Maudie Schmitt taught school for 25 years before she opened a restaurant, and has now run the restaurant for a quarter century. The Talk Business notice that announced it in November 2000 described her as having taught in Crowley, Louisiana, with a catering company behind her; that January she and partner Carla Williams opened Café Rue Orleans in Fayetteville, and it has been a Louisiana kitchen, and only that, ever since. The bread comes from Gambino's in New Orleans, the olive salad is Boscoli's, and the andouille comes up fresh from south Louisiana, all of it brought in and named rather than swapped for whatever was near. The menu, read a quarter century on, is still wholly Cajun-Creole: eggs Pontchartrain, grits and grillades, crawfish étouffée, catfish Tchoupitoulas, chicken and sausage gumbo. Nothing on it hedges toward a safer American menu. The notice, when it has come, has come for Schmitt. She cooked on the first episode of Food Network's Supermarket Stakeout in August 2019, the show that has chefs buy grocery bags off shoppers leaving a store, sight unseen, and cook from what is inside, and KUAF's Ozarks at Large built a segment around her in January 2024. Closer to home, the kitchen cooked Fayetteville Restaurant Week this July with a brunch of red snapper over Creole succotash, as KNWA reported. This is for anyone who wants Louisiana cooking done straight, by the person who has cooked it in Fayetteville since 2001. If someone at your table wants something other than Louisiana, this is not the room for them. Twenty-five years in, it is still the restaurant she opened.