A restaurant named Eunice

Chef Drake Leonards will carry his hometown of Eunice to a new Chef John Besh restaurant in Houston named Eunice.
Leonards, named chef-partner, said he was on his way to a menu-planning session when he answered his phone Wednesday morning.
“What we want to have is really the soul,” he said of the Eunice menu.
“It’s what it meant to me and what it sill means to me to go home and share food with friends and family,” Leonards said.
Leonards, who shared his cooking skills at the Experience Louisiana Festival at LSUE in October 2015, said the restaurant Eunice will be about the food of Southwest and Southeast Louisiana.
“In the spring and summer months we will have the crawfish and rice from our local farmers. Guys I grew up that are now farming in Eunice and Acadia and St. Landry Parish area,” he said.
Leonards said he learned from Besh how to refine the traditional foods.
The Besh Restaurant Group has signed a lease to open a restaurant at 3737 Buffalo Speedway, a new office development in Houston’s Greenway Plaza area, The Advocate reported.
The restaurant will be “a Creole, Cajun brasserie” to open in the fall of 2017, The Advocate reported citing a news release.
“We’ve been fans of Houston for a while, and honored to now have the opportunity to share our culture, which is as much about hospitality as it is about food,” Leonards said in a prepared statement.
Drew Mire, operations director and general manager for Lüke in New Orleans and its sister restaurant in San Antonio, will be managing partner of Eunice, The Advocate reported.
Eunice will be Besh’s fourth operation outside the New Orleans area, it reported.
A biography of Leonards on the Times-Picayune website stated “... Leonards started out as a dishwasher at the age of 15, where he knew that he was meant to be in the kitchen. Drake began working with Chef John Besh seven years ago at Restaurant August and moved to Lüke as part of the opening crew of Chef Besh’s third restaurant. Shortly after, Chef Besh sent him to work with his mentor, Karl Joseph Fuchs, in the Black Forest of Germany, where he lived and worked for a year and a half. He then traveled through Spain, France, Switzerland and England. In April of 2012, he returned to New Orleans to work at La Provence for a year, learning more about the Provençal side of Chef Besh’s cuisine. Drake has since worked with Chef Besh on a number of projects, from Top Chef: New Orleans and Hungry Investors to the most recent opening of Johnny Sánchez in New Orleans. Now, he brings his knowledge and passion for the Cajun heritage of Louisiana to the menu at Lüke.