Rouses_January-February-2018_60

BATON ROUGE

I t’s hard to nail down what Spanish Town Market is, exactly. Is it a grocery store? Certainly they sell staples and fresh produce, and Baton Rouge residents have been shopping there for more than a century. It is also a hip little diner with the usual fare of sandwiches, salads, specials and sides. It is a coffee shop, quirky yet straightforward, with local art on the walls and strings of lights on the ceiling. And it is an institution, a community meeting point, its patio ever lively with conversation and strummed guitars. Spanish Town Market is located in the heart of the historic Spanish Town dis- trict, on Spanish Town and Seventh, beneath and between the lush trees and ver- dant lawns lining the street. Outside, regulars gab with one another, some around single tables, others leaning back to join in conversations two tables over. Every- one, it seems, knows everyone. You might sit and chat, but you will more likely be enticed to the counter inside, drawn by whatever is sizzling on the kitchen grill. The market serves an evolving menu of freshly prepared lunches and dinners. When Dearman’s burned down, Spanish Town Market’s fries became the best in the city — fresh cut, and seasoned just so. The sandwiches and burgers are homemade, prepared a dozen ways, and christened with names like Mushwiss and Smokin’ Chick.This is no greasy spoon, though.There is an elegance to the cuisine and a pride in its presentation. The lightly fried Gulf shrimp po’boy is a lunchtime standout, topped with tomatoes and shredded lettuce, served on bread that’s airy and flaky. This kind of quality comes only from a labor of love. Five years ago, Baton Rouge local Taylor Blanche went in with his fiancée and brother to buy what was then called Capitol Grocery Store. His goal was to restore and revitalize the corner store. The trio succeeded. The market has become an evening go-to spot for their well- loved pizza by the slice, and it is by far the best place to watch the famed Spanish Town Mardi Gras parade — and everybody knows it. Just follow the pink-frocked crowds to find this charming oasis of food and flamingos.You won’t want to leave. SPANISH TOWN MARKET Baton Rouge’s Best for Burgers & Beads by DavidW. Brown + photo by Collin Richie

Cane Land’s Parade Rum

So after years of obstacle jumping, site scouting and permit applying, he hired distiller Jonny ver Planck and ordered an impressive copper still from Vendome Copper & Brass Works, the nation’s premier fabricator of stills. He also studied up on technique and learned the importance of resting and aging his distillate before it goes into the bottles. So he bought several 5,000-gallon wooden vats once used by cognac makers in France, had them dismantled and shipped, then flew in four French coopers, who spent five days reassembling them. (He’s also employing some used Rémy Martin cognac casks for aging.) Today, Cane Land Distilling sells four styles of rum, including a traditional molasses-based rum, a Martinique-style rhum agricole (made from fresh-pressed sugarcane) a spiced rum and a cinnamon rum. (He also makes a vodka from sugarcane, and sells a whiskey “imported” by riverboat down the Mississippi). “Rum’s on the rise across the board,” Tharp says, “and if you really are going to get into rum, you’ve got to go all the way.” Available in Louisiana Rouses Markets.

by Wayne Curtis About a half hour northwest of Baton Rouge, surrounded by sugarcane fields, is the Alma Sugar Plantation & Sugar Mill. It processes sugar from nearly 50,000 acres of sugarcane grown across South Louisiana, with much of that ending up in packets and five-pound bags on your grocery store shelves. But not all of it. Walter Tharp, whose family owns the mill, diverts a portion of that sugar for making rum at a gleaming new distillery and tasting room that opened last spring near the banks of the Mississippi in Downtown Baton Rouge. Tharp spent years planning the distillery — the idea of which took root when he attended a wedding held by a sugarcane-growing and rum-distilling family in Central America. They asked him, “Why don’t you make rum?” He initially dismissed the question — “We don’t make candy bars, either,” he remembers thinking — but the idea began to gnaw at him. Why not?

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