Willie Mae Seaton coming to Venice by end of summer
Venerable New Orleans icon Willie Mae Seaton is coming to Los Angeles with what is considered by some to be the best-fried chicken in the United States as reported by Eater Los Angeles. Their hospitality group will open a full restaurant in Venice at 324 Lincoln Boulevard this summer and they plan to expand into the West Coast long-term. Willie Mae’s Scotch House is a huge part of the culinary scene and history of Louisiana and New Orleans specifically. Seaton’s group has previously tested the waters in Los Angeles by partnering with the founders of HiHo Cheeseburger Jerry Greenberg, also of Sugarfish, and Lowel Sharron to make a fried chicken sandwich here in LA.
It will be late summer when the restaurant opens, and will not be either a pop-up or a franchise, but everything you could expect from one of their locations in New Orleans: fried chicken, gumbo, red beans and all the traditional dishes from Louisiana. Willie Mae’s new venture will be in the same category as such restaurants as Dinah’s and Roscoe’s but since nearly everyone loves fried chicken, no one in Los Angeles is likely to complain that there are too many great options.
Kerry Seaton-Stewart, great-grand daughter of Willie Mae and current owner of Wille Mae’s Scotch House in Louisiana, will be running this new Los Angeles branch with her partner Mike Stewart. They will relocate to Los Angeles for most of the year and work in Los Angeles and New Orleans to keep both locations running. There is no estimated opening date as yet, but the restaurant’s reps say, according to Eater Los Angeles, that the restaurant will be open by the end of the summer season.
Willie Mae’s Scotch House was founded in 1957 in the form of a bar and afterward moved to New Orleans’ 6th Ward and became the restaurant that New Orleans knows today. The restaurant has been through a lot, it made it through Hurricane Katrina, the death of the founder Willie Mae Seaton, and the eventual gentrification of the city. Willie Mae’s Scotch House won the James Beard Award as America’s Classic Restaurant for the Southern Region and now that classic Southern-style will soon be coming to Southern California.
