Dream Big Then Make It Happen: Local Cook Pat Darbonne Talks About Appearing On The Today Show
By Karla Wall
If you need proof that persistence pays off and that big dreams do come true, you need look no further than Pat Darbonne, a local Cajun chef who went from posting photos of her food on her Facebook page to cooking up some jambalaya with Hoda Kobt in a segment on NBC’s Today Show.
The Smell Of Onions
Darbonne isn’t a trained chef. She never attended a culinary school and, if you don’t count her few highly popular Sunday stints in the kitchen at Buffi’s PeauxBoys, she isn’t a professional chef. What she is is a fantastic old-school Cajun cook who, of course, learned in her mother’s kitchen.
Photo By Jason Carroll • Epic Image
“My mom loved to cook, and I always wanted to help her,” Darbonne says. “I’d pull a chair up to the stove and watch her cook. And whenever she turned around, I would stir the pot.”
Darbonne says what first drew her to her mother’s stove was the smell of cooking food.
“To this day, the smell of sautéed onions brings me back to my mother’s kitchen,” she says.
Darbonne got her first chance to cook on her own when her mother developed a migraine one evening and wasn’t able to cook dinner. Darbonne stepped up and went to work.
“I cooked my first meal — smothered chicken,” she says. “I cut up the chicken just like I’d watched my mother do all those years.”
It was also around this time that she began to be allowed to ride her bike on her own across the highway to her grandmother’s house — where, of course, she helped in the kitchen, increasing her knowledge and sharpening her skills at her grandmother’s side.
Facebook Fame
Around 2010, Darbonne began posting photos of her food on Facebook. Her posts received lots of attention, and she took the next obvious step. She began posting videos of herself cooking up those Cajun dishes.
“I’d open the videos by saying ‘I’m Pat, and this is my kitchen,” she recalls. “One of my first videos was cooking smothered pork chops.”
Her popularity grew, and her audience got “bigger and bigger.”
“People were ranting and raving, telling me they loved the videos,” she says. “If I stopped posting, people would ask me when the next video was coming out.”
She took a brief hiatus from Facebook when her mother died in May of 2017 but was posting again by July.
“It helped with the grieving process,” she says.
She discovered Facebook’s new business page option and decided to start one, calling it “My Cookin.’” It was as popular as her personal page had been.
“As soon as I would upload videos, people would be messaging me saying how much they loved them,” she says.
Pat-N-da Pot
Darbonne’s dishes — and her big personality — caught the eye of a local cable access producer, who was also a high school friend of Darbonne’s.
“He contacted me about doing a cooking show for local access channel 4,” Darbonne says. “I thought he meant just a video and that he wasn’t really serious about it, so I didn’t pay it any mind.”
But she soon realized he was serious. And he wanted much more than a single video. The two of them, along with the producer’s brother, began hashing out plans for a 12-show series. Among the first questions was what to name the show.
“We couldn’t come up with a name,” Darbonne says. “One day, the producer’s brother, who was also president of the studio, said something like ‘when Pat is in the pot cooking.’ I thought ‘that has a nice ring to it.’”
Pat-N-da Pot it was. And on Jan. 14, 2018, Darbonne taped her first cooking show, preparing crawfish etouffee.
“The response was great,” she says.
Once those 12 shows were complete, though, Darbonne says that was it for the show. “We couldn’t find sponsors for another series,” she says. “Besides, it was very stressful, both for them and for me. We all worked during the day.”
Besides, Darbonne had her sights set a bit higher.
The Today Show
Darbonne has long been a big fan of Hoda Kobt of the Today Show. Kobt had spent six years as an anchor in New Orleans before joining the Today Show and is known to love all things Louisiana. Darbonne began texting and emailing Kobt about cooking Cajun food in a segment on the Today Show.
“I sent clips of my cooking shows,” she says. “I tagged her on Instagram and commented on her posts and told her I was coming to see her in New York and that I had gifts for her.”
She got no response, but talk to Darbonne any length of time and it’s evident that the words “no” and “can’t” aren’t prominent in her vocabulary. She decided to plead her case in person. She bought a ticket to New York City and on Oct. 4, 2019, made her way to Rockefeller Center to stand with the crowd outside the NBC studio.
“I got out of the cab at 4:15 am, and a security guard was there. He said ‘Boy, you are serious about seeing this show,’” she recalls. “I asked him if I was the first person there, and he told me I was.”
She staked out some prime real estate in full view of the windows in the studio and waited to see Kobt.
“I could see (Kobt). She was getting the finishing touches put on her hair and makeup,” Darbonne says. “She looked out and she immediately knew who it was. She got so excited, and she gave me a big thumbs-up.”
A bit later, while outside greeting the crowd, Kobt stopped to chat with Darbonne, who was indeed bearing gifts.
“I gave her a fleur-de-lis locket with a photo of her two daughters and her fiancée in it,” Darbonne says. “She kept holding my hand and saying, ‘I love her. I love her.’ I also gave her a gift basket with products from my website – a keychain, an apron and some other things.”
Kobt told Darbonne she wanted her to appear in a cooking segment on the Today Show. And she wasted no time making it happen.
“(Kobt) walked away, and a couple of minutes later some producers came up to me and asked for my contact information. I gave them a card,” she says.
Darbonne arrived back home from New York on Oct. 5. On Oct. 8, she received a phone call from the Today Show producers.
“We planned the segment for two months, emailing back and forth, talking about recipes and how we were going to make things work,” she says.
The Color Eggplant
After a hectic two months of planning, it all came together on Dec. 12, when Darbonne made her long-awaited Today Show debut.
Oddly enough, she says, there were no nerves on the day of the show.
“I was plenty nervous the week before, but once I actually got to New York there was just a calmness that came over me.”
When Darbonne walked out onto the set to greet Kobt, both women began jumping up and down in excitement and high-fiving, partly because there was some excitement at meeting again, but mostly because both women discovered they were wearing the same color. Both had on tops in a shade of eggplant.
Darbonne says that was meant to be.
“I went to New York with clothes with my logo on them,” she explains. “When I got there, they told me that I couldn’t wear clothing with a logo on the show. I didn’t have anything without a logo, so I had to go shopping. I found an eggplant-colored sweater and bought it, but we went to a couple of other places and I found something I liked even more. I went to pay for it, but at the last second something made me put it back and I decided I’d just wear the eggplant sweater.”
While you might assume that appearing on a national television show with an audience of millions would be the stuff of nightmares, Darbonne says that, mostly thanks to Kobt, she felt “completely comfortable.”
“It was like we’d known each other for years. Like we were best friends,” she says.
The segment lasted four minutes and 55 seconds. And in that time, Darbonne had to explain how to make an authentic Cajun jambalaya and produce a finished dish for the nation to see.
Not surprisingly, that took a bit of doing.
“I’d cooked a gumbo and the jambalaya and froze them to take with me. They had ingredients there for me to cut up — sausage and chicken.”
When she arrived on the set, however, she discovered that the staff had already mixed the jambalaya with the rice for her. And that, she says, was the one drawback of the experience. Obviously, it would be very difficult for New York City folks to mix a jambalaya to a Cajun chef’s standards.
“They didn’t mix it right,” Darbonne says. “It was pretty, but they hadn’t mixed it the way it was supposed to be mixed. You could still see gravy floating around in the rice.”
Despite that, Darbonne says the dish went over spectacularly with the cast and crew. Co-host Jenna Bush told her, “it was one of the best jambalayas she’d ever tasted.”
And they all congratulated Darbonne on doing a great job in front of the camera. Kobt later said that Darbonne “slayed it” her first time on the set. And co-host Maria Shriver, Darbonne says, “told me she loved my energy.”
The Heat That’s Bon Appetit
All of this, and Darbonne is also an entrepreneur. At the urging of Paige Vidrine, owner of Buffi’s PeauxBoys, she started selling her own brand of Cajun seasoning this past summer.
“I measured everything and got the seasoning just right, and gave it to Paige,” she says. “Paige gave it to the person that handles her seasonings.”
But when a couple of months passed without any action, Darbonne, predictably, took matters into her own hands and began looking up vendors herself. She settled on Targil in Opelousas. And she got her first case of the product in August.
She began taking orders on Facebook and distributing them at the Civic Center, in front of the Veteran’s Memorial. She created a website, and within 24 hours of receiving that first shipment, she had sold out.
And in case you think fame might have gone to her head, you should know that Darbonne still sells out of her truck. To catch times and dates, visit her Facebook page or go to patndapot.com. She’ll even deliver to you if you’re local.
But you don’t have to order. Rouses Markets began selling her seasoning on Dec. 2, and you can now find it in all Rouses locations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Not Stopping Now
As should be obvious by now, Darbonne is not one to sit and wait for things to happen. And she’s not content to let the Today Show appearance be the pinnacle of her television fame.
She’s again setting her sights higher.
Darbonne is currently talking to Ellen Degeneres and her staff to try to get an appearance on Degeneres’ show.
“I sent my videos to them and contacted Ellen by Instagram with a video of the Today segment. That was on Friday morning after the Today Show (appearance). By Friday evening, I had a message from them that said ‘Thanks for the text. That was fun. Where are you now?’ I told them I was still in New York.”
While she didn’t get to go on the show while she was still in New York, it’s a fairly safe bet you’ll see her on the show in the near future. After all, as stated earlier, she isn’t one to take no for an answer.
“I have no patience,” she says. “When I want something, I want it yesterday. And I won’t stop until I get it.”
And when she does appear on the Ellen show, she promises she’ll be wearing her logo jacket and chef hat.
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