CHEF PROFILES | LOUISIANA

Justin Devillier’s Long Way Home to New Orleans

The James Beard-winning chef followed a childhood cookbook from California to New Orleans. Now his next restaurant brings the story back to family.

By Eric Barton | Sept. 3, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Growing up in Dana Point, California, Justin Devillier could cross the street from his family’s small condo, descend roughly 180 stairs, and reach the Pacific. He surfed, speared sand bass and halibut, and boarded $5 twilight fishing trips from Dana Wharf. During lobster season in October, he’d swim with friends beyond the breakers after dark, flashlights in hand, and pluck Pacific lobsters from the reefs.

Eventually, his mother tired of receiving the day’s catch with an implied dinner order. She handed the responsibility back to him.

“If you’re going to bring it home, you’re going to learn how to cook it.”

Those first meals led to La Petite Grocery in New Orleans, where Devillier became one of the city’s most accomplished chefs. He won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South, wrote the acclaimed The New Orleans Kitchen, and helped turn La Petite Grocery into a national name, including recognition by the inaugural Michelin Guide to the American South. Now, after more than two decades of success there, he and his wife and business partner, Mia Devillier, are preparing to open Daughter’s Neighborhood Italian.

Devillier

Devillier’s first education came at home. His mother ran a catering company called the Munchie Mermaid from the family’s 800-square-foot California condo, producing stuffed mushrooms, quiche, beef stroganoff, enchiladas, lasagna, and carrot cake. She taught him how feeding people could become a livelihood, and also how quickly an idea could turn into a business.

“Being ready isn’t necessarily a feeling as much as it’s a decision,” he says. “Sometimes you just have to decide you’re going to do something and start.”

His parents were divorced, and his father, a Louisiana native, kept cookbooks from home. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen captured Devillier’s attention. The recipes were complicated, heavily detailed, and dependable when followed. Years later, the book would help pull him across the country.

Heirloom tomatoes with blue crab

Devillier began cooking professionally at about 16, at an Italian restaurant within skateboarding distance of home. After working at Southern California resorts, he moved to New Orleans at 21, chasing the flavors he had encountered in Prudhomme’s book. He arrived during summer, found the city staggeringly hot, and felt at home among restaurant workers riding streetcars in checkered pants.

LPG Cheeseburger

Gumbo

He cooked at Bacco, Stella, and Peristyle before joining La Petite Grocery as a line cook in 2004. Hurricane Katrina struck about a year and a half after his move. Devillier returned to a city where restaurants ran with skeleton crews and nobody knew what recovery would look like.

“You can spend a lot of energy worrying about all the things happening around you that you have absolutely no control over, or you can identify the things you can control, figure out the tasks in front of you and get to work.”

Chef Justin Devillier La Petite Grocery New Orleans chicken

Devillier helped rebuild La Petite Grocery, became executive chef in 2007, and faced another defining decision three years later. He and Mia were offered the opportunity to buy the restaurant. Mia, who joined as general manager in 2009, brought a background in hospitality, business, and accounting. Together, they turned La Petite Grocery into one of the city’s enduring restaurants, with dishes including turtle Bolognese, panéed rabbit, and blue crab beignets.

Pan-roasted chicken

Its longevity, Devillier says, belongs as much to the people around it as to its owners. Staff members have met and married there. Guests have celebrated engagements and anniversaries. Children have eaten their first solid food at its tables. “At some point, a restaurant becomes bigger than the food or its creators,” he says. “It becomes a collection of relationships and memories that belongs to many people.”

Key lime pie

La Petite Grocery

Daughter’s will extend that idea into the former home of Upperline, JoAnn Clevenger’s Uptown institution, which closed during the pandemic. The restaurant takes its name from the three Devillier daughters and the business partner’s daughter, Hailey, who first noticed that both families had girls only.

It also gives Devillier a ready response when someone asks why a Californian with a French-Louisiana restaurant is cooking Italian food. His wife is Italian, and therefore his daughters are, too.

“So now when somebody asks me, I can say, ‘No, but my daughters are.’”