SILVERHILL — For 13 years, Gerald Ardoin has been cooking up the cuisine of his home state at Café Acadiana in the Silverhill community.

Ardoin is originally from Opelousas, Louisiana, a small city just north of Lafayette with a population of roughly 15,000, where he began his cooking career in 1979 at the age of 16, working with his father at a restaurant called "Ardoin's Seafood." After his father retired in 1995, he opened his own restaurant, Café Acadiana, that he ran for eight years before selling it in 2003 and moving to Silverhill.

After working in the wholesale foodservice industry for several years, Ardoin decided to jump back into the restaurant business and opened a new establishment, also called Café Acadiana, in the summer of 2013.

"I enjoyed working for the distributor, but the big corporate rigmarole and everything else drove me insane and I wanted to get back to my roots and do something that I love," Ardoin said. "I love to cook and I love the people, so this business was for me."

The name Acadiana (pronounced "uh-kay-dee-an-uh") is a reference to an area in south-central Louisiana covering 22 parishes. Groups of French-speaking Acadian refugees were exiled from Nova Scotia, Canada by Britain following the end of the Seven Years' War, settling in a region in Louisiana now known as Acadiana in the late 1700s.

Café Acadiana cooks up good old-fashioned southern-style seafood and dishes with a Cajun twist, with its food including homemade fried boudin balls, crawfish etouffee, po-boys and red beans and rice. The restaurant's sauces are also made in-house, including its Cajun shrimp and crawfish cream sauce called Boudreaux's sauce. The sauce is smothered on dishes such as crab cakes and what the restaurant calls a Boudreaux's Burrito, which is a deep-fried tortilla stuffed with shrimp, crawfish and crabmeat and covered with Boudreaux's sauce.

"Keep it simple, buy the best ingredients you can get your hands on — the best and the freshest — and cook with a little pride and a little love," Ardoin said about his cooking philosophy. "Try to differentiate yourself from somebody else. In our business, I can buy an already made macaroni and cheese, an already made potato salad and an already made coleslaw. An already made tartar sauce or cocktail sauce. I choose not to. I make all of it in-house with my recipes, which differentiates us from everybody else. Our products are pretty unique. Just keep it simple, take pride and throw some love in the pot."

The establishment also does daily lunch specials, such as a blackened chicken alfredo, and nightly specialties for dinnertime, which he says usually consists of a seafood combination plate that changes up every weekend, which can include food such as crab cakes, fried shrimp and blackened mahi.

Ardoin and 16 other staff members keep Café Acadiana running, while he and his family have made a home in the local community. He currently serves on the Silverhill City Council and his wife, Christina, is the principal at Robertsdale Elementary School.

"It's just been very rewarding to meet so many people along the way and to build the good, solid business that has become a staple in our community here in Silverhill," Ardoin said. "I'm very proud of that. I've had some people say that this little restaurant has put Silverhill on the map. Silverhill is not a very big town. That's kind words. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I've had numerous local people tell that, but the biggest thing is just a pride factor of being able to build something with your own two hands and see it be successful and be a big part of supporting 16 other families."

Café Acadiana, located at 16137 Silverhill Ave., is open Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Wednesdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.