The Best King Cake in New Orleans
COVER STORY: We stopped in at Ayu Bakehouse to sample a slice along with their muffuletta sticks, kaya buns, and more.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Cover Story: At Ayu Bakehouse, Kelly Jacques and Samantha Weiss serve some of New Orleans’ best baked goods.
February’s Featured Field Guide: Download our Signature Field Guide to New Orleans, packed with over 40 recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks in the Crescent City, all organized into a six-day travel itinerary. The 62-page e-book (our largest yet) is formatted for your phone and this month it’s free for paid subscribers!
The Order: A whole-hog barbecue joint with a must-try housemade hot dog in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Weekend Reading: A favorite flavor of Hubig’s pies returns, the South’s top motor lodges, plus an ideal winter weekend in Maine.
The Queens of King Cake
NEW ORLEANS, LA. — When you visit New Orleans during the Carnival season, there’s king cake. Everywhere. It’s at bakeries and grocery stores, restaurants and bars. You’ll see people walking down the street with boxes of king cake. There are king cakes with peanut butter, banana, and bacon (Cochon Butcher) and king cakes with tahini, kumquat syrup, and halva (Molly’s Rise and Shine). There are king cake sundaes (Medium Rare) and king cake doughnuts (District Donut).
So to win the Times-Picayune's king cake bracket is a pretty big deal. And it happens that the king cake we ate when we were in town last month, The Croissant City Classic King Cake from Kelly Jacques and Samantha Weiss’ Ayu Bakehouse, was the winner. (The bracket had 320,030 total votes cast over five rounds, an absolutely gigantic turnout). Ayu’s king cake is flaky and buttery, and the topping is simple (most king cakes are frosted), with just purple, green, and yellow sugar and a golden bean in lieu of the plastic baby.
“We go pretty classic in terms of the flavors,” Jacques told me when I called the duo a few days after they were named the winners. “We do cream cheese filling that we make in house and raw Louisiana cane sugar. Right before we opened, The Big Book of King Cake had just come out, and we were thumbing through the pages of so many beautiful king cakes. It was almost overwhelming — how do you come up with a flavor that hasn’t been done? What felt more exciting was a hot king cake from the oven, so we decided to go kind of simple with it.”
King cakes are typically made with brioche, but at Ayu, they use laminated dough so the cake stays moist and gets a little crispy on the outside. Ayu also offers a savory muffuletta version and a chocolate babka one that draws on the duo’s shared past. “It’s New York meets New Orleans,” Weiss says.
Jacques and Weiss met in pastry school in New York, and Weiss joined Jacques at Breads Bakery after they graduated. “I knew Kelly would do something someday, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it,” Weiss says. It didn’t happen immediately — Weiss moved to California and Jacques moved back to New Orleans, where she had attended college at Tulane — but when Jacques started looking for spaces in New Orleans, Weiss moved to town to join the project.
Ayu, which opened in June 2022, is a sunny corner spot across from Washington Square Park on Frenchmen Street, a part of the city known for its music and nightlife. “We see the space as a little oasis,” Jacques says. “We loved how open the space was and wanted to keep it that way. It’s our version of a live performance, where you can see the bakers at work.” Looking at the abundant pastry cases, these are exceedingly busy bakers. When deciding how to approach their offerings, Jacques says they asked themselves: “We had all these tools in our pocket from our training in New York — laminated dough, sourdough bread, cakes, entremets — but now that we get to drive the ship, what direction do we want to go in?”
Their own backgrounds and their lives in New Orleans provided their starting point. “Sam and I both identify as mutts,” Jacques says. “My grandma was born in Sumatra, but I’m also a quarter Italian and Irish and whatever, Sam is Honduran but adopted by a family who’s also Jewish, and she has all these roots in New York, so it didn’t feel right to just pick one identity, like this is an Asian bakery or a Jewish bakery. It was more, let’s take all these flavors we love and use the language of the bakery to express those, and also layer in Louisiana flavors.”
That translates to pastries like the cro madame, a croissant with ham, béchamel, Gruyère, and a runny egg, and muffuletta breadsticks, with meat and olives twisted into the dough. I loved the Boudin Boy, a sausage roll made with a hard-boiled egg and boudin from The Best Stop Supermarket in Scott, Louisiana. The meatless version, The Shroom Boom, is an umami-bomb made with mushrooms and caramelized onions. On the sweet side, the kaya bun is an homage to Jacques’ grandmother. “Kaya is a coconut jam that’s big in Singapore, where I’d have it when we’d go visit family,” she says. Jacques asked a family friend, a pastry chef in Singapore, for her kaya recipe, then turned it into a pastry. “You get something that’s familiar even though the main component is something that most people haven’t had.”
Ayu also has 12 wholesale accounts — they make the bread for Turkey and the Wolf’s bologna sandwich, the sub rolls for Francolini's, and the lobster rolls and sourdough bread for Pigeon and Whale. Though they’ve discussed expansion, Weiss and Jacques are currently focused on building internal structures. “We’ve been putting a lot of work into developing our team of people who are becoming managers,” Jacques says. “A lot of creativity comes from giving people a little leeway. Once those wheels get turning, you can’t stop them.”
801 Frenchmen St, New Orleans, LA 70117
Save All Our New Orleans Recommendations
Our newly updated Signature Field Guide to New Orleans is a super-sized digital dining guide featuring more than 40 vetted recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks, all organized into a curated six-day travel itinerary. This e-book download is formatted for your phone so you can save it for easy reference on your next trip. Paid subscribers received a link to download a free copy of the guide last week, so upgrade your subscription today and get your complimentary copy. You can also buy the Field Guide on our website. (A paid subscription is a better deal, plus you’ll receive 50% off any other Field Guide you’d like!)
Hot Dogs with a Carolina Twist
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — We eat a lot of barbecue at American Weekender, so when we were in Chapel Hill, we made sure to stop by The Pig for whole hog ’cue. Opened by chef/owner Sam Suchoff in 2010, this casual spot serves barbecue, tacos, and po’boys. Suchoff sources local hogs to make his barbecue, and turns scraps into some compelling dishes for his menu — you can order pork tongue tacos, a Vietnamese pork cheek salad, or, as we did, the housemade hot dog.
This is a beautifully spiced link, which you can get topped with cole slaw, relish, sauerkraut, mayo, and hot sauce; or, if you see if on special (or ask nicely), some of the restaurant’s excellent pimento cheese. Suchoff serves the cheese on nachos and cheese fries (also great ideas), but pimento cheese on hot dogs is such a good pairing that we’ve tapped it at home.
Even if you haven’t made it to The Pig, you may have had Suchoff’s products. He also makes Lady Edison “Extra Fancy Country Ham", an excellent product we’ve seen at shops and on charcuterie boards around the country.
630 Weaver Dairy Rd #101, Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Pineapple of My Eye: Speaking of New Orleans pastries, one of our new favorite New Orleans treats is a Hubig’s Pie. We first heard about them reading
, where described them as “a convenience store fried hand pie, yes, but miles above any other commercial brands” and shared the tale of his chance presence in New Orleans the day the bakery was destroyed in a fire in 2012. The pies did not return to store shelves for over a decade but now, as the company has slowly ramped up production, John Buzbee of NOLA.com shares news that for the first time since July of 2012, one their beloved original flavors is back: Pineapple. We’re fans of both the chocolate and coconut varieties, but we will certainly give pineapple a spin the next time we are in town.Motor On In: One of the silver linings of the pandemic was that we got reacquainted with staying at motor lodges around the country (including our beloved Lake Shore Resort in Michigan). Writing for Garden & Gun, Jennifer Kornegay shares her picks for seven retro roadside motels in the south. Hitting the Bourbon Trail? Check out the Bardstown Motor Lodge in Kentucky. Planning a getaway to Charleston? Try the Starlight Motor Inn. Looking for a beach? The Hotel Lucine in Galveston, Texas, might fit the bill.
The Coast is Clear: You may not think of coastal Maine when planning a winter getaway, but Amy Traverso is ready to change your mind. “The stark beauty of the Maine coast in winter is something not many of us travelers get to see up close,” she writes in Yankee magazine. “Nestled in my bed at Cliff House, propped up on fluffy pillows and perched a few meters from the ocean, I savor the pale pink midafternoon light that illuminates the roiling sea outside my window.” In addition to her stay at Cliff House, Traverso has some picks for Cape Neddick, Ogunquit, and the surrounding area. (We do too, but that’s for another newsletter.)
— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
Want more? Chat with us on Substack, download our Field Guides, check out our archives, or follow us on Instagram @americanweekender. We’ll be back next week.
Can’t believe I missed reading this last year…but I’m hanging on every word and photograph now! 🤤
those Hubig’s Pie are so dreamy! and I must try pimento cheese on a hot dog stat