“The Queen of Zydeco”-Abiz
Michelle Vallot has gone back to her roots and the entrepreneurial skills she honed while doing sales for her dad’s oilfield service company. Vallot grew up in rural Abbeville, the second oldest in a family of seven children all close in age. “Our home was situated on several acres of family property and sugar cane fields farmed by my paternal grandfather and his sons,” Vallot says. “To me these sugar cane fields were beautiful with the tall, giant green canopies of shade they created from the inside of the cane rows looking up that practically reached to the sky. I had grown to love those sugar cane fields even at harvest time, after the cane had been cut down with all of the flags burned off smoldering atop the rows.” Vallot never forgot the sweet sugar smell in the cool autumn fields against the backdrop of an orange setting sun. But it was the manufacturing process — her memory of the smell of sugar cane juice cooking into syrup, a drift she says came from the mill nearby — that would inspire her creativity in the kitchen and one day give rise to her Zydeco Bar company, which she is now working full-time to expand….Click Here to Read the Full Article.
article by: Leslie Turk