Paul Prudhomme

Pairing pride and a magic blend of seasonings, this renowned Louisiana chef cooks up one hot career Chef Paul Prudhomme greets each day with a smile.

"If you can't be excited doing exactly what you love, you're probably not living right," he says.

The 63-year-old Prudhomme's enthusiasm for life pulses through the phone line from a trade show in Montreal where he's working the booth for his company, Magic Seasoning Blends.

"Can you imagine?" he asks. "I'm getting paid incredibly well for cooking — for something I would do anyway. Think about that!"

While some would groan about being in a trade show booth all day long, Prudhomme delights in the opportunity to brighten someone's day with a new product or seasoning blend.

"When you put something in someone's mouth, and they keep talking about it for a couple of days, well, there's no greater pleasure," he says.

A famed restaurateur as well as the author of eight cookbooks and numerous cooking videos, Prudhomme now spends much of his time at trade shows, marketing his herb and spice flavor combinations to companies worldwide.

Shawn McBride, whom Prudhomme hired as his firm's president and chief executive 20 years ago, remembers him telling her, "I've got this little company starting up, and I think it could do really well."

At the time Prudhomme already was operating his award-winning restaurant, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, which he opened in 1979 with his wife, K. Hinrichs Prudhomme. K-Paul's was inducted into the Nation's Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame in 1983.

Prudhomme is still active at the restaurant though he stays clear of the day-to-day operation.

"His influence is more involved with taste, such as creating new dishes or expanding the menu," McBride adds.

As Magic Seasoning Blends grew, Prudhomme carved himself a special niche.

"I own the company and can do what I want, so research and development is what I selected for myself because it's the most fun I have," he says with a laugh.

Without knowing it, Prudhomme has been in research and development virtually his entire life. He grew up on a farm near Opelousas, La., as the youngest of 13 children. When the last girl left home, he was, at age 7, old enough to help his mother in the kitchen.

"I started working with my mom, so, with over 50 years of experience, that gives me a big advantage in this field," he notes.

Prudhomme's MenuMasters Hall of Fame honor doesn't surprise his longtime friend, Jasper White, owner of Jasper White's Summer Shack seafood restaurants and the 2002 MenuMasters Hall of Fame inductee.

"He's an American icon, and his contribution to American cooking is astronomical," White says. "To talk about Paul in terms of R&D alone is really limiting."

In fact, one of McBride's missions, she says, is to help people understand the range of Prudhomme's abilities, including eliminating the word "Cajun" from references to him. "That was years ago, and he's way, way beyond that," she emphasizes.

White understands McBride's desire to downplay the Cajun-cooking label that's associated with her boss. "Of course he's gone beyond Cajun, but I'm talking about his roots and what made Paul such an important figure in American cuisine," White explains. "It was his immense pride in his heritage that made him so inspirational to other chefs."

According to White, "It's hard to truly comprehend his impact unless you were really into the food business in the 1980s. The pride he had in his community and the food he grew up eating was enormous."

What was truly remarkable, White continues, is that Prudhomme had the confidence to present his food to a market in the late 1970s and 1980s that was completely enamored with French food.

Some of White's fondest memories of Prudhomme date back to the 1980s when he would attend the chef's annual heritage festival in Opelousas.

"It was a festival that was pretty much built around Paul," he remembers. "He brought chefs in from all over the United States. I felt privileged to be part of it — to know Paul on a different level and to see how much he was loved by his family and the community," White adds.

Now when Prudhomme is home in New Orleans, he spends six to seven hours a day in the Magic Seasoning Blends' test kitchen. "I'll be doing something," he explains, "and right out of the blue I'll think of something new to put in a dish, and I'll remember, 'Hey, I tasted that somewhere else.' "

Those moments of inspiration come from a lifetime of tasting food from other cultures and other chefs.

"You can never really duplicate what you taste," Prudhomme says. "I've quit trying. For example, I have an Indian chef at K-Paul's whose Indian food is spectacular. I can never make his dishes, but I can use his methods and his seasonings and make my own dishes.

"I don't think there's anything more exciting for a human being than to add to their knowledge," he adds. "One of my great joys is when I run into someone who says, 'I'm a cook because of you,' or 'I'm a cook because of your Louisiana Kitchen cookbook.' "