AMATULI SAUSAGE Co. —Gumbo, Chaurice + Dirty Rice? Albany’s Hiding a Louisiana Secret.
In October 2025, Amatuli Sausage Co. opened on the sloping, cobbled downtown Maiden Lane next to Emmanuel Thai. For most, it sounded like a logical successor to the deli/lunch spot Cobblestone Lunch which operated at 37 Maiden Lane from 2019 to 2024 and before that, Sandwiches To Go, a longtime sandwich spot from 1986 to 2019.
Over a few months, two Dishing readers reached out to me extolling Amatuli’s house-made sausages and the backstory of the owner, a Louisiana native who made his way upstate after spending more than two decades in Alaska. And that story checks out in a menu loaded with classic gumbo, jambalaya and chaurice + dirty rice. I headed over to check out the food and caught up with owner Jeff Lockwood for the dish on Amatuli Sausage Co.
— SDP
Louisiana cooking, house-made sausages, cookbooks + a record player? One year in, Amatuli Sausage Co. may be the coolest spot you don’t know.
After some less-than-stellar attempts at Creole/Cajun cooking in both Albany + Schenectady, could the NYS Capital finally have a Louisiana-style café tucked away on a tiny downtown lane? Could it boast a record player with a stack of vintage vinyl for customers to play while they wait? Could the owner make everything from scratch from the gumbo, jambalaya + sausages to chocolate chip cookies + crusty bread? Are the walls sunshine yellow? The answer is yes + we can’t get enough.
Amatuli Sausage Co. 37 Maiden Lane Visit
Amatuli Sausage Co. is unfussy, comfortable in its bare bones skin, and quirky from tiny counter top yellow signs to a collection of cookbooks that include Bar Tartine and tombs on charcuterie. The maroon overhead sign is optimally hung over a cooler packed with sausages and bright fermented pickles. While cookies cool on a rack, a line quickly forms, dissipates and re-forms for take out. The few tables in a yellow room to on one side soon fill with a light lunch crowd. As we wait, I spy a yellow sign inviting patrons to pick an album so I pop Django Reinhardt on a record player atop a large, out of commission commercial range. A young man in the queue turns and asks, “Did you do that?”, waving to the record player. “I did,” I nodded, to which he explained he’d always read the sign but had never used “a machine like that.” So I showed him how to raise and lower the arm to play a record while his sandwich and gumbo were being prepped to go. That’s Amatuli in a nutshell. People in suits, in work clothes, regulars whose order Jeff knows before they ask. One regular unwrapped everything he’d just ordered on a table and pulled out two tomatoes and a nearly empty jar of kimchi from his bag. It’s clear those who know, go often. And I’m now among them with thoughts of gumbo and jambalaya on my mind.
SDP: From Louisiana to Albany by way of Alaska is not the most direct route. What brought you to the capital region?
JL: The short version is that when I left Alaska, I needed to go somewhere with winter, mountains, and some kind of nearby body of water. My ex-drummer from AK lives in the Adirondacks and my favorite city is Montreal, so I landed in Plattsburgh for a couple of years (I had originally intended to finish the degree I’d quit to move to AK at SUNY Plattsburgh). When I had the opportunity to think about opening a little food joint the capital region seemed like a better bet so here I am.
People might assume Amatuli Sausage Co. is just a sandwich shop or downtown deli, but you actually serve classic Louisiana fare like chaurice and dirty rice + your sandwiches give proper respect to Duke's mayo.
JL: I only use Duke’s because I can’t get Blue Plate, which I like more and is made in New Orleans!
I’ve been doing my three main sausages since I developed them for the place my ex-wife and I ran for a bit in Alaska. Chaurice is a Louisiana version of Mexican chorizo; the spicing’s different and it uses wine instead of vinegar, but they’re clearly related. If you get rid of the wine, simplify the seasoning a little bit and throw it in the smoker (which unfortunately I do not currently have), you get andouille. The garlic sausage I do is very French - the spice mix is stolen from Larousse Gastronomique and it uses a ton of garlic - and the fennel-orange is derived from the common Italian sausage in America but I nicked the citrus idea from a Greek lemon sausage and just subbed orange instead. They all have different grinds - I think texture is something American cooking generally doesn’t pay enough attention to and I wanted them all to feel different in the mouth, so the chaurice is very chunky, which helps the pork itself not get lost in the heavy seasoning, and the fennel-orange is ground twice, and finer, which distributes the somewhat delicate orange flavors throughout the sausage, and the garlic is kind of in the middle, something toothsome that would be at home on a pile of mashed potatoes. I do a few other varieties from time to time, including a juniper that I make as both a hot sausage and as a bologna, but when you’re a tiny operation you have to keep things focused.
I didn’t want to only do sandwiches, since in my handful of office-type jobs where there is a lunch break that is often spent going to grab lunch from somewhere I would get pretty bored with sandwiches, and I like rice, so it seemed pretty natural to do at least red beans and rice and dirty rice, which you can get alone or with any of the hot proteins… (God, I hate calling things “proteins” but here we are).
“Louisiana beef” is what a po-boy shop would call “roast beef”, which is braised beef with its gravy, but everywhere else in the Anglosphere “roast beef” means beef roasted in the oven to medium or medium-rare, so I changed the name to avoid confusion. I don’t call my sandwiches po-boys because, although I make all the bread and it’s good bread, it’s not po-boy bread, so it’s not a po-boy. If I got my bread from Banh Mi 47 I would be comfortable calling them po-boys, since po-boy and banh mi bread are basically the same and theirs is great.
You make of a lot of different pickles to top off rice bowls and which you can sell by the half pound…
JL: I do a lot of pickles because the produce in Alaska is not great for the most part and now I have a weird aversion to committing too hard to fresh produce because I’m so used to it going bad really fast unless you preserve it somehow. And when you have a bunch of strong, heavy flavors, you need something to lighten the mood.
The meat of your business is sausages in the name and anchoring the menu. When and where did you learn to make Louisiana sausage? And your house-made cold cuts too?
JL: The sausage in Alaska is uniformly terrible! It’s the usual mediocre national brands and then a few statewide ones that aren’t much better, so I eventually started messing around with learning how to make it, and smoking things like tasso just so I didn’t have to rely on whatever freezer stock I had managed to bring back from Rabideaux’s the rare times I went to Louisiana. I really got into the weeds of it, though, when we had ducks one year and in trying to figure out what the hell to do with them after I killed them I got heavily interested in French charcuterie, which Louisiana meat processing obviously derives from, but which has a much wider scope and is only very recently being appreciated much in the U.S. Next thing I knew I had a fridge full of aging confit duck legs and was covering galantines with chaudfroid for fun.
You were born in Cajun Thibidoux, Louisiana, moved to Lafeyette, Louisiana, and studied history at the University of Texas. What inspired the move to Alaska?
JL: I was born in Thibodaux but we lived in Morgan City when I was very small (essentially my whole family is from one part of Louisiana or another), then moved around a lot because my dad was in the oil business, so to Oklahoma til first grade, then Lafayette, then a year elsewhere in L.A., then Yemen, then Dallas for high school, then Memphis for a year of school, then University of Texas Austin for two years, then Alaska for 23 years! I never lived in New Orleans - there’s a complicated relationship between New Orleans and the rest of South Louisiana, so I don’t feel like I know New Orleans very well, especially post-Katrina, because it’s a very, very different place now.
I moved to Alaska because I wanted to go somewhere I could live the rest of my life and never leave, which worked for a while, until it didn’t, and because it was as far away from America as I could get without a work visa.
You opened Amatuli Sausage Co. in late 2025. How's business? Have people been surprised to find Creole/Cajun flavors in downtown Albany?
JL: It’s improving. There’s not really any way to rush the opening phase of a restaurant unless you have a ton of cash to burn or are very well established in the community, so it takes word of mouth, one office at a time. People are pretty enthusiastic - I see a lot of people two or three times a week, which is a good sign. People have told me about some Louisiana-heavy places that have existed here over the years, so I don’t feel like I’m coming out of left field.
OK, a few quick-fire questions. What are you listening to currently?
JL: I have a record player in the shop with a bunch of records. I put them all on from time to time but probably play more Emmylou Harris on it than anything else, although it’s getting close to time to put Willie Nelson’s Christmas record into heavy rotation. Customers seem to go for Thriller or ABBA’s Greatest Hits as their top choices.
Coffee or tea?
JL: Coffee, black, no sugar. I appreciate the difference between good coffee and bad coffee but I don’t care.
Favorite cocktail?
JL: Martini, two or three parts gin to one part vermouth (either dry or blanc), with a twist.
Favorite food or dish?
JL: I could probably eat or cook mussels every day and be perfectly satisfied.
What are 3 of your favorite places to eat in the Capital Region or Hudson Valley?
JL: I moved here last year so there’s a lot of places I just haven’t been to yet, but I like the memelitas at El Rancho, I like A La Shanghai in Latham, and I live fairly close to the Albany Defazio’s and get their pizza a lot.
Where's some place you want to travel to next?
JL: I don’t care that much about travelling anymore but when I do, I go to Montreal.
Thanks, Jeff. We’re excited that you made your way to Albany and I’m coming back asap for the confit duck jambalaya.
* If you’re interested in hearing some of Jeff’s own recipes from bbq to beets, check out his former community public show, Check the Pantry, on KBBI Radio.