Traditionally, Monday is “laundry day” in New Orleans. It’s also a day for red beans and rice, a Creole dish that cooks long and slow — like, all day long — and is mostly hands-off, leaving time for sudsing and scrubbing.
On laundry day in Burlington, Abby O’Sullivan does the cooking. From her certified home kitchen in the Old North End, O’Sullivan whips up her version of Louisiana-style red beans and rice (including a vegetarian option), crawfish cornbread, dirty rice hand pies, green gumbo, and fried green tomato po’boys for preorder and pickup, averaging 75 orders per week. Prices range from $13 to $22 for entrées. She also offers Friday pickup and will soon vend at the Essex Farmers Market on Wednesdays, if your wash-and-fold is on a different schedule.
“New Orleans feeds my rebel side.” Abby O’Sullivan
O’Sullivan, 45, grew up in Burlington but left right after high school, moving to New York City to work in fashion. Her work evolved to costume design for film, starting with Oscar-nominated Frozen River. For the past 20 years, she’s lived and worked on the road, spending time in Los Angeles, Winnipeg, Chicago and Japan, designing for sci-fi and high-budget horror films including Sinister and Dark Harvest.
On those film sets, O’Sullivan — who worked in restaurants back in the day — often cooked “giant meals” for her crew, which could be as many as 40 people, she said. When she returned to Vermont full time last winter, she decided to start a “ghost kitchen” — an industry term for a restaurant that’s just a production space, without seating — and catering biz focused around Louisiana’s Cajun-Creole cuisine.
Besides Burlington, New Orleans is home for O’Sullivan, who lived there for five years starting in 2011. She still spends part of each year there doing shows of mixed-media fiber arts for her business, Pieces 4 Foxes.
“It’s my favorite little joint,” she said. “New Orleans feeds my rebel side.”
With baking help from her mom, former state representative Jean O’Sullivan, she launched Laundry Day Takeaway in January. She uses all local ingredients, except Gulf shrimp and the French bread she flies in from New Orleans’ icon Gambino’s Foods.
“You cannot get that bread. You cannot make that bread. Po’boys need to be on that bread,” O’Sullivan said with a laugh.
On Saturday, August 2, she’ll head to the Big Easy to compete against 11 chefs from across the country in the 2025 Great American Seafood Cook-Off. In front of a live audience, she’ll have an hour to cook a dish that celebrates domestic seafood and represents Vermont.
O’Sullivan sat down with Seven Days while she was deep in menu planning for the event. She was also waiting to hear back from the lieutenant governor’s office — which nominated her for the contest and is helping her connect with local food vendors — about some landlocked Atlantic salmon, which can be found in small numbers in some of Vermont’s cold, clear lakes and rivers. She talked about how her various creative endeavors overlap and what she’s planning for the big competition.
Your main focus with Laundry Day Takeaway is Cajun and Creole food, particularly po’boys. What are you planning for the cook-off?
We’re not typically known for our seafood in Vermont. [Laughing.] I’m between three dishes. If I can get my hands on landlocked salmon, that would be dope. No one thinks we have salmon, and when you find out, it’s crazy.
I really want to use mussels, too, because they’re sustainable and I want to highlight that ethos. I think it’ll be a Nepali-style mussel with a sweet purée and a chutney. Because I’m a child of politics, I’m always going to highlight our growing refugee and immigrant population.
Ninety percent of the dish will be Vermont: produce, cheeses, apples and maple. Maybe I can get some goat cheese in there. So, a seafood dish that’s Vermont rustic and Nepali influenced: It’s gonna be weird and not what I usually cook. I’m just experimenting, experimenting. I’ve got my third broken butane torch in my bag. I’ve gone through so many of them.
Are you approaching this the same way you would approach designing for a movie?
I do think of it like a movie. You throw everything on the board, come up with the design and work backwards from there. My production management skills have been really helpful.
The creativity element is remarkably similar. When you’re given a script as a designer, it’s an outline, which is similar to, like, the rules of a seafood competition.
With Laundry Day Takeaway, after 20 years watching catering feed large numbers of people on a film set, I learned that, at a certain point, you can’t be appealing to everybody. Cajun-Creole food is spicy. It’s a particular taste profile, and if we try to please everybody, it becomes muddy.
What will it be like to cook in New Orleans?
This is like going home. It’s my favorite city. And it’s similar to Vermont — it’s very, very limited in its economy. You’re in oil, you’re in food and hospitality, or you were in movies for a couple years.
I’m lucky that I’ll have a lot of good seafood sources there. I recently found out that’s what a lot of my friends’ families do. I thought they were just criminals. But no, also seafood.
The competition is at the convention center, which is hysterical, because I’ve gone to so many Mardi Gras balls there. I’m sure they’ll bring the floats out for this. It’s New Orleans. They’ll have a party at a puddle on the ground.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Learn more at laundrydaytakeaway.com. Weekly pickups will be paused from August 1 through 11.
The original print version of this article was headlined “In the Wash | Three questions for Laundry Day Takeaway chef-owner Abby O’Sullivan”
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
