James Beard semifinalist Lawrence Weeks has a new restaurant, and this one is all his own.
Murray’s Creole Pub opened late last year on Bardstown Road, with an atmosphere melding Louisiana hunting lodges and European pubs on its ground level. But next month, the restaurant’s upper floor, called The Dining Room, will begin serving three to five course fine dining tasting menus.
Weeks said fans of his work at North of Bourbon will certainly find some familiar dishes on the menu at Murray’s, but he’s pushing the southern Louisiana influence even further, serving dishes informed by his family’s history in St. Landry Parish.
Cooking has been part of Lawrence Weeks’s life since early childhood. He spent a lot of time in the kitchen with his grandmother, learning basics like milk gravies and rues. When he went to culinary school, many of the dishes were already familiar to him, though maybe by a different name — the chefs call a milk gravy a bechemel.
Weeks chose to honor that family legacy of cooking with the new restaurant’s name — his grandfather Lawrence Xavier Murray and great grandfather Lawrence Ignatius Murray were both cooks in Louisiana at a time when Black people couldn’t become head chefs.
“If you believe in reincarnation, a piece of them found its way into me.”
