Rouses_May-June-2018

the Eat Local issue

ONE SINGULAR SENSATION by DavidW. Brown + photo by Collin Richie

I t started in theMidCity neighborhood of Baton Rouge, at a restaurant called Bob & Jake’s. They didn’t call it the Sensation salad back then. It was just — well, to them it was just a salad, but the locals of Baton Rouge would call it otherwise. After Bob & Jake’s closed, the Sensation survived, with other restaurants taking stabs at the signature dressing. It proliferated in the late ’60s and has remained a staple of the city’s food culture. Even Southern celebrity chefs like Emeril Lagasse and John Besh have prepared it on their shows. Baton Rouge culture lives in the shadow of New Orleans, but here was this thing that was its own … A Sensation salad’s soul is this: garlic, cheese, oil and lemon — the latter squeezed, sprightly, just before serving. Local foodies in the know toy with percentages and varieties —Romano or Parmesan, vegetable

oil or olive, and for the bold, this spice or that.Are you really even a Baton Rouge chef if you haven’t tried your hand at topping the masterpiece? When Richard Hanley went to Rouses to buy a Sensation salad dressing, he didn’t see one on the shelf. He was bringing a salad to a party, and it had to be Sensation — his favorite! — and the salad dressing aisle was coming up short. A Baton Rouge native, he’d known growing up that there were only three serious salad dressings: Balsamic, Ranch and Sensation. So where were the bottles of the stuff? It merited investigation, and to his astonishment, there were no Sensation salad dressings on any store shelves in 2012 because no such dressing existed. It was a local thing. How could he have known? At the time, he worked in marketing and

had a good job as an art director for a New Orleans-based advertising firm. He loved his job and he was good at it, but — and this might sound crazy — he couldn’t shake the notion that there was this gaping hole in the salad dressing market, and that maybe, just maybe, he could fill it. He wasn’t a cook, but he gave it a shot and began experimenting with his take on Sensation salad. He came up with four killer variations of the original, then held a salad party. He invited friends and family over and asked them to choose their favorite. He then took the winner and recalculated the recipe to re-create its goodness in a much larger batch. It took six hours to make enough dressing to fill three cases worth of bottles, and he brought them to the local farmers’ market. The dressing didn’t last two hours. Though he had to leave his booth with only a frowny face drawn on a napkin and the

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY MAY | JUNE 2018