Around this time last year, I pitched, wrote, and summarily abandoned a story about a charming Cajun food truck parked behind an east side dive, The King Bee. I didn’t mean to abandon the story–but what wasn’t evident to me then and contains no hints of opacity now is that the truck, The Big Easy, was experiencing the kind of instability (an impossible to reach owner, different chefs, unreliable hours) that marks the beginning of a restaurant’s end. I couldn’t see it, then, but while writing this story, I was similarly overlooking the signs that my boyfriend and I were about to break up.
Colby and I first stumbled onto The Big Easy (short for the restaurant’s proper name, The Big Easy: The Original New Orleans Po’ Boy & Gumbo Shop) during a 2022 winter night out at King Bee–where I’m sure I’d lured him under the auspices of listening to live jazz or some other promise I likely couldn’t and didn’t deliver on. At the time, the menu boasted Creole classics like gumbo, red beans and rice, fried fish, po’ boys (unsurprisingly), and beignets. Though Creole dishes are some of my favorites, my culinary experiences over the past decade in Austin have tempered my expectations: if I’m being honest, a lot of Creole food in Austin is bland—it’s under seasoned, catering to a palate that can’t (or refuses to) handle complexity. From the moment I stepped up to The Big Easy’s window and the chef’s gold fronts gleamed as he took my order, I knew this wouldn’t be the prototypical Austin Creole experience.
When the chef called us to pick up our food, he handed my boyfriend his order of gumbo and said in a true New Orleans accent, “I made that, so let me know if you like it.” We both found this immediately endearing. To the chef’s credit, his gumbo wasn’t just good—it was full bodied, aromatic, and Colby–my then Creole boyfriend (by way of Hollygrove, New Orleans)—noted that “the roux is deep.” That last comment may not mean much to the casual diner, but food historians have found that arguments about the proper color and thickness for a gumbo roux date at least as far back as the 1880’s. In fact, in 1885 the New Orleans Womens’ Exchange lovingly declared crafting the perfect gumbo roux an “occult science.” Today, youtubers still upload videos about how to get the deepest hued roux without burning it and having to start over. Our first bites of The Big Easy’s gumbo were far from good: they were masterful.
Later that night, we watched as an apprehensive customer asked the chef what to order. He recommended the beignets and when we saw the customer leave the truck with a mound full of powdered sugar in a paper bowl, we knew we had to try them. The chef–that night a young man named Rell–was still watching us enjoy his cooking and encouraged Colby as he attempted to eat his beignets without getting powdered sugar on his clothes. Colby stood up, leaned forward so that his shoulders and hips formed a ninety degree angle, and took a bite. From the order window, Rell assured us, “that’s the right way to eat them!”
Whether you mind getting sugar all over yourself or not, whether you care about the perfect roux or not, beignets at The Big Easy were not to be missed. The Big Easy’s beignets were never greasy, always pillowy and airy, and always served up with sky-high piles of powdered sugar. The beignets, alone, were worth repeated pilgrimages to The Big Easy’s two locations (the one behind King Bee on East 12th and another at the Zilker Park PicNic). This is not a hyperbole: The Big Easy’s beignets rivaled those that folks customarily brave long lines for at New Orleans’ famous Cafe Du Monde.
After that first night, Colby and I returned to King Bee multiple times to have po’boys, red beans and rice, shrimp étouffée, and boudin egg rolls (we also ordered the beignets each visit). Each trip to The Big Easy was just as flavorful, hearty, and fragrant as the first. Within a couple of weeks, the two of us were The Big Easy’s self-proclaimed evangelicals. Increasingly, those dates came to be ways I’d cajole Colby into meeting up. Sometime after our first anniversary, I gained this creeping feeling that Colby wasn’t listening when I talked and our dates and nights spent together grew farther and farther apart. Extending a dinner invitation to the Big Easy was a guaranteed night out together and it quickly became one of my favorite places, not only because I love a good dive bar and a warm beignet, but in those final weeks of our relationship, I came to think of The Big Easy as assurance that things were okay between Colby and I. Looking back, I can see that these dates were akin to falling asleep in the snow and not feeling yourself freeze to death: for a moment I wasn’t worried about how many of my texts had gone unanswered, the last time we’d slept in the same bed, or whether we’d hang out again that week. For a moment we were just two people having gin and tonics, and laughing at each other spraying powdered sugar all over our clothes.
While working on this essay, I had a chance to speak with Merlin Billson, Junior (who wonderfully pronounced his first name with a Louisiana accent so thick it sounded more like the Maryland, the state than Merlin, the wizard). Merlin ran The Big Easy alongside his childhood friend and The Big Easy’s owner, Darryl Garden. Merlin told me that though they’d operated the food truck behind King Bee for just under a year, the restaurant was open in different forms around Austin for nearly a decade. Most notably, longtime residents of Austin’s east side remember The Big Easy: The Original New Orleans Po’ Boy & Gumbo Shop when it was housed in a stucco building on East 12th Street.
At the time, I asked around and east side residents told me they remembered The Big Easy back then as a warm, family-run enterprise with a reputation for the best beignets in town. The restaurant operated out of that stucco building for years until the pandemic, when the venue’s owner sold the location. Even with that setback, the restaurant was able to stay afloat through the lockdown primarily through pivoting toward meal delivery apps. Merlin told me he and Darryl operated the two food truck locations in addition to making their food available for pickup and delivery on Favor, Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats. In the brief time that I chatted with Merlin on my last visit, our conversation was often interrupted by incoming order notifications coming in across one of the four devices that he monitored for third-party orders.
Weathering the storm as the two have managed since the lockdown is part and parcel of being from New Orleans. Chef Billson and Chef Garden met as young men in New Orleans (the two men are from New Orleans’ west bank and the city’s ninth ward, respectively) and began cooking together by the time they were in their early twenties at places like Copeland’s of New Orleans. After evacuating New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, both men found that they’d relocated to Texas and after some time working together in the same kitchens (Chef Billson mentioned they’ve worked together at places like Z Tejas, Bartlett’s, Houston Restaurant, and Monument Cafe), they decided to go into business together.
At their own restaurant, the two men resolved to share their family recipes for classic Creole fare and cut no corners. Of The Big Easy’s ethos, Chef Billson said, “You know how we cook. We throw some love in it, some TLC. It’s all from scratch.” Making things with tender love and care and making things from scratch means that for the restaurants’ two locations, the two men wake up early and start cooking for their Zilker Park location lunch rush. And though Chef Billson was pretty tight-lipped about his secret recipes, he said his favorite dish to serve at The Big Easy is the gumbo. Back when Chefs Billson and Garden ran The Big Easy out of the stucco building on East 12th, they were able to add more ingredients. Now, to break up the cooking time and still preserve the sanctity of their recipes, they offered two gumbos: one with chicken and sausage and one that was seafood based. To their credit, Colby and I tried both gumbos and even though Merlin lamented the loss of ingredients, the results yielded no loss of flavor.
On New Year’s Eve 2023, Colby and I visited his family in Houston. Like Chefs Billson and Garden, his family also emigrated to Texas after Hurricane Katrina. As a final meal of the old year, Colby’s uncle prepared a bonafide Creole feast for everyone: cabbage cooked with crawfish; dirty rice; pot roast; cornbread the texture of cake; and black eyed peas with andouille sausage. When we offered to help him, he declined saying cooking was his love language for his family. Sitting down to dinner around that meal last year, I thought about love as an ingredient. It’s intangible, but you can definitely taste it: “cooking with love” means taking a little longer to cook a dish because that’s the right way to prepare it. It means not cutting corners, even when that’s the cheapest and easiest option. At The Big Easy, it also meant the chefs cooked for their patrons as if they not only knew them personally, but as if they loved them: an increasingly rare thing. When you sat down with a bowl of gumbo or red beans and rice from The Big Easy, you could taste the care and thoughtfulness the chefs brought to their dishes–it was present in all the spices they utilized, the airiness of their beignets, and yes–in the deepness of their roux.
When I submitted my draft, the food editor of the local paper chided me for making Colby the central character in my essay. It might not have happened this way, but I remember her email having a sort of “you’re a dumb girl” energy directed towards me. Understandably, she wanted to know more about Rell (who had left the truck sometime after Colby and I’s first handful of visits to The Big Easy) and Darryl (who was always mysteriously in New Orleans or otherwise unavailable). Maybe she wanted me to play up the thing about roux–but that, too, was another story about Colby since in the final months of our relationship, inspired by The Big Easy, he’d taken up Creole cooking and in particular, gumbo. Colby and I broke up a couple of weeks into my revisions, and feeling every bit the dumb girl, I didn’t know how to move on with the essay or otherwise. I didn’t know what the story was without him.
In the time since, Colby and I have become friends. In fact in late 2023, he was the person who gently broke the news to me that The Big Easy had shuttered. Near Thanksgiving, I gifted him a copy of a vintage Creole cookbook gathering dust on my bookshelf. The night before Thanksgiving, he made a stuffing that he found the recipe for in the cookbook I’d gifted him and the two of us to shared it before he headed off to spend the holiday with this family in Houston. That meal was a reminder of our one time culinary adventures and also of the enduring ties that bind us. In hindsight, the essay I was working on was always about Colby. From the beginning, I harbored hopes that my glowing review might serve as a lifeline for The Big Easy, but intertwined with this desire was an unspoken prayer or bargain that our sojourns to the east side and evenings at the food truck’s window might somehow bridge the widening chasm between Colby and I.
A simple assignment to explore the charms of a Cajun food truck nestled behind a quaint east side dive evolved into a series of unexpected parallels between the restaurant’s instability and the subtle cracks in my own relationship. Rereading my essay draft nearly a year since Colby and I broke up (and some months since The Big Easy closed), I wonder now if amidst the sizzle of frying beignets and the swirl of Creole flavors, I hadn’t accidentally uncovered something deeper and harder to digest about cuisine and companionship: that love transcends and all good things come to an end.
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