CAJUN RIFF
IT’S A BIT OF AN IMPROVISATIONAL PERFORMANCE TONIGHT. For starters, Erling Wu-Bower is a long way from Chicago, where his mash-up of cross-cultural cuisine has won him accolades, including status as a three-time James Beard Award finalist. He’s worked the kitchens at some of the Windy City’s upper-echelon restaurants—among them Avec, the Publican, and Nico Osteria. In the spring of 2018, he opened Pacific Standard Time to glowing write-ups in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Wired, and elsewhere. But he insists that this place feels most like home: the Spartan kitchen of a Louisiana fish camp on stilts, a half dozen ingredients on a rough countertop, fresh fish on the cutting board, a bayou and family close at hand.
Under his gaze, shrimp shells stew in a rich stock. Fresh speckled trout marinate in fennel, shallots, garlic, and wine. At Wu-Bower’s shoulder, his father, Calvin Bower, stirs a roux in a cast-iron pan. Bower is no stranger to performance, either. He grew up in South Louisiana in the 1940s, the son of a Southern Baptist preacher. He learned to play piano and piano accordion so he could lead hymns at his father’s tiny mission churches in Port Sulphur, Belle Chasse, Empire, and Buras. Some of the churches were so small that their congregants paid his father in fish. “‘Blessed Assurance,’ ‘The Old Rugged Cross’—those hymns set my life in its direction,” Bower says. As professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Notre Dame, he
