In the mornings, Gerald Ardoin loves to get to his little Baldwin County restaurant a couple of hours before the rest of his staff arrives and long before the lunch crowd starts to pour in.

He’s here by himself, tending to simmering pots of seafood gumbo, crawfish etouffee, red beans and rice, and whatever specials he has on the menu that day.

It is his quiet time, his happy place.

“I usually come in with a game plan in my head already from the day before,” Ardoin says. “On a busy morning, I can have as many as 15 or 16 pots and pans going at one time.”

Then, around 11 o’clock, when the doors open to his Café Acadiana restaurant in the small, southern Alabama town of Silverhill, Ardoin cranks it up a notch and turns into this high-energy host with a thick Cajun accent and a boisterous laugh to match.

Ardoin — whose surname is pronounced “ARD-wahh” (“just like a baby goes, ‘wahh,’” he says) — works the dining room like a maestro, greeting every guest, checking on their food, thanking them for coming.

This, too, is his happy place.

“I’m a people person,” Ardoin says. “I love coming out and meeting folks. I typically touch every table in the dining room every day — just tell them ‘hi’ and get to know people.”

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From Louisiana to Alabama

Gerald Ardoin grew up Opelousas, La. — a city of less than 20,000 people just north of Lafayette and about an hour west of Baton Rouge in the southern half of Louisiana — where his father ran a neighborhood grocery and then a furniture store before opening a restaurant, Ardoin’s Seafood, in 1979.

He started working in his father’s restaurant when he was 16, doing everything from slicing tomatoes and dicing onions to washing dishes and mopping floors.

“He eventually taught me to work the line, the frying and the grilling,” Gerald says of his father, Burnley “Blanc” Ardoin. “He’s the one who taught me how to handle all those pots at one time.”

By the time Gerald was in his 20s, his father entrusted him with all the day-to-day operations of the restaurant, from the cooking to managing the staff.

Then, in 1995, the younger Ardoin left his father’s restaurant to open a place of his own. It was the first Café Acadiana, and he ran that for eight years until selling it in 2003.

That following January, Gerald and his wife, Christina, who were newly married at the time, left Louisiana and moved to Fairhope, where they rented a house.

“I actually came here with no job or anything,” he remembers. “I had just sold the restaurant, so I had a little jingle in my pocket. I didn’t even look for work for three months. I took a break.”

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Eventually, Ardoin went to work as a sales rep for the foodservice distributor US Foods, selling groceries and equipment to about 45 restaurants around Baldwin County.

“I was calling on restaurants, so I was still involved in the restaurant business but on the opposite side of it, on the wholesale side of it,” he says.

Not long after moving to Alabama, Gerald and Christina discovered and became enchanted with Silverhill, a town of less than 800 people about 10 miles from Fairhope in southern Baldwin County.

“We didn’t really know it existed,” Gerald recalls. “We kind of found Silverhill, kind of fell in love with the little town, and when it came time for us to buy a house later that same year, we bought a house in Silverhill. And we’ve been here ever since.”

Back in the kitchen

Later, after nine years of being on the other side of the restaurant business, Ardoin starting to feel the pull to be back on the inside.

“I had become pretty close to several of my accounts (at US Foods) that were really strong operators, and I watched them growing their businesses and doing really well, and I started getting a little jealous,” he says.

“Although I was in and out of restaurants all day every day with US Foods, I still had the itch to get back into the business myself. I wanted to do the cooking. I wanted to meet the people and build something special.”

A breakfast and lunch spot on Silverhill Avenue — the main drag between Fairhope to the west and Robertsdale to the east — caught his eye.

“I watched this little restaurant open and close four or five times in eight years,” he recalls. “And the last time they got ready to close down, I caught wind that they were going to be closing, so I went and found the owner of the property and secured a lease.”

On Sept. 3, 2013 — 10 years and change after Ardoin sold the original Café Acadiana in his hometown of Opelousas — he opened the second Café Acadiana in his adopted home of Silverhill.

A taste of home

The name Café Acadiana (pronounced “uh-kay-dee-an-uh”) refers to wide swath of southern Louisiana where French-speaking Acadian refugees from Canada settled back in the late 1700s.

And when he reopened Café Acadiana in Silverhill nearly 10 years ago, Ardoin wanted to bring a taste of his native Louisiana to his new friends in Alabama, introducing them to crawfish etouffee, catfish Pontchartrain and, one of the restaurant’s most popular appetizers, crispy boudin balls.

“Number one is these boudin balls,” Ardoin says. “Most people still can’t pronounce it (”boo-dan”), or don’t know what it is. A lot of people are familiar with it, though. But the boudin balls, right off the bat, were a big thing.”

At dinnertime, Ardoin gets to flex his creative muscles a little bit, with such signature dishes as the Mahi Boudreaux, a blackened Mahi filet ladled with a shrimp-and-crawfish cream sauce, and the Boudreaux’s Burrito, a deep-fried tortilla stuffed with shrimp, crawfish and crabmeat and smothered with that same shrimp-and-crawfish cream sauce.

“I’m always trying to come up with a different concoction,” he says. “I learned a lot from my dad, but I’ve learned a lot over the years from watching other people, from talking to other people, from trial and error on my own.”

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Two years after opening Café Acadiana, Ardoin bought the building he had been leasing, annexed the adjoining hair salon, and nearly doubled his capacity to its current 96 seats.

“The local people in the area have really enjoyed what we’re doing and how are we doing it,” he says. “Our word of mouth has been fantastic. and our business just continues to grow. We’re almost 10 years in, and each year has been a year of growth.”

Ardoin looks around the dining room on a weekday afternoon and sees two- and four-top tables filled with guests ordering fried shrimp, blackened catfish, sausage po’ boys and Bayou burgers.

“As you can see,” he says, “it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and they’re still coming in. We’ve still got a good crowd, and this is every day.”

Making sacrifices

Unlike their dad, none of Ardoin’s three sons — Lance, Chayce and Kadin — is interested in following their father into the restaurant business.

Nor has the 59-year-old Ardoin encouraged them to do so.

“It’s a sacrificial business,” he says. “You always want maybe your kids to follow in your footsteps and carry on your legacy, but by the same token, I know the sacrifices I’ve made over the last 40 years.”

Ardoin was reminded of just how much he has sacrificed when his father — who was the reason he fell in love with the restaurant business to begin with — died last March.

“He was almost 92 years old, 67 years of marriage to my mom,” Ardoin says. “My mom was completely broken and distraught.”

They buried his father in Opelousas on a Thursday morning, and Ardoin had to leave immediately after the funeral to work a 700-seat catering event back in Daphne that he had booked months before.

“That’s one of the sacrifices that you make,” he says. “I couldn’t let those 700 people down. . . . I could not call them on that Monday and say, ‘I just lost my father. I’m sorry, I can’t do your catering.’”

Besides, he knew his father would have been furious with him if he had canceled.

“My dad would have been the one that looked me square in the eye and said, ‘What, are you stupid? You get your (rear end) over there and go do that catering. Your word and your integrity are at stake. You gave your word. By God, you pull it off.’”

Putting down roots

When he talks to his friends and family back in Louisiana, Ardoin loves to tell them he lives in Mayberry.

“It was 19 years ago that we moved here,” he says. “My middle son was raised here. He was 5 years old when we moved here, and my youngest son, who is 18 years old, was born right here in Fairhope at Thomas Hospital.

“So, we have roots,” he adds. “This is Christina’s and my home now. We’re here. We love it.”

Gerald serves on the Silverhill Town Council and emcees the annual Silverhill Heritage Day Festival, and Christina is the assistant principal at neighboring Robertsdale Elementary School.

And whenever one of the local elementary or high schools needs money for the band or the cheerleaders or a field trip, Gerald always steps up and prepare plates of jambalaya for them to sell at their fundraisers.

It’s his way of giving back to the town that means so much to him.

“It’s been a joy and a pleasure to serve my little town,” he says. “Our town has been great to me, so I help with everything I can.”

Café Acadiana is at 16137 Silverhill Ave. in Silverhill, Ala. The phone is 251-945-2233. Hours are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesdays and 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays. For more information, go here.

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