Patula Blooms: A New Chapter of Flavor in a Historic Courtyard
photo by Kim Ranjbar
September 2025Chef Rob Tabone tips his hat to French Quarter history while offering a fresh European-esque menu in a lush Royal Street courtyard
– by Kim Ranjbar
photographs by Kim Ranjbar and Ellis Anderson
This column is underwritten in part by the Matthew Peck Gallery
In Latin, patula means “wide-spreading”; in Sanskrit, “eloquent”; and in Tagalog, “poetic.” For Chef Rob Tabone, though, it’s chiefly a nod to Marigold, the restaurant that thrived in this space nearly a century ago.
Launched late last year, Patula emerged as a partnership between luxury eyewear company KREWE and Rob Tabone, a chef who gained hands-on experience working locally for the Link Restaurant Group, BRG Hospitality, and the family-owned Bywater BBQ spot The Joint.
Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, Tabone began his career track studying history and English literature at Florida State University.
“I had some ideas of being some kind of a creative type, [but] I wasn’t particularly interested in going the academic route,” admits Tabone. “I figured if I did interesting things, took different jobs, went with the flow, that something would eventually come of it.”
Chef Rob Tabone in the courtyard of Patoula, photo by Ellis Anderson
His first job in the restaurant industry was as a dishwasher in a “crappy Italian place” with shady owners. “I think they were looking to under-pay somebody,” laughs Tabone. While in college, he worked in a pizza parlor.
After college, a friend of Rob’s set out on a wildly ambitious journey, riding his bike from Sarasota, Florida to Austin, Texas, but he only made it as far as New Orleans.
“I was trying to get out of Florida and he offered me a free place to stay,” explains Rob. “I took him up on that with plans to stay for six months or a year . . . and here I am, ten years later.”
“I got into cooking because I thought it was interesting and I wasn’t really qualified to do much of anything else. I fell in love with it here,” says Tabone.
After moving to the city, he started working as a prep cook at Cochon, at first learning how to dice vegetables and later roasting whole hogs, butchering, fermenting and pickling.
Before opening Patula, Tabone ran Wood Duck, a pop-up/catering business serving elevated dishes and bar snacks at LeBlanc + Smith’s Marigny bar Anna’s NOLA and inside The Tell Me Bar in the Lower Garden District.
The pop-up drew local and visiting food-lovers with seasonal menus featuring manchego cheese burgers with sherried onions and scallion salsa verde, seared Hokkaido sea scallops swimming in calabrian chili, and razor clams with white asparagus and shaved bottarga.
Rob’s inspired menus soon caught the eye of designer eyewear brand KREWE’s founder Stirling Barrett, who brought him on for a series of catering events across the city—including a benefit for Son of a Saint, the New Orleans nonprofit dedicated to mentoring, educating, and enriching the lives of fatherless young men.
“They were looking for a tenant for their courtyard space and I needed a home for what we were trying to do with Wood Duck,” Tabone explains.
The three-story, Creole-style building on Royal Street with its attached courtyard or carriageway has worn many faces over the centuries, but it started life as a modest, single story structure built for General Jean Baptiste Labatut in 1795, a year after the second great fire swept through the French Quarter.
A man of influence under Spanish rule, Labatut served as attorney general of the cabildo and, in the aftermath of the 1794 blaze, petitioned for loans to help his fellow citizens rebuild their lost homes.
According to the Preservation Resource Center, in 1840, 619 Royal Street was also home to the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor.
Yet for many, the building is most remembered for the Southern Magnolia Tea Room, a Southern-style comfort food restaurant that bloomed here in 1933. Founded by Mrs. Asa Baldwin, the Marigold – as it was often affectionately called – was a seasonal business that wintered in New Orleans and summered in Niagara Falls.
Colonial furnishings – even down to the portraits – and full silver service, all evoked the feeling of dining inside a manor house parlor. Still, it wasn’t the pageantry that lingered most in diners’ hearts – it was the food.
Chicken gumbo, fried chicken served whole or halved, biscuits and corn pone, French-fried onions, oysters à la poullette in a rich egg sauce, and desserts like black walnut ice cream or chewy date sticks were carried out family-style, the table groaning beneath the abundance and diners encouraged to eat their fill.
In 1939, columnist Maud O’Bryan of the New Orleans States shared a composition by Muriel Pau in Ontario – a poem about her experience at the Southern Marigold restaurant titled "Verses in Praise of a Good Dinner":
It was on a June Sunday --
I tell you that's one day
Will come back in dreams when
I'm very old;
My pulses still quicken
When I think of the chicken
They served us that day at The Marigold.
Three years later, O’Bryan described a feast there so vividly it still stirs appetites decades later. She waxed about home-cooked meals with beet relish, pickles, browned biscuits, corn sticks and “ham so tender you insult it with a knife.”
In 1946, the Baldwins moved the Southern Magnolia restaurant to a Victorian home at 1015 N. Broad Street, and although the restaurant is long gone, its first French Quarter home remains.
Another long-standing tenant was Royal Blend, a beloved coffeehouse that opened in the late 1980s and served the neighborhood for over two decades before closing abruptly in 2014, after losing its lease.
Nearly a decade later, in 2022, an elaborate historical renovation of the centuries-old building was completed by Trapolin-Peer Architects and the NFT Group, winning a 2023 award for Excellence in Historic Preservation from the Louisiana Landmarks Society.
The structure had greatly deteriorated due to age and neglect, but the architectural and construction teams were able to effectively balance “historical accuracy with modern adaptations.”
Later that year, Stirling Barrett – founder of the local luxury eyewear brand KREWE – established the building as the company’s flagship store, the “Maison du KREWE.” The renovated courtyard, though perfectly suited for gatherings and an inviting retreat for the shop’s frequent patrons, remained largely underutilized until the arrival of Patula in late 2024.
Nestled behind the shop in a flagstone courtyard with a burbling fountain, Patula has quickly grown from its original three-man team.
“We didn’t know what the space needed or what direction we were going in until the doors were open,” says Tabone. “They (the guests) were going to tell us. A lot of things I didn’t think we were going to have are now staples.”
The “small but robust” cafe now has eleven employees, from local musician Rob Gooch – who works on several fermentation projects – to Nigël Andrea from Whatever Coffee, a skilled barista pulling specialty coffees with beans from local roaster Mammoth Espresso. The aromatic brews are the ideal accompaniment to the fresh-baked pastry from Ayu Bakehouse.
“We want to start highlighting more small producers for pour-overs in the future,” adds Tabone.
As Tabone’s business partner, KREWE has a lot of input into the cafe, particularly when it comes to design. “We’re pretty close with KREWE, they’ve been really helpful and we have a good symbiotic relationship,” says Tabone. “But in regards to the menu, they leave that pretty much up to us.”
Patula’s wine list focuses on natural or biodynamic wines from small producers, but also curated to be “comfortable and delicious.” The seasonal set menu sources ingredients from local food distributor JV Foods and the dishes lean towards casual, European-style fare that tends to be bright and fresh.
“We don’t have a deep fryer,” explains Rob. “If we’re going to cook a fish, we’re likely going to poach it.”
Currently Patula offers a stunning Caesar salad heavy with white Spanish anchovies marinated in vinegar, a poached shrimp dish with pickled peppers and watermelon radish in a saffron chili oil “that’s never coming off the menu.”
Shiitake mushroom toast with Piave Vecchio is served on their house made focaccia, as is their eponymous sandwich with Parisian ham and celery root remoulade.
“We look at the farm list, go to the farmer’s market to see what they have in season and go from there,” he explains. “We’re always running some kind of special, if not two, everyday.”
For the last few months the café has featured a Maryland-style blue crab cake with iterations of a different sauce. “Everything we’re doing is intentional.”
Despite the recent summer doldrums and on-going construction in the neighborhood, curious passersby are drawn into Patula’s courtyard. While tourism is the city’s bread and butter, denizens of the neighborhood have quickly caught on to the café’s appeal.
“It’s kind of hard to think about a neighborhood space in the French Quarter, but that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do,” says Tabone. “The soul of a city is the people who live there, the culture they’ve created.
“There are things that honor that and things that detract and we’re definitely trying to be on the side of adding to the culture of the neighborhood.”
*Patula is open from 10am to 9:30pm Wednesday through Monday. The café also offers an intimate dining experience dubbed the 619 Supper Club, a communal dining experience with only 16 seats available. It provides an opportunity for Patula’s team to highlight special dishes, techniques and unique ingredients. Send direct messages through Instagram @patulanola for future supper club events.
