Hot Tails chef and owner Cody Carroll is scrapping plans for a new concept restaurant in Baton Rouge and is planning instead to open the restaurant in New Orleans’ Warehouse District.
Carroll spent the past year looking for a site in Baton Rouge and earlier this year thought he had found the ideal location on a four-acre tract on the north side of Nicholson Drive, between Lee Drive and GSRI. But the New Roads chef says he was unable to get the property to be feasible and could not find another suitable location.
“After months of dedicating all of our time to crunching numbers on Baton Rouge locations, a New Orleans opportunity arose,” Carroll says. “It is truly an opportunity we would have to be idiots to pass on. We want everyone in Baton Rouge to know that we tried everything we could to make this concept work in Baton Rouge.”
In an August 2013 Business Report cover story, Carroll—who had just been crowned the 2013 Louisiana Seafood King—discussed the differences between the New Orleans and Baton Rouge restaurant scenes and explained his reasons for wanting to stay in Baton Rouge.
Though he hopes to eventually open a restaurant here, he says “the problem with Baton Rouge came from the fact that we want to seat around 100 customers, not 300, and we just could not get the numbers to work,” with a smaller establishment. Hot Tails executive sous chef, Owen Hohl will be taking the helm in the New Roads kitchen, which he has been running for the past several months.
Carroll’s New Orleans restaurant, which will be located on Annunciation Street near the intersection of Tchoupitoulas Street, is scheduled to open by the end of the year. He is not yet ready to disclose the concept or the name.
“This was a really hard decision for me,” he says. “We love Baton Rouge and hope to represent it well in New Orleans.”
