After a 20-year career in fine dining, Sukeban is Jacqueline Blanchard’s first restaurant and solo project - a New Orleans take on a Japanese-style izakaya. Jacqueline is a 10th-generation Cajun from Bayou Lafourche in Southeast Louisiana’s Assumption Parish. Her family fled Nova Scotia during the Acadian exile and settled in the Lafourche Valley in the late 1700s as farmers, where they’ve remained. Cooking has always been a family tradition, with crawfish boils in the spring and Cajun boucheries each fall.
 

After earning a Culinary Arts degree from Nicholls State University post-Katrina, she joined Chef Thomas Keller’s team at The French Laundry and Bouchon in Napa Valley. She also worked at Frasca in Boulder, Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, and served as executive sous chef at New Orleans’ Restaurant August. After a summer in Provence, she became sous chef at Benu in San Francisco, helping them earn three Michelin stars.
 

In 2015, Jacqueline returned to New Orleans to open Coutelier, a curated knife shop specializing in hand-forged Japanese cutlery. She travels annually to Japan to source these tools, supporting multi-generational Japanese blacksmiths. Her deep respect for Japanese culture and cuisine is evident in Sukeban, where she thoughtfully sources premium Japanese ingredients as carefully as she does tools for Coutelier.