Jackson Jambalaya

Before the restaurants, before the trips, before any of it — there was my grandmother's table.

She had two of them that mattered. The one in the breakfast room, where we'd share Saturday morning pancake breakfasts and casual fried chicken lunches — nothing fancy, just food and family. And then the dining room table, formal and serious, reserved for Sunday lunch after church or for the occasions when company came in from out of town and special treatment was warranted. Both tables were hers, and so was everything that happened at them.

Eunice Holman St. John was the most influential person in my life. That's not sentiment. I've spent a lot of money over the years trying to become a better businessman and a better leader. None of it came close to what she did. She never owned a business, never ran one, probably never gave it much thought. But she knew how to live a meaningful and principled life, and she showed me at that table. 

I've been trying to follow her example ever since.

My mother's table was different, but no less important. She was a single mom, working full-time all through my childhood, and she still put breakfast and supper on the table every day. We rarely went out to eat in those days. We sat down together and shared a meal. She made sure I had manners and understood what was expected of me. She knew nothing about business or finances. That I'd have to figure out on my own— and I did, the hard way, through years of mistakes too long to list here. But the lessons and examples she gave me at that table, have been with me every day since.

Simon Sinek built a career around one question: Why? Not the product, not the process — the reason behind it all. I've thought about that question for years, trying to apply it to my own life and businesses. It turns out the answer was right in front of me the whole time. It was the table. Always had been. 

Then came the restaurant tables, which were another owner’s for a while.

I waited tables for seven years. I worked as a waiter through a long and storied college career and that work gave me something a classroom never did. You learn things about people when you're serving them. You learn patience. You learn to read people before they even place an order. You learn that the table isn't just furniture — it's the whole point. It's where the evening either works or it doesn't. I didn't understand any of that consciously at the time. I just showed up and did the work. But it was shaping something in me.

At twenty-six, I opened my first restaurant. Almost four decades of watching people at tables — you learn things. Most of them nobody teaches you. People choose your table for the nights that matter most — anniversaries, last conversations, first dates. I don't take any of it for granted.

The travel piece wasn't planned. Nothing about it was.

A few people asked if I'd host a trip overseas, and I said yes mostly to be agreeable, and then I did it, and something unexpected happened. It didn't feel like group travel. My wife and I are not group travel people — the idea of being herded around a foreign country with strangers has never appealed to either of us. But from that first trip to the one that just wrapped in Tuscany two days ago, it has never felt like that. Not once.

For years I couldn't explain it. I'd pick up a group at the airport — a few couples who already knew each other, but the rest were strangers — and within a day or two they were all finishing each other's sentences. By the end of the week, they were planning reunions. I've been invited to some of those gatherings, evenings of people who had never laid eyes on each other before that first trip. I once asked a table of women at one of my restaurants— all Yonderlust travelers from various trips over several years — how many of them knew each other before they traveled with me. The answer was none. They were fast friends now. Some had become part of each other's daily lives. Two of them will be with me in Portugal next week, on their tenth Yonderlust trip together.

Last year, it finally hit me why it works. It's the table. On these trips, we share three meals a day together. We sit down, we eat well, we talk. People learn about each other's families and childhoods and the places they came from. The connection happens when the bread arrives and someone refills a wine glass and the conversation goes somewhere you didn't expect. That's where friendships are made. Sinek would tell you that's the why — and he'd be right. 

The why of my entire life has been the table. 

It was true at my grandmother's house, it was true in the restaurants where I worked and the ones I built, and it turns out it's just as true in a trattoria in Tuscany, a pub in Ireland, or in a king crab hut above the Arctic Circle in Norway.

Many of the guests who travel with me are women who have lost a husband — to death or divorce — and who are figuring out a new chapter they didn't expect to be writing alone. A lot of them tell me their husbands handled all the planning, all the decisions, and traveling without that feels overwhelming. What I can offer is simple (and this goes for all my guests): from the moment I meet them at the airport to the moment I say goodbye; they have nothing to worry about. Everything is handled. And for some of them, that freedom — the permission to just be somewhere beautiful, at a table with people who will become real friends — changes something. 

A woman pulled me aside on a recent trip and told me she had reached a point in her life where she had lost her will to live. She said the first tour of mine she went on gave her a whole new outlook and let her know there were reasons to keep going. I don't know what to do with a statement like that except be grateful for it and make sure I never forget it. Whatever else these trips accomplish, that one conversation makes all of it worth it. Period. End of story.

This fall, I'm hosting that kind of table back home for the first time. Not because it makes business sense, though I believe it will, but because Mississippi and New Orleans are mine in a way that nowhere else is. I've been telling their stories for over thirty years — in my column, in my cookbooks, on my menus, and in conversations with guests from all over the country who want to know what the South is really like. The food, the music, the art, the people, the history that doesn't always make it into the books but lives in the restaurants and juke joints and home kitchens where it was made. I want to share that. I want to sit at those tables with people who've never sat at them before and watch something happen that I've watched happen from Tuscany to Scotland to Spain.

My grandmother understood it before I did.

All those years at her table — the Saturday lunches, the Sunday spreads, the formal dinners with the good silver, china, and crystal out — she was teaching me something I'm only now fully able to understand. Sit down and share enough meals with someone and you'll know them better than their neighbors do. She built her whole life around it.

Seventy-some trips in, so have I.

Onward.

Heat the oil to 375° F in a four-quart saucepot. Place the flour, two teaspoons of kosher salt, Creole seasoning, and lemon pepper in a mixing bowl, stir to combine. Working in batches, drain the squid well and place in the seasoned flour. Coat well. Once all the squid has been coated, place half of it in the hot oil. Cook for three to four minutes, or until golden brown. Using a slotted spoon, remove the squid from the oil and drain on paper towels. Cook the remaining squid, sprinkle with two teaspoons kosher salt and serve immediately.