Outstanding cuisine isn’t required to come on fancy, fragile china, plated with tweezers on a bed of micro greens and presented with puffs of scented air. Sometimes all you want is some goddamned bacon. But what if someone could exploit the sweet spot between the two? What if an enterprising culinary talent spent years mastering the intellectual nuances of classic cuisine but never lost touch with the joys of actually eating? And as long as we’re daydreaming, wouldn’t it be great if the aforementioned chef was a 6’8”, 280 pound, foul-mouthed, silver- tongued vindicator of all that is just and right and good about restaurant kitchens and comfort food? There is no need to speculate, for New Orleans is home to such a talent; his name is Joel “Bull” White and he can be found at the Avenue Pub.
Chef Bull presents a pub-style menu made the hard way, so even a combination as fundamental as a burger and fries is presented with significant forethought: the man hand- cuts over 100 pounds of potatoes in a single day to accommodate orders for his house-made french fries; and the Pub’s hamburger beef is ground fresh and delivered twice each week from an Angus-certified farm in northern Louisiana.
Those standard pub items pave the way for Bull to get creative. Just a few weeks ago he was serving up duck fat biscuits with jabañero-apple-sage jam, fried chicken and pickled watermelon. “It was a twisted Southern picnic dish, and it totally kicked ass,” White says. “It was almost as good as my venison and rabbit meat pies, with golden fruit filling topped with orange cream mashed potato. Those may have been the best things I’ve ever cooked.
“My goal for the Pub’s menu is to make a fun product that people will be interested in eating and feel good about when they’re done with it,” says Chef Bull, a reflection of a much deeper sentiment. “I used to cook for my dad all the time. He loved the fact that I was a chef, and I wanted to cook for him in a way that he’d enjoy but that would also get him eating healthier. He passed away when I was 24, and that made it the blatant differential between people who knew how to cook and people who didn’t. It took a little time of running away from cooking to realize how much I missed it. My dad dying, leaving cooking and coming back to it… that full cycle has everything to do with how I regard cooking and why I take doing it well so seriously.
“I enjoy developing flavors that are fundamentally sound. I like to understand all of my ingredients. I like to know where they come from. I’m really against using anything that’s pre-made and adds instantaneous flavor, because shit like that is easy and cheap.” Bull smiles when he recalls, “When I was a little kid, my grandmother practically had a small farm in her backyard. I’m talking strings of green-beans and okra and rows of vegetables. Looking back on it, we were ridiculously spoiled. We’d pull stuff down off the vine and eat it right there. And man, that woman could cook.”
Chef Bull draws an especially hard line with respect to his Creole recipes like his jambalaya. He explains that the use of tomatoes in Creole jambalaya sets the dish apart from its Cajun cousin. “Everyone who has ever served me Cajun jambalaya has relied too heavily on the fact that they’re adding like
six different kinds of meat, instead of actually building their own signature flavors… with Creole jambalaya, you have that tomato base which can stand up to a lot; it allows you to add your own citrus and bay leaf and signature spices to build upon what makes your jambalaya unique. Cajun jambalaya is almost always just a ‘meat lover’s jambalaya’ and that’s all it is. It always tastes to me like somebody was afraid to make something that tasted bold.”
Most chefs enjoy the luxury of reigning over their mini-kingdoms from beyond the eyes and ears of their customers, which provides them an outlet to curse and yell in a semi-private forum. The counter-service setup at the Avenue Pub, however, puts Chef Bull face-to-face with the public. Given this fact, there is only one request he has of the customers who visit the Avenue Pub: please don’t walk up to the counter and ask, “What’s good here?” You might as well wave a red cape in his face. “I truly detest indecisive human beings. Even if I make the wrong decision, I am 100% locked into that decision. Fuck dilly-dallying… Our menus are like the world’s biggest Rorschach painting: you’ll see what you see, and certain people will gravitate toward certain dishes. I want people to know that I work hard to make sure everything on that menu is delicious and enjoyable, so if you make a decision that isn’t one hundred percent what you were in the mood for in that particular moment, then that’s totally on you. It’s really no big deal. I mean, you’ll live to eat again tomorrow.”
