There are things you’d expect to find inside an Irish pub in the English seaport city of Liverpool. A Cajun restaurant probably is not one of them.

Nonetheless, thanks to two entrepreneurs with Alabama ties, the Liverpudlian menu now includes some of the staples of Gulf Coast life: gumbo, po-boy sandwiches and red beans & rice with Andouille sausage.

After months of international effort by Reggie Pulliam and Adam Williams, SuSu’s New Orleans Kitchen opened in June. It’s a full-service restaurant that operates inside a large bar called Molly Malones.

How that came to pass is, for Louisiana native Pulliam, an exuberant tale chock-full of good omens, chance meetings and lucky stars falling into alignment. On a more practical level, it starts with him selling an insurance agency he operated in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach. That afforded him the opportunity to indulge his love of soccer, specifically the Liverpool-based Everton Football Club.

He’d had an interest for years, thanks to the fact that Everton had fielded some American players such as Joe-Max Moore and Tim Howard, legendary for once scoring from his own goalkeeper position. Now he and his wife, Cassie, were able to travel and see the team play more often.

During a European train ride, the idea blossomed in a brainstorming session fueled by “a second bottle of prosecco:” He’d bring Cajun cuisine to Liverpool in a restaurant named for his mother, Susan, aka SuSu. He started scribbling menu ideas on a napkin.

A few days later after he and Cassie had settled into their favorite Liverpool hotel, the Titanic, he started bouncing the notion off of the locals. Again and again and again, he said, he just happened to make chance connections with people who could help nudge his crazy notion toward feasible reality. Finding that an available kitchen inside Molly Malone’s was a particular boon, he said: It cut down the risk and expense of opening a free-standing restaurant.

As things snowballed, he partnered up with Mobile native Williams, a chef who’d grown up visiting relatives in Louisiana, where he began to learn about Cajun and Creole cuisine. Pulliam had experience in the restaurant industry too, so they made a formidable team.

They understood that while they might not be starting from zero, they would be introducing some unfamiliar flavors to the market.

“There are already a couple of vaguely New Orleans-themed options there,” Pulliam said. “There’s even a Popeyes. The Popeyes over there is huge. Every time we went by the Popeyes in Liverpool Center — think of the French Quarter — the line was out the door. So we were doing a lot of market research and asking people inside and outside of Popeyes, like, what do you think about Popeyes? And our market research was telling us we have to educate people on New Orleans and Louisiana. They don’t associate Popeyes with Louisiana, New Orleans. They associate it with America.

“We’d ask, ‘When I say New Orleans food, what’s the first thing that pops in your mind?’ They’d say ribs and steak. So a lot of people don’t have the correct concept of New Orleans food.”

The menu they came up with seems to balance accessibility with authenticity. From the appetizers onward, some items clearly reflect that New Orleans heritage (boudin balls, “SuSu’s Famous Shrimp Bread,” po-boys) while others don’t (Buffalo wings, cheesy fries, smashburgers).

“All our meat is smoked before we cook it,” said Pulliam. “We found a butcher to make Andouille sausage for us. And we have a big smoker back there. So we smoke all our sausage, all of our chicken, all our pork, all the wings are smoked before we prepare them. They’re full of flavor.”

“The overall and overwhelming reaction is, people are loving the food,” he said. “People are having flavors that they never had. You know, you walk through the dining room and you see people, like, just nodding their heads as they’re eating, which is a great sign.”

At the same time, he said, there have been a few surprises.

“You know, Liverpool’s a port city,” he said. “We were surprised at the lack of people eating seafood. We thought shrimp po-boys and oyster po-boys would be our huge sellers. And they’re not. They’re not. We do have a debris-style roast beef po-boy that we put on the menu that is our number one seller. And then we have a fried chicken po-boy that we toss with what we call jazz sauce. Jazz sauce is like Buffalo hot, tempered with butter so it’s not super spicy. It’s got a little kick, with garlic and Parmesan. We take those chicken tenders, we toss them in there, we put them on a po-boy and they’re loving that, too. But we were surprised at the lack of people eating seafood.”

SuSu’s gumbo and jambalaya, similarly, are made with chicken and sausage. A menu option called the “holy trinity” lets you sample those along with the red beans & rice, an unusual twist on familiar terminology.

“The red beans is probably, in my very biased opinion, our best dish,” said Pulliam. “It’s an 18-hour dish. We soak the beans overnight, we boil them three times, and then we cook them with the andouille sausage, the ham hock, for about five hours.”

It makes for some interesting perspectives. One early review came from a TikTok food critic known as “the Scouse Ghetto Gourmet,” who sampled his way through the menu shortly after the venue opened. The clip, which features an appearance by Pulliam, also can be seen on Instagram. The gourmet describes jambalaya as being “like a USA version of paella.”

Funny as it sounds, he’s … not completely wrong there. It just depends on how you look at it.

The response so far has raised Pulliam’s hopes that he’ll be able to expand SuSu’s to other locations, he said. He’s laying the foundation. SuSu’s is certified under a “Living Wage” program, which requires a base pay at a certain level above minimum wage. He plans to implement profit-sharing as soon as the startup becomes profitable. “We want to grow organically so our employees learn the culture, learn our ‘whys’ about what we do,” he said. “And then they can have their own SuSu’s restaurants when we expand.”

In the meantime he sounds like he’s having fun, and why wouldn’t he be?

Williams has been running the show since the opening; Pulliam has been stateside, focusing on some of his other ventures. But plans call for him and his family to return in late September and stay for a month, giving Williams a break.

“We live about a nine-minute walk from the restaurant,” he said of a flat that he and Williams rent. “Every day that we go to our restaurant, we’re walking right by the Cavern Club, which is where the Beatles got their start. We’re about 50 steps away from the Cavern Club.”

“Liverpool is known as a party town,” he said, praising the city’s energetic arts and entertainment scene. “Similar to New Orleans in America.”

It’s been a good summer. The best may be yet to come.

“It’s still not gumbo weather over there yet,” said Pulliam.