NATCHEZ. Renowned chef Regina Charboneau, a seventh-generation Natchezian, has been all over the world serving up large helpings of her Southern hospitality.
The 60-year-old cookbook author and restaurateur has worked in the bush of Alaska, attended cooking school in Paris and owned and operated restaurants in San Francisco. She’s lived in New York City and Minneapolis, and she’s cooked for everyone from Bob Hope to Mick Jagger.
“When I opened my restaurant, people would always comment on how hospitable I was, and I just didn’t know any other way,” she said. “I always made a point to stop at every table, never to pick and choose. I find everyone equally interesting.”
Her pull back home began 14 years ago. She and her husband, Doug, moved their family to Natchez and eventually settled at Twin Oaks, a 6,000-square-foot historic home included on the ever-popular Spring Pilgrimage.
“My father passed away and I had a tug to come home,” Regina said. “I really thought I was going to be in Natchez six months, and then when it turned into two years, we figured this is where we’d be.”
Since moving to Natchez, Regina has spread her culinary talents across the local, regional and national scenes. She runs a bed and breakfast, owns and operates a successful restaurant and craft cocktail bar, acts as culinary director for a steamboat company and is promoting her newest cookbook, released this past spring.
She had intended to slow down after she moved home.
“My big focus when we moved to Natchez was to focus on my boys,” she said.
But, while 24-year-old Jean Luke, a budding entrepreneur, and 21-year-old Martin, a student at New York University, were boys in Natchez, Regina did not necessarily play the role of stay-at-home mom. The Charboneaus also have an adopted daughter, 25-year-old Catherine, who became part of the family seven years ago.
While raising her boys, Regina also consulted at Monmouth Plantation, one of Natchez’s grand historic homes, and traveled back and forth to San Francisco, where she is still part-owner of Biscuits & Blues, her 19-year restaurant business. She also managed to write two cookbooks and completely restored Twin Oaks.
The 1832-built home has only three bedrooms, but the Charboneaus welcome guests to the six guest rooms adjacent to their home on the property, an antebellum dependency known as White Cottage. Regina, who occasionally offers cooking classes to her guests, said owning a bed and breakfast was “accidental” but has been a good way to welcome visitors to Natchez.
“I call it a bed and whatever, because you never know what the guests are going to get. Even though I’m a chef, I don’t do breakfast,” she said. “With my schedule, sometimes I don’t even meet the guests, and sometimes they get invited to a party. It’s fun. We stay busy.”
Running a bed and breakfast was only one ingredient to Regina’s flavorful homecoming. Despite the many hats and ongoing projects, Regina and Doug, married for 33 years, were claiming to be “semi-retired” a year ago. While watching reality television, Doug proclaimed to Regina, “I don’t think we can do this.”
She agreed.
“So, we bought King’s Tavern because it was falling apart,” Regina said. “The bank owned it and every time we would go to the bank, they would say, ‘Don’t you want to buy King’s Tavern?'”
King’s Tavern, a 225-year-old building that once was a rest stop for people traveling along the Mississippi River, is quite possibly the oldest building in the Natchez Territory and a landmark for the river city.
Within two weeks, the Charboneaus bought the King’s Tavern building and the adjacent building and developed a plan for two businesses, a restaurant focused on flatbreads and craft cocktails and a rum distillery operated by Doug and their son, Jean Luke. Regina opened the restaurant in October and Doug and Luke plan to open the distillery in August.
Starting a rum distillery has been on Doug’s mind since before the Charboneaus had children.
“We’ve been to rum distilleries all over and collected anything we could get our hands on. Doug always said he was going to do a rum distillery,” Regina said.
Doug, who has a background in finance, wanted to use the rum distillery to help increase the offerings to Natchez travelers.
“We talked about the fact that Natchez is a tourist town and Natchez has a nice tourist pattern already. We thought, ‘What can we do to add to that?'” he said. “Sugar cane is grown down here, so it’s a natural product and, while there isn’t a long history in Mississippi of rum distilleries, there certainly is in Louisiana. It’s another something people can do and see and touch and at the end of the day, I get to drink some white rum.”
Hoping to create a food offering that would draw on her decades of experience, Regina’s concept for King’s Tavern quickly began to unfold. It seemed to go back to an item high on her culinary wish list.
“I really wanted a wood-fired oven,” she said.
Once she purchased it, the wood-fired oven became the centerpiece, and the rest was simple. King’s Tavern was reborn with a simple menu, a simple concept and high-quality ingredients.
Regina’s vision for the space was to build on its uniqueness. While the building’s history is storied, complete with a resident ghost named Madeline, it was easy for Regina to develop a modern twist on the local treasure.
Gutting the kitchen and making it more focused was likely the biggest challenge.
“I didn’t want a typical restaurant kitchen, because I was very focused in my direction of the food I wanted to do,” she said. “Everything is cooked in the wood-fired oven. We have a prep stove to make custards for ice cream and sauces, but that’s it.”
Regina and her staff don’t use mainstream products. Goat cheese comes from a small farm in Liberty. They make their own Italian sausage. All of the seafood is sustainable, and they grow what they can in the courtyard garden full of lettuce, chard, kale, Thai basil, okra and peppers. All of the desserts are made with homemade ice cream and are Regina’s twists on sweet classics.
“From the time we looked at the building and made an offer with the bank for the building, it took me about two hours to design it, menu, concept, everything. I thought, OK, this is it,” she said. “It just made sense. Everything just clicked.”
Regina’s favorite salad offering at King’s Tavern is seasonal greens tossed in preserved lemon vinaigrette, shaved apple, shaved Parmesan and crispy prosciutto.
“We don’t have one deep fried item. And, my salads are, I think, the best salads in Natchez because they’re fresh, fresh, and they’re not overdressed. They’re creative,” she said.
Craft and creative seem to be the themes throughout the tavern. Despite the non-traditional menu, King’s Tavern is drawing crowds of both locals and tourists.
“I knew we would carve out a niche market. If somebody wants pepperoni pizza, that’s not who we are, and it’s OK,” Regina said.
While the food was, of course, key to the theme, Regina wanted to spotlight craft cocktails, an idea equally inspired by her urban influence and the upcoming Charboneau craft rum. She also has a liquor gift shop upstairs called Craft Retail, where she offers hand-crafted liquors, such as bourbon, moonshine and rum, and sells specialty, hard-to-find wines.
“I thought, ‘We’ve got to do the craft cocktail thing. You can’t have a craft liquor and not totally embrace that whole concept,” she said.
Regina hired bar manager Ricky Woolfolk and craft cocktails and mixology classes became a main focus of the tavern.
“He was just made to order,” she said. “He is masterful at it. He so gets it. He doesn’t just talk the talk.”
Ricky began his bartending career in the New Orleans French Quarter. He later moved to Dallas and spent 14 years there, eventually owning two nightclubs and a restaurant. It wasn’t until he moved to Miami Beach and worked for Kimpton Hotels that he learned mixology, the art of mixing cocktails, and decided to take it to the next level.
“I’ve always been a good bartender but you can only go so far with speed. You have to actually learn well-built, quality cocktails,” he said. “At the time I started getting into it, a movement started sweeping the country and people started appreciating quality cocktails over quantity.”
Ricky took the job at King’s Tavern after a five-minute phone conversation with Regina.
“It was almost like a match made in heaven,” he said of working with Regina. “I just think it’s kind of a cool thing being paired up with Regina and with Doug doing the distillery. It was a fortuitous circumstance across the board.”
Ricky said King’s Tavern is one of only a few bars in Mississippi celebrating craft liquor and mixology, something he is proud is catching on. Another mixology bar that’s garnering national attention is Jackson’s Apothecary inside Brent’s Drugs in the Fondren area.
“Now people are starting to appreciate artisan spirits and craft spirits,” Ricky said. “As somebody that’s been in this business as long as I have, it kind of makes me feel like a proud papa, to see people’s palates become more sophisticated. And people are starting to actually appreciate what goes into a cocktail. People are wanting good stuff and not big name brand stuff. It’s kind of a neat thing to see.”
Ricky specializes in pre- and Prohibition Era cocktails, drinks that haven’t been made much since the early 1900s. He puts his creative spin on every drink he makes, even the classics.
“I do this cool twist on a Manhattan, where I use fire and smoke,” he said.
Ricky, a scientist of sorts, has a growing collection of bitters, plant extracts used as additives in cocktails, and he keeps egg whites and cedar planks stocked behind the bar for his crafty cocktails. He said the concept of craft cocktails and mixology has gone over well in Natchez, known by many as a drinking town with an affinity for bourbon.
“It’s almost like America’s waking up and realizing there’s better stuff out there,” he said. “There are better cocktails. If you look nationwide, there are more cocktail lounges opening now than there are bars and nightclubs.”
To further promote the notion of craft cocktails, King’s Tavern offers mixology classes twice a week, 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Ricky said he teaches a rum class and a freestyle class, in which he throws in one of his favorite Prohibition Era cocktails. Participants learn what goes into a crafted cocktail and techniques, such as how to properly shake or stir.
Craft beer also is a popular push at the tavern. He sells only beer from small batch breweries, and he tries to change the entire beer menu about every two weeks.
Even though Regina’s travels have certainly influenced how she developed her restaurant and craft bar, her Southern signature is strong. Even as a young chef, with formal training at La Varenne, one of the first professional cooking schools in France to offer accredited, professional culinary degrees, her dishes had at least a tinge of Southern flair.
“I found myself, even though I had French techniques and I was in California, I kept bringing Southern ingredients into my cooking. All the things I loved, you know crawfish and corn, catfish and pecans,” she said. “Even if I would do some non-traditional Southern dishes, the ingredients would sneak in.”
She was known as a Southern chef long before she made her way back to Natchez.
“Food writers would label my cuisine as contemporary Southern cooking,” she said. “My father was a great cook. He was from South Louisiana and my mother was a wonderful hostess. I grew up with that South Louisiana good cooking,” she said.
Regina is also known for the Southern hospitality she serves up, no matter where she is, inside her restaurant or at her home.
“People feel very comfortable here, because I treat everyone the same in my home and don’t make a fuss,” she said. “I have never asked for an autograph. I’ve never asked to have a photo taken. I just don’t ever take advantage of those friendships. I have the memories. I just don’t do that.”
Mick Jagger, lead singer of The Rolling Stones and producer for the James Brown biopic, “Get On Up,” is comfortable enough in the Charboneau home to eat chocolate mousse from her refrigerator. The world-famous singer was a guest while filming in Natchez last year.
Regina’s friend Tate Taylor, the Mississippi native who is director of the film and well-known for directing “The Help,” brought everybody from the movie into the restaurant, which Regina claims helped get the tavern off the ground. The restaurant even received a shout-out from the film’s star, Chadwick Boseman, who told Garden & Gun magazine that he enjoyed hanging out in a “cool, hip place called King’s Tavern.”
Regina is passionate about bringing people to her hometown and enhancing their experience once they arrive. Her involvement with the American Queen, the paddlewheel passenger boat that made its post-Katrina return to the Mississippi River three years ago, has given her a great opportunity to do just that.
“It brings 400 people on a trip to get off on our streets, tour our houses and shop in our shops. And, they come here 29 weeks a year,” she said. “I definitely wanted to be involved in that, and I helped get them here more.”
Steamboat passengers end up at her home for an entertaining class, where she has anywhere from 60 to 100 people in a day. She also tries to get on the boat every six weeks or so to check on the quality of the food from the menu she prepared and get guest feedback.
As with her restaurant, she developed a concept that clicked, contemporary Southern cooking with a few basics. The menu, which, she said, includes all of Mark Twain’s favorites, has everything from an avocado crab tower to fried chicken. Southern favorites, such as mashed potatoes and shrimp and grits are also featured, Regina-style.
Her work as culinary director and chef for the American Queen is what inspired her most recent cookbook, “Mississippi Current,” a culinary journey down the Mississippi River. The 336-page photo-rich book is chock-full, not only with mouth-watering recipes, but also stories and culinary histories of the people and places along the 2,340-mile river.
“I know this region of the river so well, but I really did a lot of research on the entire river, and then I started traveling with the American Queen,” Regina said.
While she says her own culinary journey has never been a planned one, the renowned chef seems to be floating along in the right direction.
“I always have a good gut feeling that I’m on the right path,” Regina said.
It seems as though Regina has come full circle, her heritage deeply rooted in a place that encouraged her to experience the world.
“There’s something about growing up in Natchez. Because, since 1932, we’ve opened our homes to the world through Pilgrimage that you grow up and you meet people from all over the world, and the world always seemed very accessible to me,” she said. “People from Natchez, we never meet a stranger.”
Now, she’s perfectly happy and at home back where it all began in Natchez.
STORY Lauchlin Fields
PHOTOGRAPHS Eli Baylis
