When Helen C. Franklin fired up the stove in her big house in Plaquemines Parish, anyone who could claim the remotest acquaintance mustered up some excuse to stop by. Plaquemines is a long, low-lying sprawl of country stretching from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.
“Grandma’s cooking,” recalls her grandson David Franklin, “brought family and friends together. The whole family helped with the cooking. Cooking and eating were really big with us.”
From the day he turned seven, young David was a part of this.
“I learned to cook just by watching and being involved,” he says.
He was a cook at a nearby seafood restaurant while he was in high school.
“It broadened my horizons,” Franklin recalls, “made me step outside the box of traditional family meals.”
He wasn’t confident enough to stake his future on his cooking just yet, though, and for the next twenty years he entered the world of finance and accounting. He did some catering, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the praise of strangers made him realize: “I can cook – and I’m good at it.” Meanwhile, his grandmother had died and Franklin realized that he wanted to keep her legacy going. That’s why a huge portrait of Helen Franklin smiles benevolently at the diners in David’s Tulsa restaurant, C’est Bon.
Franklin opened his first restaurant in Denison, Texas and later moved it just across the Red River to Durant – but he wasn’t content.
“I wanted to go to a larger city, with more diversity and more culture,” he says. He did his research, exploring both the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metros. Eventually he settled on a space inside the newly developed shopping mall on north Peoria. TEDC, the non-profit that ran it was, says Franklin, “really helpful with improving the space.”
He worked on building, not publicity, but the day C’est Bon opened, the place was packed. The word had spread. It was a historic moment: The history of food in New Orleans is intimately tied to Black cooks and chefs. Enslaved people brought from Africa such quintessentially New Orleans dishes as gumbo. Later, Black chefs working behind the scenes in New Orleans’ most famous restaurants – and later, on their own at places like Leah Chase’s restaurant, Dooky Chase – invented so much of what the world thinks of as the finest New Orleans cuisine.
“But I don’t focus on being Black,” Franklin says. “I focus on taking what I know about my culture and displaying that to Tulsa.”
It’s a proud and wonderful display. Franklin, whose creative talents really shine, invented almost all of the dishes. (One exception is the smothered chicken, which uses Helen Franklin’s exact recipe.) But his recipes are designed to give you the authentic feel of New Orleans. It is, he says, “as if you were to visit my hometown and come to a family reunion or dinner.”
Some of the best dishes are named after his family. Grandma’s Smothered Chicken, of course. Uncle Buddy’s Special features red beans served with chicken wings. The Anderson has fried eggplant stuffed with seafood au gratin atop angel hair pasta topped with a rich decadent Creole sauce.
“My grandpa Anderson grew eggplant,” Franklin remembers.
Then there’s the Highway 23, their most popular item. Fried or blackened catfish reclines on a bed of dirty rice with a wonderful Creole crawfish sauce.
There are lots of delectable dishes on the menu. Standard ones like the aforementioned crawish etouffee. Seafood boils. Sandwiches. Lovely mixed drinks, too. You can’t go wrong here.
“Every dish is a hit,” Franklin assures us. “Every dish is created with love.”
