Jackson’s Place: The New South Comes to Old San Pedro

The newest restaurateur in San Pedro is serving Louisiana cooking, but not in the surroundings you might expect. Kevin Faciane knows that most Southern eateries feature the rustic cabin look, but that’s not his vision at the new Jackson’s Place.

“The sawdust-on-the-floor thing is fine for a certain style of place, but it’s not what I want to do,”  Faciane said. “It’s more on the Creole side than the Cajun side, a more contemporary and urbane Cajun. That would be a nice name for a restaurant, Urbane Cajun.”

There haven’t been many changes to the art-filled room that used to be a wine bar serving simple sandwiches, but the menu has been transformed. Faciane is cooking the food that is part of his heritage — though he grew up in Los Angeles, both parents were from Louisiana.

“Mom was used to cooking what her mother made and she was busy raising four boys and stuck with what she knew,” he said. “Home cooking was Cajun. Monday night was always red beans and rice; there was fried chicken, smothered pork chops — all the traditional items. That’s the culture she passed on to us.”

Kevin learned that cuisine and kept cooking it for friends after he became an aerospace and technology engineer. The idea of opening a restaurant came to him gradually.

“My family is really big,” he said. “So, any time we got them all together we were cooking for almost 50 people anyway. My brothers and I started doing Mardi Gras parties about 15 years ago, and the parties got bigger and bigger. Then we added a Fourth of July party, tailgate parties for the [U]SC-Notre Dame game. After doing all those parties and always having people over for food, we started thinking, maybe we should look for a restaurant.”

He started the project with an engineer’s attitude to research and got a job at a now-closed Ports O’ Call Village restaurant to see if he liked the business.

“I was working at Northrop by day and doing banquets at Nizitich’s so I could learn how a restaurant operates. I saw for myself what goes on in a restaurant and even after that, I still wanted to do it. I decided you could run a restaurant and have a life at the same time if you do it right. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it.”

After deciding to go forward, the San Pedro resident considered a location in Belmont Shore, but a chance interaction led him to consider a place closer to home.

There was one problem with the restaurant he took over: it had a tiny kitchen.

“It was a wine bar that served snacks, but didn’t have a cooking line — they had a panini press and convection oven, and they made cheese plates. People stopped by on their way to dinner or after an event, but it wasn’t a food destination. We’re going to extend the building with a cargo container right outside the backdoor; it will be fitted out in advance with the other items we need. ”

That new kitchen is still under construction but the menu has already expanded. A barbecue in the back is turning out pulled pork, jambalaya, gumbo, seafood etoufée and other delights. These are made with attention to tradition.

“Cajun cuisine involves sauces that take hours that are put on items that take minutes,” he said. “The seafood doesn’t touch heat until it’s almost ready to be served, so the customer always gets everything fresh. We think you can tell the difference even if you’re not really familiar with this food.”

He is ready for the day when that kitchen is finished and will add a jazz brunch, fried chicken, steaks, and grilled seafood. The big plans involve a big investment and raised the question of why he would locate his restaurant in a town with no obvious cultural link to the American South.

“The future is bright here in downtown San Pedro, despite the fact that there’s not a big Cajun community locally,” he said. “A lot more people know about this food than you’d expect, because they’ve tried it elsewhere and are excited about getting it near their homes. Many of my customers have Southern roots and there’s an underserved African-American community in San Pedro that appreciates this cuisine. Our target audience is San Pedrans and there is nothing like us here.”

He also cites demographic changes as a reason for optimism.

“The downtown core is very urban, and younger people today — the ones between 25 and 40 — they like urban,” he said. “They’re not afraid of it; they embrace the history and the authenticity and character. There are projects that are coming in that will bring in new tenants and workers, and that’s not including whatever impact we get from the San Pedro Public Market renovation. That will become a magnet for people from outside and will also give locals more reasons to come downtown instead of thinking of other places for dining and nightlife. There are plans to make this a pedestrian-friendly area, which worked very well in South Pasadena, and people are going to want to come and walk around.”

“People who love this cuisine will travel to find it, and they like to try them all – people come in and tell me they’ve been to Little Jewel downtown, Ragin’ Cajun in Redondo, Uncle Darrow’s in Carson, they list them all,” he said. “We’re now part of that conversation. ”

The engineer-turned restaurateur has done a remarkable job of transitioning from an orderly business to one that is unpredictable under the best of circumstances.

“An engineer can go into their office and close the door and tweak something until it’s perfected, but here every day I’m judged on every minute of the experience,” he said. “Someone asked me what the business is like and I asked them if they had ever hosted a family Christmas. You know how you have to run around all day and get things ready, work for hours serving and then at the end of the night everybody goes home? At the end of that you have a year to get ready to do it again. I have to do that tomorrow, so for me it’s Christmas every day. It’s harder than that, because when you have people over for Christmas you know how many you invited and when they’re coming — I don’t.”