Award-winning chef and restaurateur Bonnie Breaux is grateful and excited to be out of the kitchen for a change.

As of January of this year, Breaux said she is no longer working at Café Sydnie in Breaux Bridge, but the 2017 Queen of Louisiana Seafood has used her time off wisely.

Because restaurants are struggling to remain open and pay their employees, especially executive chefs like herself, Breaux is looking to do more catering work or to return to the field she loves, but to a lesser extent.

When she was working at Café Sydnie Mae, Breaux would experiment with spices and sauces. She made a cane vinaigrette and it was a huge hit with the locals, who told her she should bottle her home-made sauce.

It wasn’t until she had free time on her hands to sit down and make it that Breaux realized she really needed to try to market her products.

“I do my vignaigrettes, pepper jelly vinaigrette, I do cane vinaigrette and a remoulade that is very, very popular,” Breaux said. “I am going to start with those three dressing and I am going to LSU AgCenter (to have them) work up everything for me.”

Though Breaux has always had the recipes for her sauces in her head, her strenuous work hours prevented her from working on them. Working between 58 and 64 hours a week, the last thing Breaux wanted to think about when she got home was what she was going to cook.

“You work all day, you get home, you’re exhausted, you don’t have time to put any more effort or thought into anything other than taking a shower, going to bed and getting to work the next morning,” Breaux said.

Though it’s a rewarding profession for her, Breaux, 54, is glad when her long workdays are on hold as she realized how much she’s missed out on her life. Breaux credits the downtime the last few months as a motivating factor to focus on her new ventures in life.

Though her love is always cooking in the kitchen and coming up with new dishes, she misses meeting and talking to customers and employees — calling them her family.

“I do miss that part of it, I am loving the fact that I am getting to see my grandchildren more, my children more,” Breaux said. “ I am having a little more ‘Bonnie-time.’”

Breaux also enjoys getting to cook in her own kitchen and enjoy her food instead of the non-stop environment of a restaurant kitchen.

“It’s a toss-up,” Breaux said. “I love both. But this is what God had given me, so this is what I am going with.”

Breaux said her sauces are still in the developmental stages but her hope is to have them completed by the beginning of next year.

Though Breaux is not working in restaurants at all right now, she still gets an itch to cook in the business she’s loved her whole life..

“I absolutely do, I absolutely do, but that’s why I have a great kitchen at home,” Breaux said.

A self-taught cook, Breaux raised four children of her own. After her divorce in 2006, she realized that she just raised children and cooked for them. She then started looking for a job, and with the help of her brother, she was able to not only work but do what she’s always done her whole life: cook for others.

“My brother told me, ‘You love to cook, let’s open a restaurant,’” Breaux said. “And so we did.

After opening a catering company in Covington, she then worked her way around Louisiana, coming to New Iberia to become an executive chef at Clementine. She then moved to Florida as an executive chef at Roux.

“Just every kitchen I worked at, I fell more in love with it,” Breaux said.