Just 90 miles southwest of Chicago and a mile south of Starved Rock State Park is the village of Utica, population just shy of 1,000. It’s home to a single street of shops, including an Amish furniture seller and a scattering of curio stores and bed-and-breakfasts. Even though neighbors in nearby LaSalle-Peru accuse Utica of wanting to become the next Galena, it’s a quiet place.
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Forty-five-year-old McFarlain was born and bred in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in the swamps west of the Atchafalaya basin, the heart of Cajun country and the rumored hideaway of pirate Jean Lafitte. McFarlain headed north to Illinois in 1993. Back home he’d cooked in friends’ restaurants, and he quickly found himself cooking at a local motel. Though he’s never been trained as a chef, “I’ve been with this food all my life,” he says. “In Louisiana, everyone’s raised on this food and learns how to cook it. You go out on the boat and get it, and then you boil it up to order. You eat what you catch.”
After the batter breakthrough, McFarlain decided to strike out on his own. He opened the original Cajun Connection in 1995, settling next door to the bait shop due to cash constraints. In 1997 he hired manager Amy Martin to run the front of the restaurant, which allowed him to concentrate solely on cooking.
McFarlain heads down to Louisiana every two or three months to visit family, stock up for the restaurant, and occasionally do a little gator hunting. “You put a baby nutria rat or other meats, like a turkey leg, on a hook as bait,” he explains. “Then you put the hook on a cable and attach the cable to a jug line and tie the rope around a cyprus tree. Then throw the bait into the water where you think the gators are. You take off and come back later and look for your jug. The gator comes along and swallows the meat and then tries to regurgitate it, and the hook gets caught. Once it’s caught, you shoot it.
