Before he was a chef, Jean-Paul Bourgeois was a hunter and a Louisiana boy; he didn’t know it at the time, but he would spend the rest of his life bringing the South to the rest of the world. “I try the best I can to be an evangelist for where I’m from in other places in the world,” he said. “I’ve brought Louisiana everywhere, from Napa Valley to San Francisco to the Virgin Islands to New York City.”
Today, Bourgeois is perhaps best known as the creator of the wildly popular Duck Camp Dinners, an ongoing, multi-episode documentary series on YouTube in which he and a few lifelong friends share their experiences hunting, cooking, fishing and living in South Louisiana. The series brims with an infectious enthusiasm for life in the South and covers everything from conservationism to cleaning wild game. You’ll learn how to cook — and might get a little better at hunting — but the real takeaway might be what a special place Louisiana is, and how warm and funny its people are.
Bourgeois grew up in Labadieville, Louisiana, a small community just up the bayou from Thibodaux. He spent his high school and college years in Thibodaux. His earliest professional cooking experience was at a little seafood shack, and he worked his way through school in local kitchens and catering. He attended Chef John Folse Culinary Institute, the celebrated four-year culinary degree program at Nicholls State University, founded by one of the godfathers of Cajun cooking. Afterward, he took his South Louisiana culinary sensibilities on the road.
“Growing up in South Louisiana is not very different from a young culinary student that grows up, say, in Naples, Italy. Just as they’re going to have a passion, love and understanding of pizza, people around here have that same type of understanding and love and passion for cooking Southern food in general. It’s just part of who we are. All my friends from South Louisiana are great cooks too. I just happened to go into a profession where I could expand that love and passion for cooking and develop it into a career.”
About 10 years ago, he decided to take his career digital, using social media to develop and tell stories about the place he’s from. “My career has not been a linear path, as most careers aren’t,” he told me.
Chef Bourgeois started duck hunting with his dad around age seven; as he was growing up, the two did a lot of hunting in Terrebonne Parish and the Bayou Black area. “A lot of people might have a center-console bay boat or maybe a little johnboat with a tiller-handle Johnson on the back,” he said. “My dad didn’t have any of that. He had a mud boat for duck hunting. And during those couple months of duck season, that boat worked hard. And I went with him.”
It was the best way he knew how to connect with his father, something he learned at a very young age. “To be completely frank with you — and I’m not too bashful to say this — those are the best moments that I have with my father, the best memories that I have,” he told me. “We haven’t always had the greatest relationship, but those moments are the ones I hold on to.”
His father is no longer able to duck hunt, he explained, but from those childhood experiences, he learned the power of camp life and the bonds built by hunting: “The same sort of visceral connection I have with the friends I grew up with, hunt with, and have on the show.”
Duck Camp Dinners is one way he memorializes that time spent on the bayou, and the floating camp at the heart of it all. “The camp is a very special place that has grown in importance to me and my friends, a place where we can rally and escape the classic struggles of life, the ups and downs and stresses and pitch points. It’s become an almost spiritual place that we can find a lot of peace in.”
The show was conceived as a series of long-form videos on Instagram where, today, Bourgeois has over 100,000 followers. “The core cast of Duck Camp Dinners includes some of my best friends. We would be at the floating camp, and I was like, man, this would be interesting to document the meals that we cook there.” Since there’s no refrigeration there, when they hunt, the cooking never stops, whether on a grill or on a gas burner with a propane tank.
It was also a way to share bayou hunting life with the rest of the world, and the kind of food Louisianans cook beyond the typical gumbos, crawfish boils and jambalaya. “I thought people should know about this kind of local cuisine, beyond the Cajun staples [that are] already famous. This is stew chicken, or shrimp stew with boiled eggs, or catfish sauce piquant. Those classic Cajun gravies or stews that we all know about, that’s what I wanted to talk about.”
The annual, increasing threat of hurricanes also motivated him to start filming. “It’s a floating camp. You don’t bring it in when there’s a hurricane coming. You tie it down and cross your fingers.” The camp has survived several major storms, the worst of which was Hurricane Ida, which passed right over it. “The camp survived like a champ: not even a broken window. But we all know that any time something like that happens, that camp could wind up in the marsh, never to be seen again. By memorializing it, though, it could always be there. We could always have that place.”
He wasn’t quite sure what the show would look like. When he finally decided to turn the idea into reality, Bourgeois hired a two-man production crew. The sound guy rigged the cast with mics, and Bourgeois only had one direction: “I said, look, I don’t know what we’re going to get out of this, but just don’t stop filming.” Nobody knew what was going on — which worked in the show’s favor. “We were just completely ourselves because we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. I think, a lot of times, season one had the most magic because we were all too stupid to understand what was actually happening.”
After filming completed, he brought the footage into the editing room and was astonished by what he saw. It was more than hunting and cooking. It was a spontaneous, sincere expression of Louisiana life. “It was like, man, it would be a shame just to make some five-minute videos from all this.” He decided to turn it into a storytelling series.
Louisiana music features heavily in the first three seasons of Duck Camp Dinners. “We put out a significant budget on that. Now, it’s ones that we can afford, you know? But I wanted every Louisianan to look at this show and feel like we really captured the essence of this state. And that’s through food, that’s through music, that’s through our relationship with the outdoors, and the cuisine that comes from it.”
Conservation is a recurring theme on the show. “If you’re going to kill something, you should eat it,” said Bourgeois. “You should honor that animal’s life, that fish’s life. I don’t believe in hunting or fishing anything I don’t eat, unless it’s a catch-and-release situation: brook trout or salmon that we’re responsibly releasing back into the ecosystem.”
People who don’t hunt, or don’t know hunters, don’t necessarily understand the types of cuisine they are missing out on. “I’m a classically trained chef, and we can’t serve wild game to the public anywhere in the United States, except maybe for wild boar out of Texas that was harvested and butchered in a USDA facility.”
For this month’s issue of the magazine, Chef Bourgeois gave us his recipe for duck à l’orange. “It came from my love for classic French cooking,” he said. In 2005, Bourgeois was part of the first exchange program between the Paul Bocuse Institute in Lyon, France, and the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute. He spent three months in Lyon honing his skills in the kitchen, and it gave him a new perspective on his home cuisine.
“Duck à l’orange is classic French haute cuisine,” he explained. “My goal wasn’t to re-create a classic French sauce; it was to look at it the way a Louisianan would look at it. Decades ago, Alice Waters popularized a brilliant phrase: ‘If it grows together, it goes together.’ When looking at duck à l’orange, this classic French recipe, I said, well, we’re on Bayou Black shooting green necks and blue-winged teal. I can get satsumas from the citrus grove right down the street on Bayou Black Road. (Though this year’s freeze means there aren’t many satsumas to be found.) And now, what does that look like through the lens of a duck camp? That was me trying to understand how cuisine arrives in South Louisiana, and how it changes.”
It’s the sort of dish that’s perfect for Duck Camp Dinners. “Anybody can go on YouTube and watch it and hopefully come away with a new respect for local wildlife and the food we create from it. The things hunters harvest — somebody fought it. Somebody worked hard to get this. You reel in a snapper and you start to ask, how can we honor this in the best way?”
He is proud of the portrait of local life he’s bringing to the world. “I’m a firm believer that I was made in the image of the place that I’m from,” he said. “Seasons one, two and three of Duck Camp Dinners are a pretty darn good, authentic, original snapshot of what it was like for me growing up — and so many other Louisianians growing up. That’s been the goal all along: to really tell people what it’s really like to be from South Louisiana.”
