Yellowstone’s Chef Gator Guilbeau Dishes On The ‘Hardest Show On Television,’ Louisiana Cooking & More
Chef Gabriel Guilbeau from the TV series Yellowstone now goes solely by his nickname, “Gator." “My mom even calls me Gator,” he told me.
For about five years, Guilbeau has served as head of craft services for projects by director Taylor Sheridan. But the 30-year-old caught the public eye with his appearances in 12 episodes of the hit show Yellowstone.
“I’d never acted before,” Guilbeau said. When Sheridan wrote him into his first scene, he admitted to “shaking in my boots.” While Guilbeau’s on-screen persona as the Dutton family chef is newer territory, his affinity for cooking was generations in the making.
Guilbeau’s paternal ancestors migrated to Acadiana—a region in Louisiana known as Cajun Country—with the first wave of French people exiled from Canada in the 18th century. The region is “where all the best food in America is,” Guilbeau said.
Guilbeau described his father as “the black sheep” of his family for marrying a woman of non-Cajun descent and pursuing a profession outside of agriculture. Instead, Guilbeau’s dad ran the historic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO, which was the inspiration for the hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining.
Born and raised in Southern California, Guilbeau first visited Louisiana when he was eight and spent every summer thereafter in the state. He called it “the beginning of my education in cuisine,” as he learned about his Acadian heritage through crawfish boils, camp cookouts, and cochon de laits, or pig roasts.
Guilbeau and his father would spend their weekends on the hunt for oysters, boiled shrimp, crabs, fried pork cracklins, and boudin, a Cajun sausage.
Different dishes remind him of his relatives, who could hold their own in the kitchen. One aunt cooked “the best” jambalaya and Cajun spaghetti. Often helping another aunt preserve fruit from her trees, Guilbeau can still taste the ghost of a childhood delicacy: buttered toast with fig preserves.
When it comes to Cajun cooking, “it’s important for the people that know how to do it to continue to do it, or else we could lose one of the finest cuisines America’s ever had,” he said.
At 18, he moved to Lafayette, LA. California will “always have a special place in my heart,” but “I never belonged,” he said. First, Guilbeau worked at a restaurant—not cooking, but in maintenance. After working 18-hour days on a film set in Baton Rouge, he soon discovered his professional passion, even though he toiled through inclement weather and earned minimal cash.
“It was miserable, and I absolutely loved it,” he said. As he landed more movie industry jobs, he cooked on a strapped budget and sometimes would make just one soup a day: chicken and sausage gumbo.
“The film crews really realized pretty early on that, ‘Oh, man. Well, this is a better option than McDonald’s,’” he said. “‘Let’s have this guy all the time.’”
After making a name for himself on sets around New Orleans, he started to travel across the country for shows. Friends and colleagues working on the first season of Yellowstone repeatedly mentioned his name to their bosses. “If anybody knows Taylor Sheridan, he likes to eat,” Guilbeau said.
This led to a midnight phone call with an offer to meet the Yellowstone crew in Utah. The next morning, he packed up his belongings and drove straight to the set from Louisiana. After six hours of work, another surprise awaited him: the team was relocating to Montana.
“Oh, great. I just drove 2,000 miles. Let’s add another 500 for the evening,” Guilbeau joked.
On his first day, he also met Sheridan, whose presence was signaled by the sound of “spurs clanking on the concrete.” Sheridan pointed to Guilbeau’s BBQ pit, and asked when he planned to fire it up. “I was thinking about lighting it right now,” Guilbeau said, to which Sheridan responded, “That’s the right answer. You’ll do just fine here.”
Guilbeau quickly learned that he was “called to come do the hardest show on television.” The crew shoots at beautiful locations, but it comes at a cost: few amenities, remote sites, and harsh conditions. In 2022, they worked almost exclusively in Montana.
“I’ve had to cook on the side of a mountain, and bring food even higher up,” Guilbeau said. In spite of the challenges, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
On Yellowstone, he typically feeds around 300 people daily, from sunrise to sunset. For the prequel series, 1883, that number doubled to nearly 600.
“They eat until I’m out of food,” Guilbeau said. He’s assembled a team over the years to help meet demand, and works with local farms to secure fresh ingredients. The menu for a December week in Los Angeles included gumbo, étouffée, jambalaya, braised beef, pork, chicken, hot sandwiches, steaks, and a taco bar.
He’ll experiment with recipes, trying new cuts of meat and unfamiliar cuisines. “It keeps me sharp, and it keeps the crew from getting lackluster,” Guilbeau said.
When Sheridan made the decision to include his character, Gator, in the series, it “wasn’t optional,” he said. In the beginning, Guilbeau took it as an opportunity to prepare dinner for the crew, chopping vegetables on camera.
“It was too late for me to turn back, I guess,” he said. Looking forward to 2023, “we’ve got another big one ahead of us.”
For years to come, one fact about Guilbeau will remain certain: “I’ll never be able to stop feeding people. It’s in my nature, and I need them as much as they need me.”
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