Southern Comfort, Revisited

Tucked away on the corner of Common and Baronne, Mila appears unimposing, but inside it tells a very different story. Since its inception, Mila remains one of the preeminent restaurants in New Orleans’ Central Business District.

At its helm, head chefs Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing work to create southern food with an international edge. Now, with Mila successfully under their belt, they welcome another venture, a cookbook.

Southern Comfort: A New Take on Recipes We Grew Up With, which goes on sale Tuesday, Oct. 2, balances anecdotes of the married couple’s meeting and upbringing in the Deep South with made simple recipes of the most iconic New Orleans food, such as Oysters Rockefeller. Patrons of Mila might also find some familiar recipes in the barbeque lobster or the snapper.

“The goal of the cookbook,” Vines-Rushing says, “is to break down our recipes to a home-adapted version.”

Their snapper recipe, a favorite dish among Mila customers, for instance, comes down to a simple combination of citrus juice and melted butter. Similarly, step-by-step pictures show the process of making barbeque lobster, a recipe that at first sounds unmanageable for the ordinary kitchen.

Both Vines-Rushing and her husband have an impressive culinary background, which comes through in their cooking. Working at restaurants in San Francisco and in New York City, they acquired a taste for different ingredients from the west to the east coast. Slade Rushing also worked at an Asian inspired restaurant, which explains some of the cleaner and ambitious flavors you can experience at Mila.

“We have lived a lot of other places, so [Southern Comfort] is southern with a little something else,” says Vines-Rushing.

Despite moving all around the country the two always made it back to New Orleans. The book talks about opening their first New Orleans restaurant just days before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

Trading in the spatula for the pen was not always easy. This was their third go at starting a cookbook. Other attempts were forgotten or put on the backburner until both were ready to fully commit.

“Writing recipes was one thing,” says Vines-Rushing, “head notes and chapter introductions were another, but amazingly we found it really easy. We were shocked we found our inner writer.”

Writing the cookbook became an especially arduous task since Vines-Rushing also gave birth shortly before finishing the book, but once they got the hang of it story telling was second nature.

“We grew up in the South and story telling is such a huge part of our culture. We could always write something about a recipe,” says Vines-Rushing.

With some of the childhood stories the chefs leave it up to the reader to figure out whose story belongs to whom.

“I hope they get to know us through our book,” says Vines-Rushing, “know why our food is the way it is and where we draw our influences from."

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Southern Comfort, Revisited

Creators of MiLa Put Their Stamp - and Stories - on the Southern Cookbook

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