How Brandon Boudet of Little Dom’s and Little Dom’s Seafood benefits from a shorter supply chain

In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn

Brandon Boudet, despite the fact that he grew up in New Orleans and has a French last name, is not Cajun or Creole. Rather, his paternal great-grandfather came straight from Paris, not from the Canadian Maritime provinces like the Cajuns did. Regardless, the chef and co-owner of Little Dom’s in Los Angeles and Little Dom’s Seafood in Carpinteria, Calif., said he owes his culinary heritage to the large Sicilian-American family of his paternal grandmother. That and work under New Orleans chefs Emeril Lagasse and Paul Prudhomme put him in good stead to run restaurants in Los Angeles for the past 30 years or so. For almost 20 of those years he had 101 Coffee Shop, an all-day restaurant that did robust business until the pandemic started, and then he and partner Warner Ebbink decided to close it, largely because the lease was about to expire, anyway. They were about to open Little Dom’s Seafood on the picturesque Santa Barbara Coast when the pandemic hit, delaying their plans along with everyone else’s. They did manage to open it later in 2020 as dining room restrictions eased in late spring, and in this podcast Boudet discusses the psychic pleasures of working with the local farmers and fishermen in the area, as well as the business pleasures of having ready supply of produce and seafood that don’t have to go through the snarls of our nation’s overtaxed distribution system.