Someone Else's Bowl

On the legacy of Pableaux Johnson, and the radical power of commensality

Feb 04, 2025

Red Beans Road Show — Johnson’s red beans in progress, from a fabulous 2016 article by Max Falkowitz in SAVEUR; photograph by Matt Taylor-Gross

A few days ago, we went out to a local Caribbean restaurant, where my five-year-old, gourmand that she is, ordered the mac and cheese. After eating about half her portion, we requested a takeaway container for the leftovers. Suddenly she looked up, and in a voice many years beyond her age, asked the server, “Excuse me, are there any nuts in this?” Half-startled, half-amused, the server confirmed the pasta was nut-free, and we proceeded to box up the leftovers. I knew why she asked—her favorite teacher had a severe nut allergy, and that anything brought in a kid’s lunch had to be nut-free. It was a small moment, but a true note of grace in a week of dismal news: my kid was learning to think of others’ appetites before her own.

It’s a beautiful but far too rare thing, to keep other people’s eating at front of mind. Chefs and cooks have always had to do this, both for profit and for the good of their communities. From organizations like World Central Kitchen, providing millions of meals to people enduring times of crisis and conflict, to the grassroots movement of restauranteurs donating meals to those out of work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But making space at your own table requires another step entirely: to redefine the pleasure of a meal by who you can welcome to the table. The term “commensality”, often used in sociological and anthropological studies of food, means the practice of eating in groups, and though it’s the most natural thing in the world, it is also one that requires an entirely different state of thinking than eating on one’s own. The sociologist George Simmel, one of the first scholars to talk about commensality, said that shared meals had the power to turn “the exclusive selfishness of eating” into a habit of intentional empathy. “Persons who in no way share any special interest can gather together at the common meal,” Simmel wrote. “There lies the immeasurable sociological significance of the meal.” When we envision ourselves as cooking and dining in community, we create space to intentionally care about the feeding of other people, and to convert commensal associations into social ties.

It’s exactly that magic that made the departure of Pableaux Johnson, the renowned New Orleans food writer, photographer, and cook who died this week at age 59, so hard to bear. According to those who knew him best, Johnson was as essential to New Orleans culture as the second lines he so fervently photographed; Lisa Cericola of Southern Living observed that Johnson “had a remarkable way of not only making his subjects feel at ease, but somehow making them feel seen in the span of a few seconds.” Nowhere did he make people feel more seen than at the table—specifically, at the kitchen table once owned by his grandmother, where he hosted weekly Monday night feasts of red beans and rice. I first heard of Johnson’s work via a 2017 episode of The Splendid Table, which unpacked the origins of the weekly feast. Johnson began the tradition during his years in Austin, when he would host whole-day parties for up to 200 people at a time. When he returned to New Orleans, back at his grandmother’s table, the tradition evolved to a more humble yet more sustainable one: bowls of stewed red beans and rice, served to whatever 10-12 people could be seated around the table. The menu was always the same—beans, rice, a side of cornbread, and whiskey (for dessert)—and frequently refused offers of additional sides. “I like having it be ‘serve yourself,’” he remarked. “I put a roll of paper towels on the table for linens. I put the spoons in the middle. Everybody gets their own drink and it’s self-serve.” Johnson did this not only to keep the menu (and cleanup) simple but to keep things at a “human scale,” to offer a table that was “just large enough and just small enough.” Though the idea of a weekly dinner party seems impossibly effortful for some, for Johnson it was the simplest of habits. “Once you build up those muscles,” he remarked, “ it’s nothing to do it. … It’s an excuse to fill the table.”

Even impassioned Southerners would say that red beans and rice is not a complex dish, and rarely one that gets a place of honor at the table. In Louisiana red beans were considered a “wash day meal,” made on Mondays so that women could stew the beans while they tended to the laundry, adding the leftover meaty bones of Sunday pork roasts to season the beans. Yet like the greatest dishes in history, it was a meal as valued for sustenance as it was for flavor: a meal that ensured no one would go without, and one that affirmed that every bowl was worth filling. As a Louisianian, Johnson not only understood but affirmed the power of that shared meal, and found a way to make it a habit in his life for more than a decade, There was something effortless yet radical in Johnson’s weekly feasts, and so profoundly admirable. Especially in households where the next meal is never in doubt, how hard would it be to open up a weekly meal to others—to create a stable table in an unstable world?

The more I read about Johnson, the more I wish I’d had the chance to join him at the table, and the more I think about the power of more dinner series like this, more spaces for intentional, radical commensality in a world too often defined by self-interest. It seems like a beautiful way to honor Johnson, but also a way to carry forward the service that so many in the food world perform so well: the ability to stretch a dish, to pull up a chair, to create a little more abundance wherever we can. No matter what’s in the bowl—red beans, risotto, a simple vegetable soup—I like the idea of throwing the doors open, setting the table, and saying, “Come in. We have plenty to spare.”

French Fries and Martinis

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