TENNESSEE | THE SOUTH

Chef Erik Niel: How a Cajun Kid Helped Build Chattanooga’s Culinary Identity

By Eric Barton | Oct. 11, 2025

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.

Chef Erik Niel talks about fishing the way most chefs talk about their mentors. Growing up in Mandeville, Louisiana, he spent his childhood waist-deep in the lakes north of New Orleans, chasing redfish and speckled trout with his dad and brother. “I was just having fun being outside,” he told me. “It ignited a desire to learn how to cook what I caught or killed.”

That instinct—for knowing where food comes from and what to do with it once it’s yours—still defines everything Niel does. His restaurants, Easy Bistro & Bar, Main Street Meats, and Little Coyote, have become the backbone of Chattanooga’s dining scene not because they chase trends, but because they seem incapable of faking anything. His cooking, like his personality, is precise without pretense.

Chef Erik Niel

Niel left Louisiana for the University of Texas, majoring in psychology and minoring in business—an unusually practical combination for a future chef. “A psych major isn’t worth much by itself,” he said, “but I use that knowledge every day to manage people.” He began cooking professionally in college, finding satisfaction in the discipline of it. “Food wasn’t my passion,” he told me. “It was a skill I became passionate about.”

After culinary school at Johnson & Wales in Vail, he landed at Sweet Basil, a restaurant famously resistant to hiring students. There, Niel learned the rigor of a formal kitchen and the value of respecting ingredients. But when his younger brother was injured playing football, Niel left Colorado for Chattanooga to be near family. He thought it would be temporary—until he met Amanda, the hostess who’d become his wife and business partner.

Chef Erik Niel Chattanooga Truffle Pasta Easy Bistro

In 2005, they opened Easy Bistro & Bar in downtown Chattanooga, an ambitious leap for a young chef with a soft Louisiana drawl and a gambler’s confidence. He called it “Easy” partly for irony—the restaurant business is anything but—but also because he believed good food shouldn’t be complicated. His menu fused Louisiana flavor with French technique and Tennessee restraint: oysters from the Gulf alongside classic bistro dishes that refused to show off. “Taste can never be sacrificed for presentation or a wow factor,” he likes to say.

Truffle pasta from Easy Bistro

Nearly a decade later, Niel opened Main Street Meats, a butcher shop and restaurant dedicated to whole animal butchery. It was, by his own admission, “one of the most special things I’ve ever been a part of.” It was also brutally hard. “It nearly broke me,” he said. “But we finally figured it out. You can’t hide a single thing when you’re breaking whole animals. You either nail it or try again next time.”

Main Street Meats charcuterie.

Neil’s prized cookbooks

It was around that time, he told me, that he started cooking again from Don’s Secrets, a well-worn Cajun cookbook passed down to him through generations. “I’m on the third copy of it now,” he said, noting how those recipes—gumbo, étouffée, pot roast—still guide him more than any fine-dining technique he’s learned since. The book, along with the teachings of Paul Prudhomme, shaped how he thinks about Creole food: bold, deeply personal, and uninterested in perfection.

Chef Erik Niel Chattanooga Little Coyote

In 2023, Niel and Amanda opened Little Coyote in Chattanooga’s historic St. Elmo neighborhood. It’s an airy, indoor-outdoor homage to Texas smoke and agave and also their most casual concept. Yet it still bears the Niel signature: honesty, clarity, and a refusal to pretend something’s good just because it looks that way.

Little Coyote smoked salad

When I asked how he decides if an idea is worth the risk of a new restaurant, he didn’t hesitate. “You never know,” he said. “You just have to be passionate enough to put all your chips back on the table and make the bet.”

Spoken like a man who learned long ago that the best things in life—roux, risk, love—can’t be rushed. You just keep stirring until the beer’s gone, and hope you’ve nailed it this time.

Erik and Amanda Niel