CHARLESTON, W.Va. – A taste of New Orleans is available in downtown Charleston with the opening of Bourbon Street Bistro on Lee Street.

The Charleston Area Alliance assisted with a ribbon cutting for the new restaurant on Monday, and owner Curtis Workman said business is already booming.

“We’ve had people that literally drove from Fayetteville to come to the restaurant, drove from Beckley to come to the restaurant. We’ve been full several times, sold out in the evenings, because we make everything fresh,” he said last week on MetroNews Midday.

Bourbon Street Bistro is a labor of love for Workman, who fell in love with cooking during a course at St. Albans High School. After working in the food service industry for a few years, he took some time off, but the opportunity to open this space was too much to pass up.

“I went back to college. I took a break from the industry for a while, but it’s always been my dream, and this location opened up, and I saw a real market gap for something different and wanted to bring a little slice of my favorite city here to Charleston,” he said.

Workman put together a menu that serves a combination of Cajun and Creole dishes straight from the New Orleans and Lafayette regions of Louisiana. He believes that a taste of the Big Easy is a taste of history.

“It’s all about local ingredients and what you can find in New Orleans. New Orleans has such a rich historical significance and has been settled by so many of the greatest cultures on earth—the Spanish, African influences, the French—and that’s kind of morphed into this amazing Creole food,” he said.

Workman attributed the restaurant’s early success to its commitment to quality. Anything that can be made in-house is made in-house, and he credits his kitchen staff for making it happen.

“Everything that we make is housemade every single day. Every soup, stock, and dressing—we don’t buy premade anything so that’s what I think really sets us apart, and we have a great team of employees in the back in our kitchen who are rockstars, and I’m just so grateful for them because they’ve set us up to be something great,” he said.

Bourbon Street Bistro is located at 714 Lee Street in Charleston.