Stephen Domingue is still ragin’
Stephen Domingue, who ran the Ragin’ Cajun restaurant in Hermosa Beach for 18 years, now operates a food truck, wheeling out to different Southern California locations daily. Photo by Alene Tchekmedyian One spring day in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1988, Stephen Domingue climbed into his red, smoke-blowing Nissan Sentra, solely with the clothes on his back, a few bucks in his pocket and his at-the-time girlfriend, an aspiring actress, in his passenger seat. The then-26-year-old was heading west and he’d settle wherever his car got him. “If that car would’ve broke down in Texas, you and I wouldn’t be talking right now,” Domingue said, with a contagious laugh that revealed a row of perfectly straight, white teeth. Four days later, he landed in Torrance, crashing with a couple of high school friends who had moved there from Lafayette a couple years before. He’d dropped them off at the Louisiana airport in tears, never expecting he’d be joining them. For four years, Domingue paid the bills by working as a parts manager for a BMW dealership, practicing his “momma’s momma’s momma’s” Cajun recipes on the side. One day, he gathered the courage to take a taste of his jambalaya to the Hermosa…
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