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Discover Lafayette

Discover Lafayette

De: Jan Swift
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The Gateway to South LouisianaDiscover Lafayette© Ciencias Sociales Escritos y Comentarios sobre Viajes
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  • Marcelle Bienvenu – Acclaimed Cookbook Author and Food Writer who has been Preparing Cajun and Creole dishes since the 1960s

    Marcelle Bienvenu – Acclaimed Cookbook Author and Food Writer who has been Preparing Cajun and Creole dishes since the 1960s
    Aug 15 2025
    Discover Lafayette welcomes Marcelle Bienvenu, cookbook author and food writer who has been preparing Cajun and Creole dishes since the 1960s. A St. Martinville native, she still lives there with her husband, Rock Lasserre. Marcelle has written about Creole and Cajun cooking for The Times-Picayune, Time-Life Books, and has been featured in Garden & Gun, Food & Wine, Saveur, Southern Living, Redbook, The New York Times, Louisiana Life, and Acadiana Profile. She authored Who’s Your Mama? Are You Catholic and Can You Make a Roux?, as well as Who’s Your Mama? The Sequel, and Cajun Cooking for Beginners. She co-edited Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, which was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2009. Marcelle worked with Emeril Lagasse for 15 years and coauthored several cookbooks with him, including Louisiana Real & Rustic, Emeril’s Creole Christmas, Emeril’s TV Dinners, and Every Day’s a Party. She also owned and operated the beloved restaurant Chez Marcelle in Broussard, at the former Billeaud Family Plantation site. She has worked at legendary restaurants including Commander’s Palace and K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans, and taught for 11 years at the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University. Growing Up in St. Martinville “When I was a youngster, it was idyllic. You could ride your bike anywhere. Nobody cared where you were going. We could go around the block and ask all the ladies, ‘What do you have for supper tonight?’ If I liked hers better than mine, I could stay with her. Everybody on our block was related.” Her father’s family owned The Teche News, and she grew up folding papers and helping with printing: “Besides the newspaper, Daddy did wedding invitations, football programs. I used to hate it because my hands were always full of ink… Mama would fix the sandwiches at the newspaper office because we never went home on paper day until late. The ink was all over your bread.” She credits her early love of cooking to meals at family camps on Vermilion Bay: "My father was a Boy Scout leader, and we had a camp at Granddad's on Vermilion Bay, at Sycamore Point, and we had one in the Basin. A lot of our meals were cooked on an open fire wood bar. And I thought that was absolutely fabulous. So I would sit at my daddy's elbow with his beer. I was beer holder. I would say, shouldn't you go medium low? You don't have a dial, you'd have to move it. I became infatuated with that. I thought that was just marvelous. “We were laughing the other day about when we were little, nobody said, oh, we're going to have Cajun food. Are we going to New Orleans? Can we have Creole food? We never would. Nobody ever said that." An interesting side note: Marcelle is the aunt of Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry. His mother and Marcelle's sister, Edna Bienvenu Landry, died in 2019. Our governor also unfortunately recently lost his father, architect and business owner, Al James Landry, on July 30, 2025. The Start of a Culinary Career In 1971, while working at The Times-Picayune, Marcelle met the Time-Life Books crew. “They were thinking of doing a book on Acadian Creole cooking… We were supposed to be only a chapter in the Southern book, but we ended up with a whole book.” Working with the Brennans and legendary chef Paul Prudhomme shaped her approach: “He really brought Cajun cooking up to another level… It was absolutely wonderful to see them marrying those two cuisines to see what they came up with." Before Prudhomme joined Commander's Palace, no one in New Orleans was serving chicken and andouille sausage gumbo. Chez Marcelle Marcelle’s uncle offered to finance a restaurant in Broussard, and they transformed the old Billeaud Plantation home: “We did fabulously for almost four years and then the whole business… the oil industry crashed. It happened so fast my CPA called to ask if we had closed.
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  • Lafayette Fire Chief Robert Benoit — A Lifetime of Service and Leadership

    Lafayette Fire Chief Robert Benoit — A Lifetime of Service and Leadership
    Aug 8 2025
    Lafayette Fire Chief Robert Benoit, a man who has devoted 46 years to protecting our community, recently announced his retirement. A Lafayette native, Chief Benoit joined the department in May 1979 and made history in August 1993 when he became the first Black fire chief in Lafayette’s history. Under his leadership, the department expanded from seven to fourteen fire stations, modernized equipment and training, and earned improved fire ratings, saving money and lives. Chief Benoit has been inducted into the Louisiana Fire Chiefs Hall of Fame and served as President of the Southwestern Division of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. As he prepares to retire on August 15, 2025, Chief Benoit reflected on the calling he discovered as a child, the trials and triumphs of leading during economic downturns and political shifts, and the deeper sense of purpose that led him to seminary and prison ministry. “I think it was a gift that God placed in me, probably from birth… getting to how I got there was looking at a firefighter in a book at school at seven years old… and I said, ‘I want to be a firefighter.’” From Stockboy to Chief Chief Benoit’s journey began with humble jobs—first at Lafayette Drug Company, then Martin Mills in St. Martinville—while waiting to meet the age requirement to become a firefighter. When the age was lowered to 18, he took the civil service exam, passed, and began training at the fire academy. His first assignment was the Central Fire Station, where he spent 99% of his career. "The first thing you get is an interview with the fire chief. The fire chief at that time was Wayne Prejean. He told me he was going to give me a shot. I remember walking out the fire station realizing that I was going to get a job. Even though I had to go through the physical process. And then from there, once I cleared the physical, I went to the academy which lasted three months. It was exciting. I did everything I needed to do." My first station was at Central Downtown, which is where I work today. At that time, we had a pumper truck and a ladder truck and a rescue truck in the station. That's where I started to learn the business of firefighting. Learning that business, reading on my own time, a lot of time in the fire station. We were very short on firefighters." “They called it ‘The Rock’... because everything comes through the Central Fire Station. That was administration, firefighters, and the communications center.” A Rapid Rise Through the Ranks Benoit was known for his drive and initiative. He became a truck driver within three years (something that on average takes about eight years), communications officer, arson investigator, and captain—a rank he reached in just six years. “I wanted to learn every section of the fire department... Didn’t realize I was going to be chief. I just wanted to understand how this organization worked.” In the 1980, the local economy tanked. "I used to hear people make the comment. Last one out. Turn the lights out. They had a lot of vacant buildings and having a lot of fires that was arson.Kids were setting buildings on fire. And of course, unfortunately, some businesses were setting their businesses on fire. The fire chief at that time was Jack Massey who needed some help in the fire prevention bureau in the arson section. He asked me to go work in there just for a couple of months, just to help him out. I wound up going in there and found a home in fire prevention. So this is seven years later. I'm in fire prevention. I started learning the business of investigations. I started getting trained by ATF agents, FBI agents, insurance agents and going to school. That's where my educational level really skyrocketed. I started getting degrees and learning this business of investigating fires. The fire chief put me in charge of internal affairs for the fire department. So I pretty much did everything,
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    58 m
  • Jonathan Booth – Private Investment Fund Manager – Booth Laird Capital Management

    Jonathan Booth – Private Investment Fund Manager – Booth Laird Capital Management
    Aug 1 2025
    Jonathan Booth, Chartered Financial Analyst and CPA accredited in business valuation, joins Discover Lafayette to share his remarkable journey from being a young boy of 11 years of age falling in love with stock investments to CEO and Managing Partner of Booth Laird Capital Management, a boutique investment firm based in Lafayette. “My uncle would buy me stock in McDonald's…that was my birthday and Christmas present every year from all the family members instead of toys.” Jonathan’s early exposure to investing—paired with a deep appreciation for Warren Buffett’s philosophy of buying undervalued companies with strong fundamentals—set the tone for a career defined by rigorous analysis and long-term strategy. He emphasizes patience and discipline, especially in volatile markets: "I loved it. My uncle and I would go over the earnings releases. By the time I was in high school, I was managing my own portfolio of stocks. When I was 19, he took me to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, Warren Buffett's company. They call that the Woodstock for capitalists. It's a chance to listen to Warren Buffett talk for six hours. I didn't know what to expect, but you just sit there and listen to the Oracle of Omaha, as they call him, spew wisdom." A passionate and disciplined financial strategist, Jonathan also serves on the board of FlyGuys, the Lafayette-based drone data company in which Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame recently invested $3 million in a $13 million Series A-1 funding round and led the round; O’Leary’s Wonder Fund investment will accelerate software innovation, expand global reach, and strengthen the commercial drone workforce. Quote from Kevin O'Leary on LinkedIn: "Big news. I recently led a $13 million Series A-1 round through the Wonder Fund North Dakota. The investment went into a company that’s redefining how the physical world feeds the AI economy.Meet FlyGuys — a national network of over 16,000 FAA-certified drone pilots powering the capture and delivery of reality data at scale. From thermal roof scans to solar inspections, agriculture, and infrastructure, they handle it all. FlyGuys is the connective tissue between AI platforms and the physical world.I backed this team because their software is built to scale, their operations are rooted in service and precision, and their impact is real. AI platforms depend on clean, reliable inputs, and FlyGuys delivers exactly that. They’re not just serving today’s use cases, they’re building global infrastructure for tomorrow’s AI economy, while creating new income opportunities for drone pilots around the world. Data is the new oil. AI can’t function without it. FlyGuys is building the pipeline." A native of Baton Rouge, and graduate of Catholic High and LSU, Jonathan originally pursued accounting. "I got a scholarship from the College of Business, and I chose accounting because I already did it. After my first semester, my professor hired me to work at his private accounting practice because I did pretty well in the class. And so I just kept getting pulled along into accounting and got my bachelor's and master's in accounting. Jonathan's performance earned him a rare honor: “I passed the CPA exam in 2006 with one of the ten highest scores in the world, known as the Elijah Watt Sells Award.” He also passed all three levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam (a minimum of three years of exams) on his first attempt. While working at Ernst & Young, Jonathan maintained his passion for investing, ultimately founding Booth Laird Capital Management. Alongside his partner Kevin Laird, Jonathan focuses on concentrated investment strategies, targeting exceptional businesses and waiting for undervaluation. “We call them compounding machines,” he explained. "The term 'hedge fund' scares a lot of people, but it's truly just the way the fund is structured. It allows us the ability and freedom to invest more as we see fit.
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    51 m
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