I love a view into an open restaurant kitchen. You’re looking into the engine room, watching dishes progress to the plate and maybe your own table, watching the way the staff works together, seeing the pace and, hopefully, the precision.
There’s an open kitchen at a very different kind of restaurant running now for a limited time that showed me much more.
I saw a growing local institution with the potential to change career trajectories for people in the hospitality field, and one adding a needed foundational layer to the city’s identity as a hospitality town.
This was at the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute, the culinary school in downtown New Orleans that, of course, we call NOCHI. Each semester, students enrolled in this fast-track training program work together to conceive, produce and then run their own on-campus restaurant, which is open to the public for lunch.
The latest edition right now is call Baiyu, and it’s a fusion of a Japanese tavern and New Orleans flavors.
It’s part of a program aimed at giving an accessible, affordable jump-start in the hospitality field right here in New Orleans, and it’s building a pipeline for more experienced, qualified people for businesses that sit at the juncture of the city’s economy and culture. It’s giving a city with many great restaurants a place for structured, professional training for the people those restaurants need.
I always look forward to visiting NOCHI. The campus itself has a presence. It’s a complex of conjoined buildings that wend through gleaming teaching kitchens and specialized labs, event halls and a pair of rooftop terraces.
I found the restaurant on the third floor of the culinary school with that open kitchen and broad windows all around.
Soon I was sampling broiled oysters with miso butter, etouffee ramen, boudin dumplings, caramelized tofu and a bowl of cracklin’ that could’ve come from a Cajun butcher shop, only with Japanese seasoning.
You can get cocktails at Baiyū too, since this is New Orleans and there is lunch service on Friday, after all.
Lunch dates for the NOCHI pop-up run through Dec. 13, 2024. See details at nochi.org.
