Chef Rameaux hangs up his apron

Illness forces closure of shop

RALEIGH -- Like the mushrooms he added to everything but ice cream, or the minced garlic he doled out by the scoop, Raymond Rodgers -- as Chef Rameaux, Raleigh's own Cajun cook -- brought a special flavor to life.

Rodgers, who ran Chef Rameaux's School of Cooking and Louisiana Market, has been away from the Person Street shop since February, when he had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor that also claimed one eye. He rebounded in time to attend his daughter's wedding in May, feeling well enough to joke about wearing a gold earring with his eye patch. His wife, Peggy, said he thought he would eventually be able to reopen the business.

But with Rogers' health still declining, his wife and daughter are clearing out the store today with a sale from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

On Friday, they were sticking price tags on the collection of coffee pots Rodgers had amassed; on the sequined, feather-trimmed Mardi Gras masks; on the boxes of beignet mix, the bags of red beans and the bottles of Crystal Hot Sauce, Rodgers' favorite.

It's not that Peggy couldn't continue to run the market, keeping the shelves stocked with the goods that bring tears to the eyes of Louisiana transplants. Likewise, she has all the recipes Rodgers used to teach the proper way to make an etoufee, shrimp bisque or French Quarter bread pudding with whiskey sauce.

"It wouldn't be the same," Peggy Beasley-Rodgers said. "Who would tell all those stories? Raymond was the show."

Though he took the name Chef Rameaux only when he opened the market a decade ago, Rodgers always had a bit of Chef Rameaux in him, said Austin Beasley-Rodgers Combs.

"It was just an amplification of Daddy's personality," she said. "It was him, but it was him, even bigger."

For most of his working life, Rodgers was a college communications professor. He taught at N.C. State University and took a department-head job in Louisiana to return home, but became disenchanted with the job and returned to Raleigh.

He came back as Chef Rameaux, capitalizing on a lifetime of culinary curiosity. He liked to tell people he learned to cook in the same place as Paul Prudhomme: in the kitchen with mama.

Though the market, and its Saturday morning coffee and beignet tradition, was a Cajun cult favorite, it was the cooking school that fed Rodgers' love of the bon temps. He reveled in the limelight, building a repertoire of Boudreaux & Thibodeaux jokes, about a pair of south Louisiana good ol' boys of Rodgers' invention. He was the consummate teacher, sprinkling lessons on Louisiana history and culture into his classes as liberally as ground red pepper in gumbo.

Students would come for his Tuesday night classes, then come back for private lessons with their bridal parties. Groups of lawyers booked lessons. Teachers came in bunches. IBM and SAS sent whole departments for the team-building experience of assembling a three-course meal from scratch.

Today, they all have a chance to get one last taste. Rodgers won't be there, but he would enjoy the fais do-do.