Featured photo: Wine Country Chef Anthony Felan (center) and owner Jason Brady (right) serve food at the 2015 Wine & Swine event.
On Sunday, May 31, 2:30-6:30 p.m., Wine Country Bistro and Bottle Shop and local t-shirt company Sweet Tee Shreveport will partner on a shindig to simultaneously celebrate the first anniversary of Sweet Tee Shreveport and kick-off Wine Country’s new Sunday Funday menu. Beginning with this event, Sunday Funday at Wine Country will mean a more relaxed atmosphere and menu each Sunday afternoon, 2:30-6:30 p.m. For the May 31 kick-off, Felan will be boiling crawfish and grilling “backyard burgers” while the bar will be serving hurricanes. Burgers and crawfish platters will range from $13-$18, and will include a Great Raft Brewing beer.
For me, this is an interesting opportunity to see Felan – who was recently invited to represent Shreveport-Bossier in the Louisiana Seafood Cook-Off for the second time, and cooked at the American Culinary Federation’s “Best Chefs of Louisiana” dinner in New Orleans on April 7 – do some things that he couldn’t normally do at Wine Country. Like, for example, throw a crawfish boil.
“Each Sunday will be something different,” Felan told me. “But everything we do, we’ll do it our way. The burgers for this Sunday, for example, are going to be topped with heirloom tomatoes, butter lettuce and aioli.”
This Sunday’s event is also a celebration of local entrepreneur Kathy Ross’s Sweet Tee Shreveport, a t-shirt company that designs and prints shirts that exhibit pride and nostalgia for Shreveport-Bossier landmarks like Betty Virginia Park and Barksdale Air Force Base. Ross will be selling shirts, stickers and prints at the event on Sunday, a new shirt design will be unveiled and door prizes will be given away. Sweet Tee Shreveport products can be purchased at Wine Country Bistro’s retail bottle shop. The celebration is open to the public.
Sweet Tee Shreveport designs can be kind of outrageous (“Bossier City: It’s Da Bomb”), inside jokes (a shirt commemorating South Highland’s “thrill hill”) and heavily nostalgic (a shirt featuring a rocket-shaped playhouse that once stood in Shreveport’s Betty Virginia Park). My favorite of their designs is the simplest: a 318 area code shirt.
“Our shirts are designed to start conversations about Shreveport,” Ross told me. “I get nostalgic about everything. I can be sitting anywhere in my thrill hill t-shirt, and someone’ll walk up and say ‘I love that.'”
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