There are chefs who spend their careers trying to get as far away from the food they grew up eating as possible. Then, eventually, many of them discover the cruel little joke: the stuff Mom, Dad or Grandma cooked was pretty damn good.
Chef Kate Rousset Chef Kate Rousset, now leading the kitchen at The Cavalier in East Austin, figured that out.
After roughly 15 years cooking in Austin, the Louisiana-raised chef has built a career around seasonal ingredients, local farms and the controlled chaos of professional kitchens. These days, some of the food she’s most interested in cooking at The Cavalier comes from digging through heritage family cookbooks and reconsidering the flavors she grew up around.
“A lot of cooking in Louisiana takes time and care,” Rousset says. “I use that slow approach to elevate simple foods.”
Austin helped give her a different perspective on those traditions. The city’s restaurant scene grew, more chefs and cuisines arrived, and Rousset’s own cooking evolved with it. Somewhere in that process, she found herself appreciating Louisiana food more than she had before and began folding those familiar flavors into the seasonal, farm-driven style she’d developed in Texas.
It’s a funny thing about leaving home. Sometimes you need a few hundred miles before you can properly taste it.
From Austin Farms to a Neighborhood Bar
Rousset spent several years at Hillside Farmacy before becoming Chef de Cuisine at Store House Market + Eatery in Bastrop, working alongside chef Sonya Coté. Those years pulled her deeper into local sourcing and eventually into outdoor kitchens at Eden East, where she planned coursed dinners around the farm and cooked over live fire.
She also operated Bacchus & Brown inside Full Circle Bar, another stop in a career that kept bouncing between neighborhood restaurants and food grown much closer to the kitchen.
If there’s a thread running through those years, it’s a respect for ingredients without making them unnecessarily precious.
She’s also a regular at Austin Food & Wine Festival, one of her favorite events because it gives her a chance to represent The Cavalier, see what other chefs are cooking and “geek out on kitchen-related things.”
Chefs talking shop with other chefs is basically the restaurant industry’s version of accountants discussing spreadsheets, except somebody usually brings brisket.
Rousset also remembers Field Guide fondly, particularly because the event paired chefs directly with farmers. That relationship between farms and kitchens has followed her through much of her career, from Store House and Eden East to the seasonal menus she’s developing today.
Since 2023, Rousset has been Chef de Cuisine at The Cavalier, where all of that experience works surprisingly well inside a neighborhood bar.
Take the duck confit with Brussels sprouts, carrot purée and smoked salt, a dish Rousset says she’s especially excited to put in front of guests.
Duck confit has somehow acquired the reputation of requiring white tablecloths and a waiter who knows more about Burgundy than you do. At its roots, though, confit is old-school preservation built around salt, fat and patience. That last part makes it a natural fit for a chef who talks about Louisiana cooking in terms of time and care.
Rousset likes the idea of serving a dish like it in a casual bar precisely because it’s not what most people expect to find there.
Louisiana Keeps Finding Its Way Onto the Menu
Fall brings duck and root vegetables together with classic pub fare, while Rousset’s upcoming ideas include an aguachile and house-made duck boudin balls. She’s also planning a five-course seated dinner this winter, with details still to come.
For generations, boudin has been one of Louisiana’s great pieces of working-class food: practical, deeply regional and subject to the sort of arguments people usually reserve for politics and college football.
Food like that carries geography, memory and family around inside a sausage casing. Louisiana provides the memory. Central Texas supplies the season. Years on restaurant lines provide the technique.
At The Cavalier, all three can show up without much ceremony. Maybe that’s what makes the boudin such a fitting dish for where Rousset is now. After years of farms, live fires, restaurant kitchens and changing menus, one of the foods pointing forward happens to come from where she started.