Larry Ragusa was right all along

Eaters who can find New Orleans on the map might come up with Paul Prudhomme or Emeril Lagasse when asked to name a chef associated with the city. Savvier diners might cite Leah Chase or Donald Link. But it takes someone who pays taxes in Orleans Parish to namecheck Larry Ragusa, who in fact doesn’t exist outside of a series of commercial parodies on YouTube.

Ragusa is the creation of New Orleans actor Lawrence P. Beron, who around 2010 invented the coarse chain-smoking baker for a live cabaret-style comedy bit.

“When you grow up in New Orleans, you run across a lot of people who are firm in their convictions,” Beron says of his inspiration for a character who, in a thick hometown accent that listeners beyond the South might mistake for Brooklynese, claims to know what the people of New Orleans want from a king cake: “Garish, lurid, exaggerated, and over-the-top flavors and fillings that would be out of place at a 99-cent all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Turns out he was prescient.

Over the past decade, king cake styles which seemed like satire when Beron started poking fun at them have become staples of the annual pastry season, which comes to a hard stop on Wednesday. Chief among the updates dreamed up by social media-minded bakers are savory interpretations: Nothing says south Louisiana nouveau excess like a king cake crammed with boudin, a revamp that the Lake Charles Convention & Visitors Bureau says attained “craze” status in 2014. (The agency recommends dressing the cake with fried cracklings and Steen’s cane syrup.)

Most of the increasingly common king cake variations incorporate that sort of Cajun or Creole callback. But caloric expressions of local pride haven’t mollified many longtime New Orleanians, who view any kind of filling as a lagniappe too far.

“It’s just an arms race to see how much you can put in,” Beron says, likening flavored cream in a king cake to barbecue atop a ribeye steak. Like other purists, he draws the line at cinnamon.

While it’s a stretch to say southern Louisiana is suffering from a king cake identity crisis, there are now two kinds of cakes battling for supremacy. There’s the familiar ring of buttery pastry, cloaked in a thick coat of bright white icing barely visible beneath alternating patches of green, purple, and gold sanding sugar.

And then there are the creative tributes to other dishes synonymous with the region, such as bananas foster king cake. Picture a bready, bulging oval pumped with banana cream, glazed with brown sugar, anointed with rum, and bedecked with praline pieces and chocolate cookie bits.

Which is more—pardon the expression—authentic?

If the New Orleans-iest of king cakes is the one which encapsulates this ongoing tension between revering the past and embracing subversion—the coexisting agony and joy symbolized by Mardi Gras masks—the cake most deserving of that crown has got to be the one “with a thin layer of salami and olive salad that lets you know from the very first bite that that’s a Larry Ragusa cake.”

For his circa 2010 performances in clubs around town, Beron would slice a cheap supermarket king cake crosswise and garnish it with the innards of a muffuletta, producing something akin to a psychedelic sub. When he pulled off the top of the makeshift prop to reveal Italian cold cuts, he says, “There was this audible gasp from the audience.”

In 2011, Beron teamed up with New Orleans filmmaker David White to feature Ragusa in video shorts with intentionally low production values and new king cake takes, including one embroidered with shrimp bordelaise. Together, they developed an extensive backstory for Ragusa, his beleaguered wife and estranged brother, while White wrote him a jingle on his Casio keyboard.

By YouTube standards, Larry Ragusa was a modest success (which is all that’s modest about Ragusa, who answered the phone when I called Beron for our scheduled interview, hawking a Ragusa special with sliced wieners.) The first fake commercial has been viewed 46,000 times.

In New Orleans, though, the series was so popular that Ragusa now has his own line of (real) t-shirts, promising “50+ babies” in every king cake.

“People who don’t know how I’m involved, they’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, I love those commercials!’” White says. “That’s really nice because I never meant for it to be anything other than a New Orleans thing for locals like myself.”

Despite Ragusa’s name recognition, no one seemed to be in on the joke when he entered a legitimate king cake competition held in a fancy New Orleans art gallery soon after the first videos dropped.

“Nobody is going to believe this,” White remembers thinking while Beron—staunchly in character, as signified by his backward ballcap and ragtag muscle shirt—preened over his junky quasi-muffuletta at the contest. “People are going to see right through this right away.”

Instead, they lined up for samples. Schooled to accept anything that smacked of culinary experimentation, hipsters praised the slapdash mashup of two iconic NOLA foods and snapped pictures for their Instagram feeds, finishing both cakes that Beron brought.

“Larry and I were just dumbfounded,” White says.

“I was stunned frankly that anyone would want that,” says Beron, who has never tasted his alter ego’s signature creation because he’s unsure he could overcome the shame he’d feel if he liked it. “This was a pretty foodie crowd.”

Yet an interest in food doesn’t preclude a fondness for king cakes that skew savory. Nathan Richard ought to know: The Thibodaux chef, who was born on Epiphany—the January day on which king cake is traditionally first served—in 2019 won the Great American Seafood Cook-off with a king cake based on the crawfish bread sold at Jazz Fest.

“I get it all the time: That’s not really a king cake,” Richard says. “You’re right: It’s not. Chefs are constantly trying to push the envelope and you get new tastes. Who would have thought I could make sugar out of crab fat?”

Each year, Richard sells his crawfish-and-goat cheese king cake and boudin king cakes to raise money for causes supported by fellow firefighters. But even he harbors doubts about the latter variety.

“If you step back and think about it: Is this a kolache?” he asks.  

Ragusa hasn’t been heard from in years, save for an earnest Christmas message posted during the pandemic’s first winter. With so many bakers picking up the kooky king cake mantle, it’s hard for one ill-advised recipe to get attention. Beron wants New Orleans to know that Ragusa has noticed.

“I forgot to tell you how PISSED Larry was about ‘being left out of the big, stupit’, know nothing, book about king cakes that those CLOWNS put out recently’,” he wrote in a follow-up email referencing Matt Haines’ The Big Book of King Cake, published in December. It closes with a chapter called “Pushing Boundaries.”

Mardi Gras and the festivities leading up to it aren’t supposed to require strict discipline: That’s what Lent is for. But subversion can seem sacred when it has communal significance. Even if all it involves is eating an iced cake made with a cup of butter when there are vegetables in the crisper, it’s easy to get attached to rule-bending rituals – and rue any so-called improvements to them. New Orleanians who grew up with a certain set of king cake practices worry about what their abandonment means.

“Now they sell king cakes before Twelfth Night,” White says. “I shake my fist at the sky and yell at the clouds: It’s so sacrilegious to me, just like it is to have a muffuletta king cake, in my opinion. But it’s fine: Do whatever you want.”

Obviously, you don’t really want to eat a salami-and-olive king cake this week. But what’s brilliant about the Ragusa shtick is it manages to honor tradition and anarchy at the same time. In short, Beron’s act captures the practice of dressing up and poking fun at society better than any plain cinnamon king cake or one embellished with mirlitons and crawfish tails.

That king cake doesn’t exist, by the way. But give it time: The other day, Richard forwarded me an image of the sushi king cake served at Rock-N-Sake New Orleans.

“The sky is the limit now,” he wrote.

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