Juicy, peppery-shot links from Vaucresson Sausage Co. are an integral part of local family recipes, restaurant menus and the annual food lineup for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

Vance Vaucresson, the keeper of his family’s brand, wants to make the company an integral part of Seventh Ward neighborhood life again. This week marked a milestone on that quest.

Work is now underway to redevelop the longtime home of Vaucresson Sausage on the corner of St. Bernard Avenue and North Roman Street.

The building, a rambling old grocery, has sat idle since Hurricane Katrina, graffiti now blots out old murals that once advertised its Creole sausage on the clapboard flanks. 

But by late 2021, it should once again be open as Vaucresson’s headquarters, this time with a restaurant, a meat market and a pair of affordable-rate apartments all under the same roof.

Vaucresson also hopes it will be a statement about culture and place in a changing city as a Black-owned brand steeped in New Orleans history makes a return.

“We want a business that can contribute to the neighborhood in different ways, as a market, a café, by employing local people, by offering housing for people who are too often getting priced out of their own neighborhood,” said Vaucresson. “When people eat here, it will be a place to get a sense of Creole culture, an education on what that means for New Orleans.”

Long road home

On Friday, Vaucresson convened with his partners in the project and local officials at the property for an event to mark the beginning of the redevelopment work. Vaucresson had his own way of framing the event.

“We’re looking at this more like a rebirth than a groundbreaking,” he said. “The roots are already there, we’re not breaking new ground. We’re giving new life to a building that went into disrepair and adapting it to the needs of the neighborhood today.”

It’s been a long road to this point.

Vaucresson has struggled through the years to bring back the company's one-time home while keeping the brand alive. Working from other facilities, he has been making sausage all along to supply restaurant clients and home cooks and to cook at festivals, where his stand is a perennial favorite for many.

“For 15 years I’ve been trying to get back but have failed miserably to find a way to do it, and all the while we’re watching other big developments come into our city with deals that are not accessible to smaller entities,” Vaucresson said.

He’s gotten to the brink of bringing the old building back in the past, only to see deals fall apart before fruition. This time, though, Vaucresson said the right partnership is in place to make it happen.

“It’s about having the vision to be stewards to help business owners in inventive ways,” he said.

The nonprofit Crescent City Community Land Trust is co-developer on the project, and partners include Liberty Bank and Edgar Chase IV, chef at his family’s famous Dooky Chase’s Restaurant.

Chase will have an important role in the restaurant portion of the project, Vaucresson’s Creole Café, where meats the company makes on site will be worked across the menu.

“It's going to be a showcase for a lot of Creole flavor, the daube glace, the hogs headcheese, chaurice and grits, all the sausages," Chase said of the cafe's future menu.

Chase said Vaucresson sausage is a cornerstone ingredient in Dooky Chase’s kitchen for decades. Its classic Creole chaurice is a pork/beef blend with layered flavors and a peppery bite that’s sliced into gumbo, blended into burgers or served on its own.

While its culinary uses are many, Chase said Vaucresson’s bigger significance is cultural.

“What you’re tasting tells a story of the Creole flavor that runs through families in New Orleans,” he said.

Family and fest

Vance Vaucresson can trace the roots of his family business back to Levinsky Vaucresson, who emigrated to New Orleans from France in 1899. Trained as a butcher, he had a stall at the St. Bernard Market, then part of a network of public food markets. That market later developed into Circle Food Store, a one-of-a-kind grocery and community hub just two blocks from where Vaucresson’s is located today.

The butcher shop business was passed from one generation to the next and evolved through the years. By 1967 Vance's father, Robert "Sonny" Vaucresson Sr. had also opened a restaurant called Vaucresson's Creole Cafe on Bourbon Street, in what later became part of Pat O'Brien's. It was a rare example of a Black-owned business in the French Quarter.

When the first Jazz Fest got underway in Congo Square, just outside the French Quarter, Vaucresson's Creole Cafe was one of the vendors that festival organizer George Wein tapped to showcase the flavors of New Orleans for the crowd. Those early crowds were small, but the family stuck with the festival and is now the only food vendor to be part of every Jazz Fest.

Improbably, that also included 2006, after the Vaucresson’s home base on St. Bernard Avenue was knocked out by flooding from the Katrina levee failures. Vaucresson was able to resume production at other facilities and keep the Jazz Fest tradition alive.

In the years that followed, he’s focused on festivals while trying to find ways to rebuild the property. Now, with a partnership in place and work underway, he’s eager to return Vaucresson Sausage Co. to its old neighborhood with more ways to serve that neighborhood.

“I didn’t want to find myself on my death bed knowing I didn’t try,” Vaucresson said. “We have a lot of work to do, and now we’re dealing with COVID too, but I know I have to try.”

Project funding is coming in part through the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, the state’s Office of Community Development, the City of New Orleans and the Louisiana State Historic Preservation Office (with historic tax credits brokered through Stonehenge Capital) and Enterprise Community Partners.

At Friday's event, longtime Vaucresson customer Ericka Lassair served plates of sausage and grits to attendees from her Diva Dawg food truck. That sausage has been a staple on her menu for a very simple reason, she said.

"That's the flavor of New Orleans right there," Lassair said. "That's what I want people to taste."