CHEF PROFILES | LOUISIANA
Chef Patrick Teagle Turned a Career Detour Into Feliciana Bistrôt
After leaving a bank job for New Orleans kitchens, Patrick Teagle now leads BRG Hospitality’s French-Southern bistro in Covington.
FELICIANA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton | May 1, 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.
Patrick Teagle’s first professional uniform was not a chef coat. It was whatever a bank teller wears, while also quietly wondering if this is how adulthood is supposed to feel.
For two years, he worked behind a counter, handling other people’s money while the thing that made him feel most like himself happened somewhere else entirely. Cooking, at first, had been his release valve. Then it became inexcapable. “Cooking had always been an outlet for me, especially for my mental health,” Teagle says, “and I started to feel pulled back toward it.”
That pull has now taken him to downtown Covington, Louisiana, where Teagle leads the kitchen at Feliciana Bistrôt. It’s part of the BRG Hospitality restaurant group, inside the former Star Theater, with Paradise Cocktail Lounge upstairs. It is a fitting landing place for a chef whose life has kept circling back to New Orleans: family history, culinary school, the Domenica prep kitchen, Restaurant August. Now he’s got a restaurant built around French technique and Southern ingredients.
Chef Patrick Teagle
Teagle was born in Texas and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where childhood had the useful simplicity of time outside, Boy Scouts, and meals that became the center of everything. “Growing up in Fort Smith was peaceful and grounded,” he says. “Food was always central to daily life.”
His mother helped make cooking feel ordinary, ordained, a non-negotiable. People sat down, ate, talked, and learned that feeding someone could be a form of attention. “Sitting around the table and enjoying a meal together was just a natural part of our lives,” Teagle says, “and I came to realize that not everyone grows up with that.”
Like a lot of people who eventually find their calling, he did not march toward it. He tried sports. He tried scouts. He tried on versions of himself. “One of the biggest challenges growing up was figuring out where to focus my energy and what I was truly passionate about,” he says. By 2019, cooking had stopped feeling like a pleasant diversion and started seeming like an answer. “Once I realized … that I was actually good at it, I knew it was something I needed to pursue seriously.”
Blue crab beignets
New Orleans made sense, and not just because it’s a restaurant mecca. His parents met there, and he had visited almost every year. When he found the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute, he talked it through with his family, left banking behind, and moved toward the city that already had a claim on him.
Escargots
Feliciana
His first stretch in a serious kitchen arrived at Domenica, where the romance of cooking met the less cinematic facts of station work. “I was still pretty young and didn’t fully understand how much I didn’t know,” he says. He was working under chef Corey Thomas, and the gap between enthusiasm and execution became clear quickly. At one point, Thomas kicked him off his station. Later that day, he invited Teagle out for beers and told him he was going to teach him how to be a chef. “That really stuck with me,” Teagle says.
From there, Teagle moved through BRG kitchens. He rose from prep cook to sous chef at Domenica, went to Restaurant August, and returned to Domenica as executive sous chef. At August, he learned that ideas do not become menu dishes simply because a cook loves them. Early on, one of his dishes was turned down. The useful lesson was not rejection. It was repetition.
Red royal shrimp with pasta noire
“Developing dishes takes trial and error, and over time, I was able to contribute more successfully,” he says. One of his keepers was NOLA barbecue escargot, a dish he still points to with pride.
At Feliciana Bistrôt, Teagle’s cooking has the structure of a French bistro and the accent of Louisiana. The menu leans toward dishes like escargot, beef Bourguignon, rabbit fricassee, pâté de campagne, oysters, and seasonal seafood, with local sourcing doing a lot of the work. The point, he says, is not to turn classics into a dissertation. It is to cook them with enough clarity that they still feel current.
Upstairs, Paradise Cocktail Lounge gives the building its looser second act: cocktails, small bites, themed programming, and a little more mischief. Feliciana is the dinner. Paradise is the reason the night does not have to end on schedule.
Paradise Cocktail Lounge
For Teagle, the two concepts bring him back to the thing that started it all, before the bank, before culinary school, before the stations where he learned how little he knew. It’s an idea built around feeding people with intention, in a city-adjacent corner of Louisiana that understands dinner as both routine and occasion. “Cooking became more than just a hobby,” he says. “It became a kind of lifeline for me.”
The Feliciana spread
Baton Rouge’s Best Restaurants Still Know Their Way Around a Dark Roux
From Cajun classics to sharp new kitchens, these are the best Baton Rouge restaurants right now.
The Biltmore Championship Travel Guide: Where to Stay, Eat, and Play
After eight decades away, the PGA returns to Asheville, and we've put together a guide to help plan a trip to watch the action.
