by Chris Jay
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If you’re searching for “New Orleans-style” dining in Shreveport, you don’t have to look far. Some of our local New Orleans-inspired fare is very good: the Patton’s Hot Sausage po’ boy at Kim’s Seafood, the nectar snowball from Streetcar Snoballs, and the Sazerac at Fatty Arbuckle’s Pub are just a few examples of local offerings that could easily stand-in for their New Orleanian counterparts.
But what if you’re searching for a restaurant that markets itself as “Ark-La-Tex-style” in New Orleans?
Until recently, I would have argued that such a thing most likely did not exist. New Orleans is home to one of the most revered local restaurant scenes in the world. As much as I love Shreveport’s local restaurants, it’s difficult to imagine any New Orleans restaurateur in their right mind promoting their offerings as “just like you’d get up in Shreveport.”
Leave it to the beautiful, unpredictable people of New Orleans to prove me wrong.
Rhonda Findley owns Luna Libre, a cozy little restaurant located at 3600 St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans’s Bywater neighborhood. She proudly promotes the fare that she and Chef John Cannon serve as “Ark-La-Tex-Mex.”
“It’s not Tex-Mex, and it’s not Mexican,” Findley said. “It’s Ark-La-Tex comfort food. It’s what you’d find in Shreveport, Monroe or Texarkana. When we first opened, I had a customer come in who said: ‘I’m from Shreveport! I know exactly what this is!’”
Findley fell in love with cheese dip while growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother would load her, along with her three sisters, into the family car for occasional trips to nearby Rose City, where they’d settle into long, joyful meals at a nondescript restaurant called Mexico Chiquito.
“This is very much comfort food for me and my family, and thousands of folks who grew up eating at Mexico Chiquito,” Findley said. “This is the food that is closest to my soul.”
Mexico Chiquito opened in Rose City in 1938. Two white Texans, W.F. “Blackie” and Margaret “Margie” Donnelly, brought Margie’s popular cheese dip recipe with them when they relocated from Kilgore, where they’d previously operated a restaurant under the same name. This little restaurant, and hundreds of others that it spawned, are why Arkansans emphatically insist that the tradition of cheese dip is their own, and that it is not the same thing as “queso.”
There are all sorts of head-scratching aspects to the “queso or cheese dip?” question. Findley argues that it’s definitely cheese dip.
“I cringe when people call it ‘queso,’” Findley said. She says that she’s not actually attempting to make Mexican food. Instead, she’s celebrating Americanized Tex-Mex from a specific place and time: the Ark-La-Tex region in the mid-to-late 20th Century.
“My tacos, which I call Ark-La-Tacs, are an homage to those El Patio taco dinner kits that you get at the grocery store,” she said. “They’re a tribute to every lady who ever made that El Patio taco dinner, put it together and set it out for their daughter or son having a sleepover. We’re not making our own tortillas and Oaxacan moles, here.”
Before opening Luna Libre in 2019, Findley had careers in hospitality management, foodservice, retail and media. While working for “a very famous chef” who brought her to New Orleans in 1998, she authored and co-authored books about Louisiana cuisine. At age 33, she realized that she’d made a career out of telling people how hospitality works, but had never so much as waited a table. She took a job as busboy at Chef Emeril Lagasse’s NOLA and, eventually, wound up writing for Lagasse.
She’d never planned to open a restaurant, but when the opportunity presented itself, she took it.
“One of the worst times in my life was right before I opened this restaurant,” Findley said. “It was a transformative time, and I didn’t know what I’d do next. I woke up one day, and I was like: ‘Hey, mom, don’t you have Margie Donnelly’s recipes?’”
Not all of the traditions of Ark-La-Tex-Mex are being upheld at Luna Libre. Instead of sickly-sweet, gigantic frozen margaritas that sell for about $18 each, Findley serves a four-ingredient margarita that sells for $5.75. The restaurant’s breakfast tacos, made with New Orleans’s wonderful Patton’s Hot Sausage, have been a huge hit. Her recipe for chicken enchiladas was inspired by Julio’s Cafe in Austin, where she often dines while visiting a sister. The backbone of the restaurant, however, is her Ark-La-Tex-Mex cheese dip.
The dip starts with a roux, and slowly incorporates lots of spices as well as chunks of American cheese—not Velveeta. It’s a labor-intensive dip that’s made in small batches, without a can of Ro-Tel nor a crockpot. At the restaurant, Findley serves a kicked-up version of the dip that incorporates seasoned ground beef from the Ark-La-Tacs as well as guacamole salad.
“When you talk about cheese dip, you’re really talking about a simple pleasure,” Findley said. After spending 20 years surrounded by “talented, creative culinarians,” she finds it ironic that her entire career now hinges on a dish that she describes as “something so simple, and personal, and not fancy at all.”
The truth—at least as it appears to me—is that Findley’s main product is actually nostalgia. Taco night sleepovers, roadside America, linoleum booths.
“It makes you think: ‘What is comfort food?’ For me, it’s not just the food. The whole package is a memory,” Findley said. “And all any good restaurateur wants to do is give people a memory.”
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