Chef Donald Link has been chosen as a finalist in the James Beard Foundation Awards Outstanding Chef U.S. category! Chef Link joins a superior group of accomplished chefs from around the country: David Chang, Gary Danko, Daniel Humm, Paul Kahan and Nancy Silverton. In true New Orleans fashion, the celebrating goes on – New Orleans is represented in several other categories, as well. Emeril’s was honored with an Outstanding Wine Program nomination. Times picayune writer Brett Anderson was nominated for his writing in the Environment, Food Politics, and Policy category. Brett Martin, a new New Orleans resident, received a nod for his Humor article in GQ. And four fellow New Orleans chefs were nominated for Best Chef: South—Justin Devillier, John Harris, Tory McPhail and Alon Shaya, in addition to Sue Zemanick, up for Rising Star Chef of the Year.

The James Beard Foundation Awards recognize outstanding achievement within the food and wine industry and are considered to be the “Oscars of the food world.” The winners will be announced live from New York on May 7, 2012.

Hersaint

At Cochon , Donald Link dives deep into the cuisine of his Cajun heritage . Herbsaint, the chef’s flagship, is at once more panoramic and tightly focused. Foundationally French —– the rillettes and duck confit are both flawless —– Herbsaint’s food looks at south Louisiana cooking from the outside in. What you find is temperamentally rustic and progressive, a place where seasonal field peas are made sinful by a bacon braise and curried local shrimp served over creamed corn straddles continents without breaking a sweat. It’s Louisiana food set in a global mosaic. Consistency is a super power of Herbsaint’s kitchen, current domain of chef de cuisine Rebecca Wilcomb. Her team executes with such easy fluency it deflects attention away from the fierce ambition that has made Herbsaint the most reliably excellent New Orleans restaurant of the past decade. Neither Herbsaint’s food nor its tastefully spare setting have anything to do with spectacle. But the fruits of its ambition to serve serious food to people serious about dining are often spectacular. So go ahead: Pick out a Barolo to match the gumbo. It’s worth it.

Hersaint

Herbsaint entered its second decade having solidied its status as New Orleans’ most consistently excellent
restaurant. The position is enviable. Yet on paper “consistent”, with its suggestion of stasis and the guy you
married to please your dad, doesn’t necessarily promise exhilaration. That’s where tiles of butter poached Gulf
tuna come in, each holding a lemony relish of criolla sella chiles. Or the seared chicken rillette cake, a curl of
crisp chicken skin perched over it, like a tuile adding crunch to a custardy dessert. Or lamb neck, cooked slow,
so the meat all but falls onto a bed of pureed fava beans. All are relatively new additions to a repertoire tat still
leans on more than a few immovable standards: the housemade spaghetti with fried poached egg, the steak
frites, the duck cont with dirty rice. They’re there because the New Orleans bistro as chef-owner Donald Link
redefined it — a humble but polished restaurant where dark roux gumbo doesn’t appear at odds with a Francophilic
wine list — is still giving its diners something they expect. It just so happens that regulars know
Herbsaint’s kitchen, currently the domain of chef de cuisine Rebecca Wilcomb, also will dish out the unexpected.

BEST BETS: Mizuna salad with Gorgonzola fritters, butter-poached tuna, duck cont.

A meal at Herbsaint is a picture of modern New Orleans in action. The dress is casual. The crowd is coed. And the food—much of it available in small, tapas-size portions—is an unabashed combination of Euro (antipasto plates, homemade pastas), local (Gulf shrimp with green chile grits cakes and tasso cream sauce), classic (a delicious daily gumbo), and nouvelle (fennel-crusted pork belly with red curry sauce and lentil salad). As eclectic as it is, the menu really works thanks to executive chef Donald Link’s distinctively light touch. And Herbsaint’s Central Business District address ensures that it’s busting with corporate types looking to impress colleagues with their good taste.

With the St. Charles Avenue streetcar rumbling by mere yards from its front door, Herbsaint Bar and Restaurant gives its patrons not only a broad taste of modern French-Louisiana fare but a big helping of New Orleans’ atmosphere. Chef-owner Donald Link’s roots and roux are seeped with Louisiana culture, and 100-seat Herbsaint has become a Lourdes for those making culinary pilgrimages to New Orleans. “The concept has always been to have a neighborhood French bistro with a New Orleans flair and character to it,” Link says. “We didn’t mean for it to be an over-the-top fine-dining restaurant. We wanted it to be a classic bistro.” “When Brett Anderson, restaurant critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, named the restaurant to one of his Top 10 lists, he wrote: “No New Orleans restaurant this millennium has sat further ahead of the culinary curve than Herbsaint. …Yet among the reasons Herbsaint is a great restaurant is that trend-setting is not its raison d’être.” Link was raised in southwest Louisiana, learning Cajun cooking from his grandfather and then heading to San Francisco in the 1990′s and attending the California Culinary Academy. He was drawn back to Louisiana in 2000. “I really like the hot, long, brutal summers here,” he says with a laugh. “All that nice weather started to bug me, so I had to get out of there.” The real reason was family, he says soberly. “I grew up here. When I was a kid, I was in a big hurry to get out of here. I wanted to see the world. But after six years, I felt like I wanted to be home with my family.” He opened Herbsaint with chef Susan Spicer of Bayona, and then after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005, he opened the more casual Cochon restaurant about eight blocks away. Katrina closed Herbsaint for five weeks, but Link says, “business is actually a lot better now than before Katrina. It’s hard to explain. The city got a lot of attention. If there is good thing to come out of Katrina, if there is such a thing, it is that the locals are galvanized about their own city.” He credits much of his success not to the many visitors who pass through Herbsaint’s doors but the dedicated locals. “The locals have really been supportive though the years,” Link says. “It really shows the true significance a restaurant has to the community.” While he has long sourced locally, he’s trying to do that with greater intensity. “I’m always looking for new farmers,” he says. “We’re looking at buying some land to plant a garden.” He recently has been looking for someone local to catch amphibians for frogs’ legs. “I went out last weekend and tried to catch my own,” Link says. He says Herbsaint continues to be his passion nine years after its opening. “We get our Mardi Gras parades in front of the restaurant,” he says. “I’ve got people who have been with me a long time now. It’s a place to call home.” Or as New Orleans’ long-passed denizen playwright and frequent streetcar passenger Tennessee Williams wrote: “Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.”

Herbsaint opened a little more than 10 years ago. It was a fertile era for new restaurants in New Orleans, and this one, with its steak frites, hearty gumbos, modest décor and paper-clipped wine list, had a particularly humble air about it. How did it become one of the quintessential Southern restaurants of its generation? Leading the way on small plates didn’t hurt. Neither did anticipating modesty was about to become, at least where serious eating in America was concerned, the new swagger. But more than anything else, I credit the uncanny knack of Donald Link and chef de cuisine Ryan Prewitt’s kitchen for finding the sweet spot in every dish it serves. The best examples are rarely if ever fancy: beds of house-made spaghetti nestled with crisp paneed eggs. Watermelon gazpacho topped with Louisiana lump crab. Goat cheese beignets drizzled with local honey. Here, the light touches — the roasted pork belly’s pickled chiles, the salsa verde that brings new life to the beef short ribs — are often what make the food resonate, yet it is hard to imagine Herbsaint ever serving a dish anyone would dare call timid. Cooking so full of heart never could be.