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In the kitchen with Marcello’s seasoned young chef Kevin Anderson


On the surface, Marcello’s executive chef Kevin Anderson’s cuisine is rustic Italian with a wink at Old World Europe and the Middle East. But at the heart, his dishes also have a touch of anarchy: a purposeful embrace of no-rules-eating that values flavor over fussiness.

Anderson, 29, helped open the Baton Rouge location of Marcello’s Wine Market Café in May 2018. It’s the third installment of a successful concept launched in Lafayette and New Orleans by wine expert and restaurateur Gene Todaro.

After earning accolades for those locations, Todaro turned his sights to Baton Rouge, where he’d once owned a wine retail store and a wine-centric restaurant (in the same location in Southdowns Village where Marcello’s now sits). Through mutual friends, Todaro found Anderson, a graduate of the Louisiana Culinary Institute with a lengthy kitchen resume.

Anderson’s pork cheek stracci, which features braised pork cheeks, torn house-made pasta, a bright pea pesto and a poached egg.

As a teenager, Anderson worked at Juban’s just to pick up some cooking skills. He had no real designs on becoming a chef, but food piqued his interest and he completed a degree at LCI. He then moved to New Orleans and eventually worked at Chef Phillip Lopez’s restaurant, Root, and later under Chef Michael Gulotta at the Vietnamese-meets-Louisiana restaurant, MoPho. Next stop was a trip across the pond to Germany, where Anderson worked under famed Chef Karl-Joseph Fuchs, the fifth-generation proprietor of the Romantik Hotel Spielweg.

Once back in Louisiana, Anderson worked for the City Pork Restaurant Group before connecting with Todaro.

For such a hefty restaurant resume, Anderson jokes about having a love-hate relationship with food.

“I think about doing something different, because it’s a hard lifestyle,” he says. “Then I find myself reading nothing but cookbooks and thinking about food.”

While Marcello’s interior was being finished last spring, Anderson spent time in the kitchen of the restaurant’s New Orleans location. It opened in 2014 and was named one of the city’s five best new restaurants that year by the Times-Picayune. Anderson learned the signature Sicilian recipes the menu is built on before returning to open the Baton Rouge doors last summer.

Anderson cleans a fresh fish for the restaurant’s dinner menu.

Unlike the New Orleans and Lafayette locations, the Baton Rouge Marcello’s does not serve a regular weekday lunch. It’s open for lunch on Fridays only, allowing Anderson and his team to spend the day focusing on prep for the dinnertime crowd. It gives them time to pull off detailed, multi-step dishes like the Capra, a roasted whole goat deboned and served in a bowl painted with almond “aioli” and topped with red chermoula, za’atar and radish and herb salad. Or the Pork Cheek Stracci, which is made from slow-braised cheeks and stracci, an egg-yolk sheet pasta Anderson makes himself. It’s topped with pea pesto and a poached egg.

These dishes have lots of curated components, but Anderson leaves the idea of the perfect bite up to the patron.

“I like it kind of with the presentation scattered, that way you can get a bite of just the capra, or the capra and chermoula or the capra, chermoula and the aioli,” he says. “I don’t believe there’s one way to do it, and that it ought to taste the same 30 bites into the dish. That’s boring to me.” marcelloscafe.com 


This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of 225 Magazine.