Juban’s, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

This is a great, great restaurant with one of the all-time great food discoveries. Thank you, Russ Nobile, for the suggestion.

Juban’s has been a top-of-the-line restaurant for over 40 years, the sort of place you go for anniversaries or with important business clients. They shut down for a couple of years during the pandemic, and used the time to update the menu and spruce things up.

Juban’s is a large restaurant set in a strip mall, with various rooms, each with its own atmosphere. The strip mall mood is transformed when you go through the bright, lively atrium bar,

and then enter a formal room with a library atmosphere graced with formal portraits.

Is this place going to be stuffy? Then a sparkler erupts on the dessert at the next table,

and you notice that the face in the Dutch Masters-ish portrait looks modern and vaguely familiar. So does that young man in 19th century business attire with a gold watch and a big cigar, and Whoa! that’s Shaq in Shakespearean dress, no doubt about it. That’s the Honey Badger in elaborate 18th century dress, and the businessman is Joe Burrow, and that’s Andrew Whitworth in the ruff collar! Then you glance at a dark-painted wall and barely discern a large dark TV. Juban’s may have the classiest restaurant for watching a game in the world. I guess that’s stuffiness Louisiana-style.

Our server team glided in and gave us a warm welcome and menus, and took drink orders. Water and the bread service arrived with the light but crusty bread that I associate with Louisiana, warm and wrapped in a napkin. We enjoyed the bread and our respective drinks, a cabernet for Nancy and a Woodford for me.

We ordered the boudin dip with toasted crackers to start. Boudin is a sausage originally made with the leftovers of a pig — blood, liver, etc, mixed with rice. These days it’s usually pork, traditional Louisiana seasonings and vegetables, and rice. Boudin traditionally has been a snack food, served sliced with crackers, and, often as not, eaten standing up. Juban’s has an “elevated” version in which any trace of liver or blood is muted by the lovingly aggressive seasoning. The serving was a generous portion of a rich and, well, luscious dish. Nancy usually avoids red meats, but she dug in, and loved it just as much as I did.

Some of you are thinking, “served with saltines? In a high end restaurant?” You might want to buckle your seat belt. The toasted crackers were sensational. I’d only had them once before, at a birthday party for my Aunt Jane Simms at the Piedmont Driving Club in Atlanta. (Aunt Jane is Dear’s younger sister, and now the grande dame of the extended Tanner, Griffin, and Simms families. Before that lunch, the servers brought out plates of toasted saltines, which didn’t impress me, I confess, until I noticed all of the Atlanta people gracefully end their conversations while making a beeline for the crackers. They were delicious, and just as delicious at Juban’s. Nancy and were almost pathetically excited by them, and it’s hard to believe that you can make a saltine taste that good. They had, as our server confirmed, been brushed with butter and olive oil before they were toasted — technically re-toasted. Butter makes everything better, of course, but butter was made for this.

Nancy ordered the Ora King Salmon, which the menu described as “Fresh New Zealand Salmon, considered the Wagyu of the Sea.” It came with sautéed watercress, peaking out from under the salmon, and a pretty little rosette of ratatouille. The sauces were a smoked tomato coulis and a chive beurre blanc.  

That was quite a dish, and Nancy remarked on the quality of the salmon and the quality of the preparation. It was just cooked through, as requested, and full of flavor. This may be the wagyu of salmon, but I think she continues to consider grouper the wagyu of the sea.

I ordered the Redfish Andre.   

The large filet had been pan-sautéed as had a good portion of lump crab meat. It was topped with an abundance of flavorful mushrooms and some scallions, along with a Creole meunière sauce, all atop tartar mashed potatoes. The Creole sauce was thicker than a standard meunière, and had some creole seasonings. This was a fine dish. I don’t usually associate mushrooms with seafood dishes, but the meaty flavor of the mushrooms complemented the redfish and crab exquisitely. This was a thoughtful and well executed dish.

The tartar mashed potatoes were new to me. They were unusually smooth, and were graced not only with the usual cream and butter, but also with parsley and, I think, capers? And lemon?

After all of that, Nancy and I took a pass on dessert, but Juban’s closes all of the meals with a dish of blueberry cotton candy. It tasted surprisingly good, apparently having been made with actual blueberries, and it wasn’t nearly as sticky as the cotton candy Lily got all over herself at the Landon Azalea Festival.

What a meal. The service was flawless, well paced and friendly, and the setting was great. The food was the star, however, truly outstanding. I can’t imagine going to Baton Rouge without returning to Juban’s. Put this on your list!

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