Jubans Restaurant and Bar’s latest chapter is full of familiar characters

Taste of history: Each month across our 20th year, 225 will revisit restaurants from our past coverage. From Capital Region classics and award-winners to trendsetters and hidden gems, these businesses have helped shape our dining culture.

We all want to relive our glory days. In the case of Jubans Restaurant and Bar, most of Baton Rouge wanted to see the establishment relive its glory days, too.

During the height of COVID-19 in July 2020, Jubans announced that—like many restaurants—it would temporarily close its doors, hoping to reopen “once things have settled down.”

Managing partner Michael Boudreaux says at the time he wasn’t even sure what that meant. Members of the Juban family pondered whether the restaurant had run its course. But while Boudreaux kept the catering arm afloat, locals started messaging him about the future.

“The amount of emails I received was crazy,” Boudreaux recalls. “‘You’ve got to open Jubans.’ ‘It’s an institution.’ ‘It’s where my family went after my first communion.’ ‘It’s where my parents had their 50th wedding anniversary.’’”

The list went on.

Boudreaux realized bringing Jubans back was just as important to Baton Rouge as it was to his family.

With the help of pandemic-era relief loans and a then-partnership with Making Raving Fans Hospitality Group, Jubans reopened in 2022 featuring a full renovation, a branding refresh and a new take on the classic Creole menu.

Baton Rouge could once again make memories, host business lunches in the private rooms or cocktail hours at the famed Atrium Bar (as well as the new Hallelujah Bar), and order up countless servings of Hallelujah Crab and other elegant dishes—traditions that date back to the restaurant’s much smaller beginnings in the 1980s.

Within this same corner of Acadian-Perkins Plaza, Jubans originally occupied about 4,500 square feet, including a small bar area with only a handful of barstools, as the Juban family was at first uneasy about attracting a bar crowd.

Boudreaux started catering for Jubans in the mid-’90s. That’s when he fell for Laura Juban, daughter of Carol Juban, one of the original owners. The couple eventually married.

As catering grew, the family needed more space for on-site events. In 1999, Jubans took over part of a department store next door, adding 10,000 square feet that would house the sunlit Atrium Bar, a wine room and plenty of private areas for events and receptions.

In the years leading up to COVID-19, there were side ventures under the moniker of Jubans Restaurant Group, like downtown diner Christina’s Restaurant, Beausoleil Coastal Cuisine in Bocage Village and Adrian’s Restaurant & Bar off Highland Road. Some of those split off to become independent businesses. Others became casualties of the pandemic.

Through it all, the Juban family saw the value of its namesake restaurant and the need to get back to basics. That also made the glitzy renovations with branding firm Xdesign Inc. and architecture firm DNA Workshop tricky.

“We had to bite our tongues a lot. It’s like your house. It’s kind of hard to envision something else,” Boudreaux recalls of the process. “But after 25 years of being in the same house, we knew we needed a drastic change.”

The menu, of course, has stayed the same—except where it hasn’t. Centerpieces like the Redfish Adrian or the chicken, duck and andouille gumbo are mostly true to the originals with slight tweaks and carefully sourced ingredients.

One of the newest comebacks is the shrimp aubergine—an old favorite of Laura’s and Carol’s. What was previously a straightforward shrimp, fried eggplant and fettuccini dish with alfredo sauce now uses housemade linguine, roasted garlic cream and fresh, simple ingredients.

Not over-complicating things seems to be paying off for the reimagined Jubans.

Sure, the interiors are eye-catching and bustling with crowds of well-dressed Baton Rougeans. But the memories are still being made over those familiar, nostalgic dishes.

This article was originally published in the July 2025 issue of 225 Magazine.