Meet the People Behind Our Cajun Restaurant

Chef Gee (or “Crazy Creole” as everyone calls him), learned what fresh and flavorful food tasted like while growing up hunting and fishing with his father. He taught him how to cook what they caught. At the age of 10, he started scuba diving. He used a spear to catch fish and lobsters, which he sold to local cooks to earn extra money while in high school. By the time he was 18, he had mastered the art of cooking seafood but it wasn’t until 1976 when Guy moved to New Orleans that his culinary career began. It all started with the love he had for his Creole culture. He remembers sitting in his Grandma’s kitchen while she cooked, and learning all that he could. This led him to meet with other grandmothers in the New Orleans area so that he could add to his repertoire of recipes and cooking techniques. Guy was blessed to meet and learn from several famous mentors. His personal hero was the famous Leah Chase, of Dooky Chase’s restaurant. Chef Chase and a lesser-known, however highly acclaimed chef named Carmel Fredrick, taught Guy how to cook old-school Creole cuisine. He was also fortunate to have Chef Paul Prudhomme as a mentor and friend, who taught him how to cook Cajun cuisine. Guy’s first job was chopping vegetables in Olivier’s Creole restaurant, in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans in 1979. As he worked his way up the culinary ladder, he wondered why so many restaurants that had great food were going out of business. So, he started taking restaurant management classes, attending seminars, and then became a restaurant management consultant. For 15 years, he taught restaurant owners how to price their food and save money on labor costs. In 2011, Chef Gee purchased a food truck and named it, the “Crazy Creole Rolling Café.” His food truck had long lines wherever they went in the Los Angeles area. He also ran a successful catering business at that time, but his customers wanted more. In 2014, Chef Guy opened his first brick-and-mortar restaurant called the “Crazy Creole Café” in Long Beach, California. People drove from over an hour away to taste Chef Gee's famous Seafood Gumbo, Oxtails, and his wife Chef Aliza’s Asian-Cajun Cuisine. What made everything so special was the fact that Guy shipped in his product from Louisiana several times a week and his patrons could taste the difference. Chef Gee restaurant was reviewed in numerous newspapers, magazines and it won the Long Beach Press Telegram's Restaurant Award three years in a row, along with 4 ½ Star ratings on Yelp. In 2019, Chef Gee was recruited to transform the EMC Oxnard Seafood Restaurant into a Creole-Cajun Seafood House. He is currently working on a cookbook of old-school Creole Cuisine, to honor his grandmothers and share the recipes they taught him. Creole cooking is in Chef Gee DNA. It’s not just a way of life, it is his life! 

Chef Aliza's love for cooking started as a young girl in the province of Cambodia. She was an orphan, who was sold into slavery at the age of ten and one of her jobs was to cook and clean for a Cambodian family. Aliza felt that she could express herself through cooking and it made her feel free. Her dream was to one day, own her own restaurant. The next family she worked for was from Thailand and the daughter taught her how to cook Thai cuisine. At the age of 15, Aliza started working for a Filipino family and also learned how to cook their cuisine. The family treated Aliza as one of their own children and paid her way to go to school and learn English. Aliza was now motivated by a new dream. She still wanted to open a restaurant, but she wanted the restaurant to be in America, so she learned English very fast. Her adopted parents knew how much Aliza loved cooking so, when she was 17 years old, they enrolled her in culinary school and paid her tuition. She now dreamed of one day becoming a great chef and eventually had the opportunity to come to America. Aliza started working in a Cambodian-Thai restaurant in Long Beach, California, where she met the love of her life, Chef Guy. He taught her how to cook Creole and Cajun cuisine. They started catering and later owned a food truck. Then, Aliza’s dream came true when she and Chef Guy opened a restaurant called the “Crazy Creole Café.” She is now the Executive Chef and Co-Owner of the “Louisiana Seafood House” by EMC in Oxnard, California. So, dreams do come true. Chef Aliza has mastered the art of cooking Cambodian, Thai, Lao, Filipino, Mexican, Soul Food, Cajun, and of course Creole cuisine. When asked why she loves cooking so much, her reply was, “because it makes people smile!”