When Jon Wall invites friends over for gumbo or a seafood dish of some sort, he doesn’t say, “Hey, I’m cooking. Come on over, eat a bite and watch the game.” He calls folks up and invites them to another one of his popular “Tupperware parties.”

“Everybody brings a dish to take food home, and those dishes have gotten progressively larger,” Wall said. “After one dinner party, the next morning there was a small pile of rice on my cabinet. (He only uses Louisiana or Texas long grain rice.) I looked for the big Tupperware container I keep my rice in. It wasn’t in the dishwasher. It wasn’t in the cabinet. Someone had filled it with the leftovers and I never did find out who.”

Wall didn’t grow up in the kitchen. He was in his 30s before he took an interest.

“I started watching Justin Wilson, Paul Prudhomme, John Folse.” he said, “I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet John Folse at a food festival.”

But it can take more than a few shows to get in the groove of how to prepare great food. And, loving to eat at K-Paul’s, a French Quarter institution and Wall’s favorite New Orleans restaurant (now closed), is not the same as turning out great Cajun cuisine for friends and family.

“The first time I made gumbo, I had to pour it out,” Wall said. “It was too salty. I’m not really sure what I did wrong but it wasn’t any good.”

That’s when he sought the advice of his mother, Nickie Wall.

“Here in Louisiana, I think it’s our moms’ influence that makes the biggest impact in our cooking,” Wall said. “I know my mom’s cooking influenced me. I still can’t get her roast right. Nobody can.”

His children like his gumbo best. It did win a Houston gumbo cookoff. At Outriggers in Clear Lake, Texas, his gumbo came in second.

“I was a hero in Clear Lake,” he said. “Nobody else could cook gumbo. Or, I guess I should say it’s just not the same. But when I was in Gonzales, I had to up my game. Everybody over there could cook.”

Tell Wall that all gumbo tastes the same, and he’ll give you a quick, subtle look that clearly communicates that you don’t know what you’re talking about. He claims the secret is in the stock, not the roux.

“My cousin, Brett Williams,” might tell you otherwise,” Wall said. “But that’s because I make a better stock than he does. “You definitely have to have seafood stock for shrimp gumbo because it doesn’t take shrimp long to cook; it takes time to transfer the flavor. So I make a stock out of shrimp heads, shells, and I’ll throw a few crabs in there.”

He is a great believer in the superiority of Gulf Coast seafood.

“I really wish somebody would do something about this foreign stuff. If you look at how those countries process their food, you would definitely think twice about it.”

Wall said to make the best chicken and sausage gumbo, you start with a big, fat hen. His favorite sausage is from Market Basket.

“I have their sausage and boudin shipped to me wherever I’m working,” he said.

Wall, a Louisiana native who finished school in DeQuincy in the late  ’70s  and lived in Sulphur when his children were in school, follows the work and was most recently in Wisconsin where temperatures dipped to minus 36 degrees, what some might call the perfect gumbo weather. Of course, it doesn’t matter the temperature. It’s always a good day to enjoy good gumbo and Jon Wall has made his mark with his, at least among friends and family, the people who matter most to him.