It was almost closing time that night, more than 30 years ago, when Jimmy Koikos stopped by New Orleans’ famed Commander’s Palace restaurant on one of his many trips to one of his favorite cities.
Koikos, the longtime proprietor of Alabama’s iconic Bright Star restaurant, and Tommy Finley, his general manager at the time, were hoping to meet Commander’s celebrated chef, Emeril Lagasse.
Lagasse was off that night, but his sous chef, a personable young man named Jamie Shannon, came out to visit with the boys from Bessemer. They ended up talking for a half-hour or so.
“We just hit it off,” Finley recalls. “He was just a regular guy. He wasn’t like some fancy chef. He was a lot of fun.”
Unplanned, Finley invited Shannon to come to Bessemer one weekend and cook at the Bright Star.
Shannon said yes, and the wheels were set in motion for what would become an annual tradition.
His first visit to the Bright Star in 1989 for the inaugural “A Taste of New Orleans” weekend exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations.
“We had no idea how big it would be, but it was really unbelievable,” Finley says. “I’m just guessing, but we did 700 to 750 people each night for that whole weekend, which was pretty good for back then.”
The New Orleans celebration continued to prosper over the years, as guests flocked to the Bessemer restaurant Star for turtle soup, barbecue shrimp, pecan-crusted redfish, bread pudding, Creole cream cheesecake and other Crescent City classics.
Now billed as “Night in New Orleans,” the three-night event will celebrate its 34th anniversary on Aug. 3-5.
Eric Cook, the chef and owner of the New Orleans restaurants Gris-Gris and Saint John, will return to the 116-year-old Bright Star to headline the event for the second year in a row.
Over the years, the Bright Star's three-night New Orleans celebration has drawn as many as 700 to 800 guests a night to the restaurant. The late Jamie Shannon of Commander's Palace was the first guest chef at the annual event. (Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)
Jamie Shannon gets it started
It was Jamie Shannon, though, who got the New Orleans event off the ground and who helped make it what it is today, endearing himself to the Bright Star staff and its customers.
Shannon came back year after year, even after he was promoted to executive chef at Commander’s in 1991, when his predecessor, Lagasse, left to open his own restaurant.
“He met so many people at the Bright Star, coming that one time a year for all those years, that everybody thought they knew him,” Finley says. “So, when they went down to New Orleans, they went to Commander’s.”
Shannon was both a rock star and just one of the guys.
“In the days of Jamie Shannon, we were serving 800 people a night,” recalls longtime Bright Star server Sonya Twitty, one of the behind-the-scenes organizers of the restaurant’s annual New Orleans event. “It was intense. People were waiting two hours. They just wanted to see Jamie.
“He touched every table he could, and he talked to everyone he could,” Twitty adds. “He signed menus and invited people to Commander’s. He was definitely one of a kind.”
In the early days of the New Orleans event, Shannon stayed with Finley’s brother, Donny Finley, at his house in Bessemer, and after he and his crew left the Bright Star around midnight each night, they would swing by Krystal and order a sackful of sliders to go.
“We would work all day and wouldn’t stop to eat,” Tommy Finley recalls.
“The only thing open to eat was a Krystal burger. He would always make a joke about how well we fed him.”
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(For several years in the 1990s, the New Orleans event moved to Birmingham’s old Merritt House restaurant -- which Jimmy Koikos and his brother, Nicky, co-owned -- in what is now home to Galley & Garden on Highland Avenue. It returned to the Bright Star to stay in 1999.)
Each year after the event, Koikos wrote a note to New Orleans’ legendary Brennan restaurant family to thank them for letting Shannon take time off from Commander’s to come cook at the Bright Star.
“Jimmy took a lot of pride in this,” Twitty says. “He was very honored that Jamie Shannon came to his restaurant. He was very humbled and grateful. He and Jamie became great friends.”
Shannon made so many friends in Birmingham, in fact, that after he died of cancer in 2001, several prominent chefs and restaurateurs -- including Frank Stitt from Highlands Bar and Grill, Chris Dupont from Café Dupont, Darryl Borden from the former Bombay Café, as well as his old friends Tommy Finley and Jimmy Koikos -- hosted a benefit to help pay for his young son Tustin’s future education.
“Jamie probably didn’t need it,” Finley recalls, “but I think he would have been proud that the people of Birmingham wanted to do something for him.”
Tory McPhail, pictured here in 2010, was the guest chef at the Bright Star's "Taste of New Orleans" from 2009 to 2014.(AL.com file photo; courtesy of Commander's Palace)
Tory McPhail continues the tradition
Following Shannon’s death, Jared Tees, who had been a sous chef under him at Commander’s before becoming the top chef at Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House, headlined the Bright Star’s New Orleans event for the next several years.
Then, in 2009, Tory McPhail, another Commander’s chef and Shannon protege, began a six-year run as the Bright Star’s guest chef.
Koikos met McPhail on another one of his trips to New Orleans -- this time for the Sugar Bowl -- and they talked about re-establishing the Bright Star-Commander’s Palace connection.
McPhail didn’t need to have his arm twisted.
‘’The first time I met Jimmy, he said, ‘Look, Tory, I’ve been coming to Commander’s for decades now; we wanted to meet you and say hello and see if we can’t get you up to Bessemer to do some dinners with us,’” McPhail recalled in a 2010 interview with AL.com. “We’ve been fast friends ever since.”
McPhail brought three sous chefs with him from the Commander’s kitchen to work the event every year.
‘’We don’t do this for anybody else,’’ he said in that same 2010 interview. ‘’The Bright Star and Commander’s Palace have had a very strong friendship and a strong history together, so this is the only event I do (at another restaurant) for three days in a row all year long.”
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Meanwhile, in early 2010, Toronto chef Andreas Anastassakis, a cousin of Jimmy and Nicky Koikos, joined the Bright Star team as executive chef and managing partner, and the Koikos brothers began preparing him to take over the restaurant one day.
About six months after he started, Anastassakis found out firsthand what the New Orleans event was all about, and how much it meant to his cousin Jimmy.
“Jimmy told me so much about it,” Anastassakis remembers. “It’s like he had me prepared for it. But, you know, I was just getting my feet wet here. I was just more like a fly on the wall. But I absorbed a lot from that first time, and the second year is when I really got more involved.”
McPhail’s last visit to the Bright Star came in 2014, but by then, Anastassakis had made enough New Orleans connections that he didn’t have to search long to find new chefs for the event, including Richard Bickford and Marcus Woodham from Tujague’s and Thomas Finch from CellarDoor.
“I knew that I could keep the event going because of the network of chefs that I had met through Tory, who had been here with him and moved on to other places,” Anastassakis says.
“I realized then that as long as I had a working relationship with the chef and felt comfortable that they knew our crowd and knew what kind of menu to bring that we could make this event a success no matter who (the chef) was.”
Jimmy Koikos (right), who is pictured here with his younger brother, Nicky Koikos, took a great deal of pride in the Bright Star's annual New Orleans event. (Birmingham News/ Mark Almond) bn
Jimmy Koikos leaves a legacy
In the spring of 2019, Jimmy Koikos was diagnosed with cancer, and by the time the annual New Orleans event came around later that summer, his body was already worn down by the disease.
For those three nights in August, though, he mustered up the strength to greet and seat his longtime customers at what would be his last Night in New Orleans.
“Jimmy was struggling, but it was so important to him,” Anastassakis says. “He knew people wanted to come see him do one last one.
“He worked his butt off that whole weekend, and after that, he shut it down,” Anastassakis adds. “He would come in here, but he wouldn’t work anymore.”
Koikos died three months after that 2019 event, but the Night in New Orleans will always be part of his legacy at the Bright Star.
“This whole event was kind of like Jimmy’s baby, his creation, his child,” Twitty, who worked with Koikos for 25 years, says.
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The next year, 2020, was a pivotal one for the Bright Star and its New Orleans event.
The staff was not only still missing their friend Jimmy Koikos, but they were also dealing with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Health department restrictions limited seating to half of the restaurant’s capacity, and guests were asked to wear masks.
It was a strange time to be celebrating anything, but the Night in New Orleans proved to be a blessing for everyone -- from the employees to the customers, Anastassakis says.
“It was such a hard time for our industry, and to put on a special event like that, it really got people’s spirits up,” he says. “It really helped us to build our business back.”
Thomas Robey, pictured here when he was the executive chef at Birmingham's Veranda on Highland restaurant, headlined the Bright Star's Night in New Orleans for three years in a row. (Birmingham News file/Michelle Williams)
Thomas Robey draws a crowd
One of the constants at the New Orleans celebration over these previous 33 years was chef Thomas Robey, who, from his days as a sous chef for Jamie Shannon and Tory McPhail to his own time headlining the event, cooked at the Bright Star so many times that he lost count.
“I don’t even know anymore,” Robey joked before the 2021 Night in New Orleans. “The dates get fuzzy after a while, but it’s got to be in the mid-20s.”
Robey started coming to the Bright Star’s New Orleans event back in the 1990s, and the connections he made then later helped him land the executive chef position at Birmingham’s old Veranda on Highland restaurant, where he worked from 2007 to 2012.
“The first time I met Tom was in the early ‘90s at one of these events,” Twitty says. “He came with Jamie. He was fun, but he knew what he was doing. He had talent. And he just fit right in with everyone. Tom was the bond that tied us all together.”
After he left the Veranda and moved back to New Orleans to return to Commander’s Palace -- and to later work at Tujague’s, Palmettos on the Bayou and Gris-Gris -- Robey continued to come back to the Bright Star every August.
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“I just love to do it,” Robey said in 2021. “It’s a chance for me to get back to a town I love, see good friends, eat some great food. I’m just happy to be there.”
Robey headlined the Bright Star’s New Orleans event for three years in a row -- in 2019, 2020 and 2021 -- and with all his Birmingham ties, he, too, always drew a crowd.
“When Tom took over the event, our crowd increased because people came just to see him,” Anastassakis says.
Earlier this year, though, the Bright Star family suffered yet another loss when the “gentle giant” Robey died unexpectedly at 55.
The Night in New Orleans event won’t be the same without having Robey in the kitchen, Anastassakis says.
“It’s gonna be strange with him not being here,” Anastassakis says. “There’ll be a sense of emptiness, but, at the same time, Robey would want us to move on.
“Just like we’re making Jimmy proud, we’re gonna make Tom proud, too.”
Night in New Orleans takes place Aug. 3-5, 2023, at the Bright Star, 304 19th St. North in Bessemer. For reservations, call 205-424-9444. For more information, go here.
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