by Elizabeth Brady
With new owners and a return to its original name, a new life begins for the historic 19th-century Abita Springs building that most recently housed Artesia Restaurant. The chef team of Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing, her husband, will soon open the doors of The Longbranch Restaurant, offering a fine dining menu of Southern favorites with a fresh twist.
After five years in New York, Allison, a West Monroe native, and Slade, from Tylertown, Mississippi, have come to Abita Springs to pursue their dreams. “It was the right time to leave,” Allison explains. “In New York, things are hot and then they’re not. We left when things were hot for us, so there is a sense that we earned our stripes in a very competitive environment. In New York, we worked everyday, all day, six days a week. The seventh day we spent in bed. We will be intense here, too, but we will be sharing the experience with family, which is an added bonus.”
In the spring of 2004, Allison won the James Beard Foundation’s award for rising star chef of the year. “It’s like the culinary Oscars,” she explains. A great honor, the award brought a lot of attention to Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, the restaurant in Manhattan where she and Slade served as co-chefs for just over a year.
Both have been heavily influenced by their intense experiences in French kitchens. Allison credits her two years at Alain Ducasse, a four-star kitchen in Manhattan, as the pinnacle of her cooking experience. Slade served as chef de cuisine at Fleur de Sel before moving to Jack’s to co-chef with his wife. The menu at Longbranch will reflect their shared Southern heritage and French training. Allison calls two dishes their “new classics”: Oysters Rockefeller deconstructed, which features an oyster on a bed of spinach and watercress served with a bacon chip and grated licorice root; and New Orleans-style barbequed lobster, a variation on barbequed shrimp that uses a different cooking technique.
Longbranch: A national treasure
In naming their restaurant, the Rushings returned to the building’s first name, Longbranch Hotel. According to “The Story of Longbranch,” by J. Buchanan Blitch, the hotel built by Frank Lenel in 1880 was named after a small tributary known as the Long Branch of the Abita, which ran through the northeast corner of the property.
The hotel was built to host the many guests who began to visit the famed Abita Springs spa after the Civil War. On June 19, 1880, an advertisement appeared in the St. Tammany Farmer which announced that the “Longbranch Hotel near the celebrated Abita Springs is now open for the reception of boarders. Prices moderate.”
When the hotel opened, making the journey from New Orleans was no easy feat. It required crossing Lake Pontchartrain on a steamer, boating four miles up the Tchefuncte River to Covington and finally traveling over land by “horsedrawn six-person omnibus” to Abita. The reasons people were willing to make such an arduous journey to the northshore seem remarkably similar to the sentiments still heard today. Blitch writes of “the resurgence of interest in the northlake area, both for its timber potential for building up a New Orleans freed of the restraints of military occupation, as well as for providing a convenient refuge from the cares and dangers of that city.”
Only a month after the first advertisement ran, the St. Tammany Farmer reported that Lenel had left his house the preceding Tuesday, walking through the woods in the direction of Abita Springs, and was reported missing. He was never to be seen again. This may be the source of certain ghost stories associated with Longbranch that persist today.
Blitch writes that after 1910, with another war on the horizon, Abita Springs was no longer the burgeoning resort of the pre-war days, but Longbranch nonetheless prevailed. In 1981, Blitch wrote “The Story of Longbranch” to accompany an application to the United States Department of the Interior, which resulted in the complex being placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The famous pear ice cream
One of the favorite offerings of the restaurant at the original Longbranch Hotel was its pear ice cream.
The ice cream was homemade, hand-cranked in the old fashioned way, made with a combination of Pet Milk, fresh milk (@ $.10/qt), and sugar, into which would be introduced fresh-grown stewed fruits. Mrs. Loustalot (the restaurant’s one-time owner) in this manner created the famous Longbranch “pear ice cream” so fondly remembered by all as being a specialty of the house. (The Story of Longbranch, J. Buchanan Blitch, pg. 25)
With the talented Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing team in the kitchen, today’s Longbranch diners will certainly enjoy many new favorites!
|
Home | Advertising Information | Archive of Past Issues | Contact Us
