Gumbo to Geaux is a chef-driven food truck (and catering and events company). In every sense.
Owner and founder Etricia Robinson, a classically trained chef, is driven to offer the authentic country-Creole dishes she grew up eating. “If Emeril Lagasse and Paula Deen had a baby,” she says, “it’d be me, because I do Cajun-Creole plus Southern and all the love that goes into cooking. It’s a labor of love, but it’s my business.”
Robinson trained at Culinard, but perhaps, more importantly, she studied in her Grandma Sadie’s kitchen.
She told us all this and more for an Alabama News Center story. You can go here to see another version with a cool video.
“My grandmother, Sadie Hunter Williams, had 13 grandkids,” she says. To stand out (and be able to stay in Sadie’s kitchen), Robinson had to become indispensable. “All the kids had to go outside, but she said, ‘You come help me cook.’ I was like, sure, I’ll help you cook so I can stay inside. … So, I learned how to cook from her. It was just something we did together. And after she passed away, it’s something that keeps her memory with me. I always feel like I’m close to my grandma when I’m in the kitchen.
“I tell people all the time I had to go to culinary school to realize my grandma was the greatest chef I knew. We raised pigs and chickens and goats in Mississippi. She could butcher a pig. We would hang it, smoke it. She made head cheese. This is called ‘charcuterie.’ I didn’t know that then. … I had to learn that there’s a difference between a pastry chef and a savory chef. She was one and the same! She made all the cakes and pies and all the savory foods. So, I was ahead of the game in culinary school. They thought I was a master, and I said, ‘I’m not. I’m just Sadie’s granddaughter.’”
Robinson has been part of the Birmingham-area food scene for decades, working in corporate settings as well as in locally owned restaurants. She incorporated her Gumbo to Geaux business in 2012 as a catering company. She started running her food truck after the pandemic, and today it’s Gumbo to Geaux catering and events and food truck.
She was born and raised in Natchez, Mississippi. Her father is a doctor in Baton Rouge; she has family in New Orleans, too. “So, I tell people I’m from Highway 61,” she says. The flavors of these places along this highway inform her cooking.
Her signature foods include a fabulous red beans and rice. Each component of this dish—from the savory, fluffy rice to the creamy Camellia beans to the perfectly diced trinity of peppers, onions, and celery to crispy, browned Conecuh sausage—stands easily on its own. Each bite is delicious. She starts with dry beans and doesn’t use meat in the bean preparation, so this dish can be vegetarian if you want. You can top it with shrimp or chicken instead of sausage. “We just try to make good food that most people can enjoy and give them options,” she says.
She does crawfish quesadillas, Pasta TriciE (penne in a creamy tomato sauce with blackened chicken, Conecuh, and diced bell peppers) boozy bread pudding, fried okra with Swamp Sauce (her version of comeback sauce), and a hurricane punch that you can punch up a bit yourself if you’re so inclined.
Her AndyGator burger features fried onion rings, pepper jack cheese and Creole Dijonnaise. “Alabama meets Louisiana” with the Gumbo Dawg, a grilled Conecuh sausage topped with onions and peppers, sauteed in her gumbo sauce, and a smattering of fried okra.
Her Gator Baiter sandwich is made with chicken. “If you go hunting for gators,” she says, “you’ve got to have a chicken. That’s why we call it the ‘gator baiter.’ You use the chicken to bait the gators. It’s a fried chicken sandwich and has (homemade) pimento cheese and hot honey (her Gator Baiter sauce). It’s pretty fantastic.”
The bestselling dish is Creole-spiced shrimp and cheese grits.
“We do sauteed shrimp; we always use Conecuh sausage—shout out, Alabama! We use confetti-diced peppers. We make our grits,” she says. “So it’s cheddar-garlic grits topped with peppers, sausage, and blackened shrimp. It’s pretty simple, but people love it.”
Robinson doesn’t pick sides when it comes to gumbo debates—just that gumbo needs to be gumbo. She’s adamant when she says, “If it looks like soup and it tastes like soup, then THAT AIN’T GUMBO!”
Oh, and the roux needs to be dark. “I must have been made to make gumbo, because this is the perfect roux color,” she says laughing and pointing at the smooth, brown skin of her arm. “Once it matches my hand, we stop. … The richer roux makes a difference in the flavor.”
They do two gumbos on the truck—a chicken and sausage version (made with Conecuh sausage and chicken breast meat so it tastes light and clean) and a seafood version where she adds shrimp and crab to the basic recipe. Off the truck, she says, they can do turkey gumbo with turkey sausage and breast meat. She does a vegetarian version with seven greens and okra—a classic Gumbo Z’Herbes. That’s for special occasions like Lent and Easter. Mindful of customers’ needs, she can make gumbo gluten free using okra as a thickener.
Everything at Gumbo to Geaux is made from scratch including the sauces—a sweet-savory bacon jam, the Swamp Sauce, a Creole Dijonnaise, a remoulade, and the hot-honey Gator Baiter sauce. “I’m very picky and nitpicky,” Robinson says. “Everything we do on that truck, we make it … to be exactly the way we want it to be.”
With a head for business to go with her heart for cooking, Robinson is bringing her sauces to the market, hoping to get her Gator Baiter sauce and Sassy Sadie Salt to grocery store shelves in the very near future. The salt is available on the truck right now.
She’s also branching out with a new and different way to use her food truck.
“We’re launching a program that is catered toward corporate events of team building,” she says. Aimed at executives, the program helps people learn to work better together. “This gives them an opportunity to build a menu, to execute that menu and to sell it,” she says. “So, what happens beforehand—the pre-work—is we give you a packet that tells you to write your menu. We will review that menu to see how plausible it is in a set amount of time. … We shop the menu for you; we bring the truck preloaded with the ingredients for your menu. You have your prep team, and we show you how to get started on prep work and then how to execute. Of course, we’ll have two members of our team there to manage the truck and to help with preparations of foods. But for the most part, they get to write the menu, run the menu, serve the menu then eat together as a part of the team builder.” She can accommodate up to 20 participants—some outside and others inside the truck.
People constantly ask Robinson when she will open a restaurant, and she says she’s not ruling out an eventual brick-and-mortar location. “If the opportunity presents itself—and I feel like it’s the right opportunity—we will take it. I’m just not in a rush to do it.”
For now, she enjoys bringing her foods to her fans—whether that’s catering in their homes, at various venues or with her food truck that travels throughout Birmingham to over-the-mountain communities to Trussville, Gardendale, Alabaster and beyond.
“I’m happy on my truck,” she says. “When people come up, I hope that’s what translates to them. People always say, ‘They’re so nice on that truck.’ Yeah, we’re nice because we appreciate you. I love what I do. I’m very ‘chef-y’ that way. It’s your heart on the plate, and you want people to love it. So, we try to put forth our very, very best effort. That’s how we’ve been getting customers. That’s how we have repeat customers.”
When asked what she does best, Robinson says: “You can get food anywhere. I think we give (our customers) a sense of the ‘Cheers effect.’ You know how people would go to Cheers and drink a beer? I’m pretty sure there was beer all over Boston. But you go where people know you. … We’re very disconnected right now in the world. People may be great on social media, but in person they can’t even make eye contact. … We give them a sense of community, you know. So, yeah, we make great food, and that’s our main purpose—to feed you—but we also want you to feel seen. That’s important now because a lot of people out here are not feeling seen.”
That’s another of life’s lessons she learned in Sadie’s kitchen.
“There’s a point in food where it’s not just food for nourishment, it’s an experience. … It makes you just feel different,” she says. “It warms your soul, and it gives you a memory of something. …. It’s that comfort and that level of flavor that is only created through love. That’s what I learned from my grandma.”
205-873-2740 or
Chef@GumbotoGeaux.com
Check Gumbo to Geaux social media for hours and locations or go here to see a calendar: https://www.gumbotogeaux.com/find-our-truck/
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