Reporter's Notebook: Sarah Master

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Filed under: Food

Barbette head chef Sarah Master (interviewed this week) had far more to say than could be contained within the puny confines of a 500-word print article.

ON THE INTOXICATING ODOR OF SEAFOOD

"When I started, I was doing a lot of Creole, fried green tomatoes, and oysters, and I worked at the frier station at my first cooking job down there. My husband used to complain that I came home smelling like oysters all the time — they call them "ersters" down there, you know, so I'd come home and he'd say: 'Oh, Erster Girl's home!'"

ON FORMER BARBETTE HEAD CHEF LANDON SCHOENEFELD'S DEPARTURE

"He wanted to open his own place. I don't know how that's coming along. He's over at Porter and Fry right now, line cooking. I think he's very creative, he's an excellent cook, and I think that this place was trying to rein him in a little bit to a certain style that he didn't really want to do. He parted on good terms. He decided that it wasn't for him, and he gave his notice, and said he would work out to the end of the year, but they decided to promote me."

ON SPOON RIVER

"Spoon River was good — it helped lead up into this. I was able to do a lot of specials there. I did the vegetarian special there, which is funny, because there aren't a lot of vegetarians in New Orleans. And everything there is really heavy. And Brenda [Langton] was always like: 'No no no no, we gotta keep it light... let's put some rice on here... brown rice on this and that...' And I was like: 'I don't even know how to cook brown rice.' She kind of reined me in a little bit, and showed me the ropes of vegetarian food."

ON THE LOCAL FOOD MOVEMENT

"I really like how most new restaurants around here now are going local. There's so many places around here where you can get great local produce. A dude dropped off a whole lamb in my kitchen today that he killed last week. That kind of stuff is really neat to me. It was hard from me when I moved up here to not get the guy knocking on the back door with a huge cooler of shrimp, saying: 'I caught these this afternoon.' But now, it's like, I've got people who are bringing me these great heirloom tomatoes. And I get to order whole lamb and break it down myself. We use Fisher Farms pork here... I'm trying to start a deal with Sylvan Hills Farm, for our produce, starting early summer and running until mid-fall, just getting produce from them. I see that shift happening here, and that's really neat. That was something they didn't really have in New Orleans, even though there were farms all over the place down there, they didn't use a lot of local produce."