Behind the iconic buttermilk biscuits at Frank’s Restaurant

Few foods are more emblematic of the South than the biscuit. Maybe it’s because it represents us at our best: warm, generous in portion, usually found around an overflowing table. Biscuits are accompanied by all of our favorite things: grits, honey, gravy, strawberry preserves, sausage, butter.

And if there’s one definitive biscuit in Baton Rouge, it might be the buttermilk beauties at Frank’s Restaurant.

Frank Dedman Sr. and his wife, Carolyn, opened Frank’s in 1964 as a drive-in. But by the early ’70s, drive-ins were going out; the time for a new concept had arrived. They wanted to remake Frank’s as a breakfast restaurant, but they needed an anchor—that signature item that would bring in diners over any other breakfast joint in town.

And so Frank Sr. set to work, trying batch after batch of biscuits from scratch, perfecting his method until he’d devised the perfect buttermilk biscuit. Now on its third generation with the restaurant, the same recipe has been part of the Dedman family’s arsenal since 1972. Today, the team makes several batches of biscuit dough every morning, with each batch amounting to five sheet pans of 24 biscuits. It all adds up to around 1,500 total biscuits served a day at the Baton Rouge and Prairieville locations.

It could be the consistency of the recipe over the years that’s kept the biscuit so close to locals’ hearts for so long. But Brent Guerin, co-owner and husband of Frank Sr.’s granddaughter Jennifer, says it’s the extra personal touch that makes the difference.

“It’s all in the way you work the dough, just like your grandma did,” Guerin says. “It’s all in how long you let it rise. It’s hard to make it like we do, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. It’s all because it’s homemade.”

After all these years, Frank’s has gotten creative with its classic biscuit. After a recent menu reboot, you can now get the biscuits piled and stuffed with the likes of sweet cream cheese, fresh berries, grilled shrimp and Creole sauce, or chicken fried steak and white pepper gravy.

But the fluffy, buttery foundation upon which it is built hasn’t changed. And that’s something worth sopping up. franksrestaurantla.com

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of 225 Magazine.