yourself in that fact. Jordan said he wants to sustain New Orleans’ culinary traditions in their restaurant, and to do so he had to understand their roots. And despite their 15 years apiece in New Orleans, neither chef had ventured downriver of New Orleans, nor did they come with specific goals in mind, or outcomes they hoped for from the experience. 

When I explained this story to a friend, a fellow food writer, he wondered if bringing chefs and shuckers out onto boats really matched the social good of Gilbert’s earlier triumph — whether this is the best next chapter for Chefs Brigade. Compared with a disaster response program, where you can tally the number of meals cooked and served, it’s hard to pin down just what getting chefs onto the water does. Gilbert told me that he’s been asked this question so many times that he now has a stock response: “The coast is a disaster.” Its decline demands a disaster response.

The most obvious metric is how many “culinary ambassadors” have participated since the program launched in September 2021. (Just short of 200, as of mid-June 2023.) Chefs on Boats sends out surveys to participants that suggest that nearly all of them come away with a better grasp of the human impact on local fisheries, and more than two-thirds of respondents say they have thought about how their restaurant operations and daily lives affect the ecosystem. 

Several workers told me that before they joined a Chefs on Boats trip, they’d been dumping their oyster shells into CRCL’s recycling bins only because they were told to; seeing the end result, at the sacred mounds, made the process far more compelling. The owners and managers at Clesi’s joined an expedition in the fall of 2022. The restaurant, which specializes in boiled seafood and oysters, raw and chargrilled, now has a map of the state’s oyster leases hanging in the kitchen so that servers can know where the day’s supply was harvested. 

Wetlands near Empire, Louisiana

A bigger change arrived six months after Gilbert launched the Chefs on Boats expeditions. One of his guests invited a friend to fill an otherwise empty seat, which is how a man named Clint Coleman, the administrator of a state advisory council called LaSTEM, wound up onboard. 

“He was superquiet,” Gilbert remembers. After the trip, though, Coleman pulled Gilbert aside and explained how LaSTEM is involved with math and science education across Louisiana. He suggested that the boat trip might be developed into the culminating experience of a new curriculum. 

Gilbert didn’t even know what a curriculum was — “that’s not how education worked when I was growing up,” he says — but he quickly understood the pitch. Within a month of Coleman’s suggestion, by June 2022, he’d hired April Bellow, a former chef who left the restaurant business to focus on culinary education as a program administrator. 

April Bellow conducts a salinity test and examines oyster shells serving as protection for a Native American mound in Empire, Louisiana.

Bellow created a curriculum that will be implemented at Nunez Community College, in the New Orleans suburbs, next spring, and later across Louisiana’s community college system. The program, built for culinary students, touches on basic geological and ecological principles important to the delta and explores how this landscape shaped local foodways. Students will gain practical insights about how chefs can support a sustainable landscape — by using the “bycatch” that is caught alongside the most desired species and too often tossed as waste, for example, or by using as much as possible of every fish. The curriculum culminates with a trip out in the boat, to see the delta in the flesh. Gilbert hopes that the curriculum can be implemented across the northern Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps beyond; he wants to develop a certification for chefs who have received sufficient training in coastal issues. 

He also hopes to expand the scope of the Chefs on Boats expeditions, potentially offering a trip into the marshes closer to the college — and perhaps as far afield as Mississippi, where he has already begun scouting itineraries. Next up could be Texas, he says. After that, who knows? Why not Ireland, Gilbert suggests, perhaps half-joking, though perhaps not: Anywhere there’s a coastline, this experience could be replicated, he notes. 

Bellow notes that the way we eat now — a drive to the grocery to pick up presliced and shrink-wrapped products — is a more modern innovation than we sometimes realize. She offers her great-grandparents as an example. They lived “down the bayou,” as the phrase goes in Louisiana, where they grew or gathered nearly all their food. Certainly fishing for one’s supper is an appealingly primal act. Here is a food sourced not from the grocery store, nor even from a farm, but ripped right out of a still-wild expanse. Can a five-hour excursion out into the wilderness undo decades and centuries of disconnection? I don’t know, but when I talked with Jarvis Smith, Clesi’s kitchen manager, about his experience, I was struck by the affection with which he remembered the journey. 

Smith grew up just outside New Orleans and first got turned on to cooking, he told me, while serving time at a juvenile detention center, where he took a culinary arts class. He wound up in a local training program, and then launched a career, working his way up from the salad station at a Texas Roadhouse to, after nearly 20 years, his job in management at Clesi’s. Yet before Gilbert came along and offered this trip, it had never occurred to Smith to seek out the waters around his hometown. More than 30 years amid all this water, and Smith had never been in a boat. It’s a common story here, in a city without a single ramp onto its famous river. 

I asked him what it had been like out there. 

“It was peaceful,” Smith told me. He’d laid his face along the gunwale and allowed the water ripped up by the boat’s passage to brush his face. “It was peaceful,” he said again, sounding wistful. He finds himself talking about the trip all the time, to his kids especially. He’d like to go again.

This story was made possible with a journalism travel grant from The Neal Peirce Foundation. 

Boyce Upholt is a writer based in New Orleans. His first book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi River, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2024.

Rory Doyle is a freelance photographer based in Cleveland, Mississippi. Born and raised in Maine, Doyle studied journalism at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. In 2009, he moved to Mississippi to pursue a master’s degree at Delta State University. He was a 2018 and 2023 Visual Artist Fellow through the Mississippi Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts. He has exhibited in New York, London, Atlanta, Mississippi, and beyond. Doyle's work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, ProPublica, ESPN, The Guardian, Politico, CNN, and other outlets.

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