Du Jour: Sammy Chenevert

This weekend’s Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival marks one of the last big events of crawfish season, which will sadly wane by the end of the month. Before the curtain call, however, Little Village Corporate Chef Sammy Chenevert will do what he does every late spring—break out a well-guarded black book of recipes and make crawfish bisque. The notoriously tedious dish features sultry bisque encircled by crawfish heads cleaned and filled with a stuffing of ground crawfish tails, spices and breadcrumbs. Time-consuming steps make crawfish bisque a rare bird in restaurants and homes these days, but Chenevert takes it on annually as a kind of homage to his mentor and friend, Chef Joey Distefano, who died in 2005 and to whom the black book belonged. Distefano’s family founded The Village, the popular Italian-American eatery that operated for more than 45 years on Airline Highway. The two men worked together for four years before Distefano died.

Today, Chenevert is corporate chef of both Little Village restaurants, a notable accomplishment for someone who stepped into his first commercial kitchen at age 36. Newly divorced and unemployed, Chenevert answered an ad making salads at the now-closed Dajonel’s on Jefferson Highway. Despite no training (he didn’t even cook for fun) Chenevert flourished and ended up becoming sous chef at the upscale eatery. He eventually became its executive chef. “I was always just the hardest working guy in the room,” says Chenevert, 47.

When Dajonel’s closed, he joined the staff of Maggio’s to work with Distefano, who was cooking there during the nineties. Distefano would have individual staff members make only components of the Village famed dishes so that secrets were kept tucked away. “Joey would only show you how to do certain parts of the recipe—and no one ever saw the book—he was very secretive,”

By then, entrepreneur Wayne Stabiler had approached Distefano about opening a new iteration of the legacy restaurant. Maggio’s became The Village, and the team had plans for a restaurant downtown as well. Then, Distefano died unexpectedly. Chenevert stepped in as executive chef and for the last seven years has served as a tether to the Village’s famed dishes, including cannelloni Florentine, seafood cannelloni, braciole, osso bucco and the signature red sauce that gilded dishes like spaghetti and veal parmesan.

“When Joey died and I started cooking, people who remembered the dishes from the Village would tell me right away if they tasted differently,” Chenevert recalls.

Chenevert says Distefano’s most important lessons were simple. “He told me to taste everything,” he recalls, “And that if you have start with the highest quality ingredients your dish has a better chance of succeeding.”