Chris West hates the pasta that’s sitting in front of him. “I actually worked at Cajun Italian restaurants,” he tells me. “But it's a whole other [legit] culture in New Orleans.” Said culture does not include “pastalaya,” a noodle version of jambalaya, which is a good way to classify the Cajun noodle dish that’s parked on the table between us at an East Tulsa Applebee’s.
West would know, because New Orleans is deep in his DNA. He has tattoos of Trombone Shorty and other NOLA musicians, and moonlights on bass with Medicine Horse, whose fiercely Native American presentation and lyrics ride a distinctly New Orleans sludge-metal undercurrent.
With his wife Amanda, the New Orleans native owns and runs Lassalle’s French Market and Farm; previously, they ran Lassalle’s New Orleans Deli downtown, before Covid closed it. The farm provides the raw materials for his OklaNola hot sauces and Cajun/Creole cuisine sold at Gambill’s and other restaurants, and their produce is a staple at area farmers markets. West does various pop-up menus around town, including regular crawfish boils at The Pump.
West is a serious Cajun chef who hasn’t gotten used to being called one. He rails regularly against false Cajun food online, and not without blowback. In one particularly memorable Facebook post, West criticized a “Cajun vegan spaghetti poboy” so thoroughly (he called it “spaghetti on bread”) that he got doxed and cursed by the owner of the food truck that produced it. “I guess a ‘friend’ of mine gave her my number,” he said while doing air quotes.
Knowing all this, it felt only natural to take West to sample Applebee’s Big Easy menu. The week after Mardi Gras, the two of us sat down to an aggressively average spread of food items with “Bourbon Street” and “blackened” in their names. This was right after St. Patrick’s Day and Applebee’s was still offering their festive green drink specials. We each ordered a Tipsy Leprechaun so we could bastardize both his and my heritage simultaneously.
“I hate pasta as a food in general,” he said as I cautiously slurped up my “Cajun” noodle dish (penne alfredo). “That tastes like there’s Velveeta in it,” he said after trying it, though he assured me he didn’t judge me for ordering it. “Velveeta with thyme on it,” he finally pronounced, shaking his head.
I thought it’d be funny to take West here, given his passion for good food and Applebee’s lack thereof. But the Big Easy menu was more mediocre than atrocious, more Easy than Big, with only a few offerings (most of them featuring pasta, to West’s great chagrin). Each item was “jazzed up,” whether with “cajun spices” or butter—even if the potency of the “jazz” was closer to Utah’s than NOLA’s. The food simply existed, devoid of passion or justification: the opposite of New Orleans’ endlessly rich and complex culture.
I asked West how he liked his Bourbon Street Chicken and Shrimp. “Well,” he said through a mouthful. “It’s chicken. And there’s shrimp. And Tony Chachere's on top. So … yeah.” I commented on the firmness of the boudin link on my plate. “Bro, that’s a breadstick … they don’t have any fuckin’ boudin here,” he laughed.