Todd Kliman’s son Theo loves cooking—not that much of a surprise when your father’s an acclaimed food critic and writer. Todd Kliman’s son Theo had never been to New Orleans. So Todd Kliman took Theo for his first plane ride, his first culinary pilgrimage, and his first blush of what a life of eating really looks like. If you see Theo’s name in a decade or two attached to the word “chef,” you’ll think back to this piece and realize: yup, this is how passions are born. A remarkable piece about family, food, and finding one’s way.
The next course isn’t nearly the tour de force that the turkey necks are, but it’s memorable in its own right: a bowl of couvillion, a soup-stew so ruddy brown that the bits of tilefish and shrimp poking through the surface seem only to enhance its fathomless depths.
“It almost tastes like mud,” says Theo—not with disdain, but with something closer to incredulity. I love it that he goes in for another taste, a confirming taste, as if compelled to look beyond the mere quality of the dish to identify its character, its essence, in this case a kind of earthy brackishness that seems to want to tell us that what we’re eating is inseparable from its source.
“There are very few meals where I find myself praying,” Theo says, after several more spoonfuls.
“Praying?”
“Because it’s so good,” he says. “You hope that the chef has a wife and a good life, you know?”
Let ’em cook!
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