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Photos by Sarah Finnegan.
The Rougaroux is a New Orleans-style restaurant located at a unique pink house that was built in the 1800s in Forest Park. “It had just the aesthetic we were looking for,” consultant Ed Stacy said.
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Photos by Sarah Finnegan.
The Rougaroux’s fried oyster po’boy. Ryan Champion, with a six-year background in Creole cuisine working for Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, was brought on to create The Rougaroux’s menu.
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Photos by Sarah Finnegan.
The Rougaroux’s shrimp and oyster gumbo.
If you’ve been to Forest Park lately, you might have noticed a werewolf-looking creature, sharp claws out, hanging out near the entrance of the little pink house at 817 39th St. S. It’s a resident of the newly opened restaurant called The Rougaroux, where the unmistakable smell of gumbo and fresh seafood permeates the air.
The name, restaurant consultant Ed Stacy said, plays off the south Louisiana folk legend “rougarou,” which is known as a bayou werewolf and swamp creature, while “roux” is an often-used base for a lot of Cajun and Creole cooking.
Stacy’s fiancée, Anne Carter, is the owner of The Rougaroux, and both of them, along with chef Ryan Champion, opened the restaurant in late October. Though Stacy and Carter grew up in Birmingham, Stacy said the two had their first “real date,” in New Orleans, and he later proposed to her there.
“We kind of thought that if the opportunity was ever right, that a concept like that would go over well in Birmingham because no one was really doing it on the level, like the true po’boy shops in New Orleans,” he said.
They’ve since brought their love for po’boys to Birmingham, with The Rougaroux becoming a comfortable and popular spot for authentic Cajun and Creole food-lovers.
“People have told me, everything from the decor and music to the cuisine, they really feel like they’re transported to the city of New Orleans,” Stacy said.
About four years ago, Stacy was working at Inland Seafood, a seafood distribution company with a center in Birmingham, and he started to frequently travel to another of the company’s centers in New Orleans.
“I really became more immersed in the city at that point,” Stacy said. “You know, New Orleans was always kind of a second home for us.”
He would bring back po’boys, boudin and seafood gumbo to Carter, since it traveled so well.
Eventually, a friend whose father owned the pink house on 39th Street South called up Stacy and said he thought the place had a New Orleans vibe, to which Stacy and Carter immediately agreed.
“[The house] was built in the late 1800s, and there was really no rhyme or reason to the house,” Stacy said, joking that if you put a ball in one corner of the house, it would roll all the way to the other side because the floor is so slanted. “It reminded me a lot of the old shotgun homes you would see in New Orleans with really high ceilings. It had just the aesthetic we were looking for.”
Stacy said Champion, their chef and creator of all the recipes at The Rougaroux, was brought on with his six-year background in Creole cuisine working for Commander’s Palace in New Orleans.
Once they secured the location, Stacy and Carter had to make sure they had authentic products to pull off the concept of a legit, New Orleans-styled po’boy shop.
They started with the bread, sourced from the Big Easy’s Leidenheimer Baking Company to be the basis of all their sandwiches, Stacy said. The fresh seafood component was easy to finalize with Stacy working for Inland Seafood, as well as Cochon Butcher from New Orleans for the muffaletta. They get their pork from Beeler’s Pure Pork in Iowa.
“One of the things we said was if we did ever open a po’boy shop, we wouldn’t want it to be a restaurant in Birmingham that’s trying to be a Cajun shop … We would want it to be a concept where if you actually picked it up and moved it into a neighborhood in the bywater of Louisiana, or right outside of New Orleans, it could stand alone as a good po’boy shop,” Stacy said.
The Rougaroux sells two kinds of po’boys, traditional and specially chef-inspired. The traditional po’boys, which can be dressed with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and some red onions, include a savory roast beef or a fried oyster, shrimp or catfish option. Adding the red onion, Stacy said, is an example of one of the “little intricacies that was added to improve the eating experience,” straying only slightly from tradition.
The specialty po’boys don’t come dressed, but come with the components specific to that particular sandwich.
The Rougaroux also serves cups and bowls of gumbo, house-made boudin links and the well-known muffaletta. Sides include crab boil crushed potatoes, red bean and rice salad, creole potato salad, braised collard greens and mirliton and red pepper slaw.
Stacy encourages people to come out and try their food, whether they’ve had traditional New Orleans food or not.
“There is a lot of foot traffic just from the neighborhood, and we are really excited about Forest Park in general. It seems like there’s a little bit of a rebirth coming in the area,” Stacy said.
This year, Stacy said, they are preparing to offer a new weekend special: family-style boucherie platters on cutting boards that can feed eight or more people.
The Rougaroux, which is dine-in or takeout, is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5-9 p.m.; Friday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5-10 p.m.; and Saturdays from 2-10 p.m.
To learn more about The Rougaroux, go to their Facebook page @therougarouxbhm.
