Chad Kirtland can tell a Louisiana native the moment they walk into Rouxster Catering — the accent gives them away, along with the way they pronounce the menu. Jambalaya. Muffaletta. Étouffée. For those customers, great Cajun and Creole food is not a novelty but a birthright, and Kirtland cooks for them first. “The Louisiana crowd is very discerning, so those are the ones I’m cooking for,” he says. “I figure that if I can please them, everyone else will fall in step.”
The strategy has worked. Rouxster — the name is a play on the roux, the flour-and-fat base that separates real Cajun cooking from imitation — opened its takeout storefront at 209 S. Section Street in Fairhope in February, in the former home of the Rootz catering business, complete with a full commercial kitchen. Open 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, the shop runs a daily lunch menu, sweet treats, and a cooler full of refrigerated and frozen meals that regulars stock freezers with like provisions for a hurricane.
From media career to gumbo pot
Kirtland’s route to the stove was a long one. He grew up in New Orleans and cycled through Loyola, the University of New Orleans, and LSU, with first jobs in restaurants, but his adult career ran through media and marketing until 2020. He first landed on the Gulf Coast as a travel writer and, like many who pass through, kept coming back until the visits became a residence.
The cooking, though, was always there. “I’ve always cooked, ever since I was a little kid, sort of out of necessity,” he says — watching his grandmother and great-grandmother cook and picking things up along the way. In late 2019, tired of working for others, he started a video production company and catered on the side. The food outran the cameras. “I think eventually you give your passion the attention it deserves.”
He and partner Jan Phillips now run a catering operation that stays busy with special events while the storefront keeps its hours — a two-front business built on Louisiana fundamentals and Gulf Coast word of mouth.
The menu, and the rules
The food follows the traditions strictly. There are two gumbos — one with shrimp and crab, one with chicken and sausage — each built on a different roux, the chicken-and-sausage version darker and thicker, a fall-winter gumbo that sticks to the ribs, the seafood version thinner and brighter. The roast beef po-boy has built a following of its own, messiness calibrated precisely. And there is one non-negotiable: “There are no tomatoes in my gumbo, and there should be no tomatoes in any gumbo,” Kirtland says. The trinity — onion, bell pepper, celery — with garlic, and Conecuh sausage, the Alabama-made smokehouse staple that bridges his two home states.
The Louisiana purists he cooks for notice all of it: the roux, the sausage, the absence of tomato. So do the judges. Last November, representing the Rouses supermarket chain, Kirtland and Phillips took first place in the blind category at the Gumbo Festival hosted by CoastAL restaurant in Orange Beach — the chicken-and-sausage gumbo that now anchors the winter menu, and an award-winning credential no marketing budget could buy.
The Rouses connection
Partnership with Rouses, the Louisiana-founded grocer with stores across the Gulf Coast, has supercharged the business. Kirtland appears in the company’s cooking segments on local television and leads cooking classes at Rouses locations in Daphne, Spanish Fort, and Gulf Shores — a teaching circuit that has introduced Eastern Shore home cooks to his methods and sent them back to the storefront with orders.
The other engine is the Book Cellar at Page & Palette, Fairhope’s beloved bookstore-and-events space, where live musicians and a stocked bar make a natural stage for a catering operation. Rouxster’s Monday presence there began off the cuff — “partly because we both love live music” — with charcuterie boards and big pots of red beans and rice, gumbo, or jambalaya feeding the crowds. “It really helped us build a name,” he says. “We love being there whenever we can.”
A New Orleans kid on the Eastern Shore
Kirtland knows what he is up against: a food town with serious restaurants and trained chefs, and a catering rookie with no formal credentials. His answer is authenticity rather than technique — the food he grew up eating in New Orleans and South Louisiana, made the way his family made it. “As much as I can make it, this is the food I grew up with,” he says.
It is a formula the Gulf Coast understands instinctively. The Eastern Shore’s food scene has deep New Orleans roots — Mardi Gras arrived in Mobile before it reached Louisiana, after all — and the appetite for a straight, traditional gumbo has never needed explaining. Kirtland’s late-career pivot from marketing professional to award-winning gumbo maker reads, in that light, less like a career change than a return.
How to get it
Rouxster Catering operates from 209 S. Section Street in Fairhope, takeout only, Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with catering available by phone at 251-237-3030 for events large and small. The frozen-meal cooler empties fastest before weekends and holidays; the gumbo selection rotates with the seasons, heavier in winter, brighter in summer.
For Louisiana transplants missing home, for Eastern Shore natives who grew up on their own grandmothers’ roux, and for anyone who believes a po-boy should require both hands and a plan, Rouxster has staked its claim on Section Street. The Louisiana crowd already knows — and they are pronouncing it correctly.