Calvin Lindsly, owner of Calvin’s Bocage Market, has been living the American dream for decades. Therefore, he wasn’t surprised that the latest twist in his success story found his Baton Rouge grocery store at the center of a social media frenzy. He also wasn’t surprised that Bethenny Frankel, one of the original cast members of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” likes his chicken salad.
Four days after posting, Frankel’s initial TikTok video, which shows her unpacking and trying Calvin’s chicken salad (and accessories), is approaching 900,000 views with more than 3,200 comments, including an early one that says: “Is that Calvin’s chicken salad from bocage in Baton Rouge??? It’s the best! I think about every day since I moved away 17 years ago…but seriously it’s so good.” (That comment alone has a chorus of replies in agreement and more than 500 likes.)
Bethenny Frankel received a large container of Calvin’s Bocage Market’s chicken salad from Shane Griffin in Baton Rouge. Her TikTok about the chicken salad has turned the much-loved local product into an internet sensation.
Local businessman Shane Griffin, who doesn’t consider himself a TikTok expert, approached Lindsly’s son, Brandon, about an idea to contact Frankel, a major chicken salad fan.
“My son and Shane were the ones that put that together,” Calvin Lindsly said of the video. “Shane’s been shopping here since he was a child.”
Griffin is no TikTok expert.
But he knew his 20-year-old son was probably right when, earlier this year, he recommended that his dad try out the social media channel to promote his design business and Bocage-area storefront, March.
An interior shot of March, the interiors store owned by Shane Griffin, located at 7627 Jefferson Highway in Baton Rouge.
“He kept telling me you need to get on TikTok. You need to start doing videos,” Griffin said. “So I started making TikToks back in April strictly for the store.”
After being on TikTok for a while, Griffin says that “for whatever reasons,” Frankel’s posts popped up often.
“She’s always in her house in the kitchen eating and telling about what she’s eating. It’s usually chicken salad that she gets in the Hamptons,” he said.
Shane Griffin, of Baton Rouge, gathered all of his favorite chicken salad treats and sent them to Bethenny Frankel, one of the original ‘The Real Housewives of New York City’ cast members and a chicken salad enthusiast. Griffin’s basket of goodies included Laffitte’s candied jalapeno peppers, a box of large WheatThins, a large container of chicken salad and Kayln Lindsly Anderson’s pimento cheese.
One day, while standing at his kitchen counter eating his favorite combination of Calvin’s chicken salad, cheese and candied jalapeños on Wheat Thins, he thought, “Oh, I’m like, ‘I’m like Bethenny Frankel.'”
“So I plopped my phone up just on a whim and filmed it on TikTok and, you know, called her out and said, ‘You need to try this.'” Griffin said. “Well, people went wild with it. All of a sudden, all these people are tagging her, tagging her, tagging her.”
Brandon Lindsly thought Griffin’s instinct had been a good one, but neither knew if things would go anywhere — for a variety of practical reasons. First, neither had a connection to Frankel or her mailing address. Secondly, mailing a mayonnaise-based chicken salad is tricky business.
Calvin Lindsly, owner of Calvin’s Market, and his son, Brandon Lindsly
Frankel didn’t take long to respond, saying she was open to trying it and sent her address.
From there, the Lindsly family donated the chicken salad, along with Kalyn Lindsly Anderson’s pimento cheese, a box of large Wheat Thins and a jar of Lafitte’s Gourmet Cajun Candied jalapeños.
Griffin’s wife wrote Frankel a note giving precise instructions on how to eat the chicken salad on the cracker with the candied jalapeños.
Laffitte’s candied jalapenos flew off the shelves and were the No. 1 jalapeno condiment on Amazon in the wake of Bethenny Frankel’s TikTok video about Calvin’s Bocage Market’s chicken salad.
The result has been that the small Baton Rouge grocery store has been inundated with people from around the world begging them to ship them some chicken salad.
Kalyn Lindsly Anderson, Calvin Lindsly’s daughter, manages the company’s social media accounts.
“I’ve gotten over a thousand messages from people asking me to ship it to them in New York, California, Australia, Japan — all over,” Anderson said. “They were all so nice — so, so nice.”
Despite the internet fanfare and phones ringing off the hooks, life at Calvin’s has been business as usual.
Shelves of pimento cheese and chicken salad line the cooler at Calvin’s Bocage Market Monday morning.
“Mostly just phone calls wanting chicken salad shipped all over. Everybody here knows about it. We sell 500-700 pounds a day,” Calvin’s manager Jeremy Jarreau said Friday afternoon.
Despite its moment in the limelight, Calvin Lindsly knows the secret behind his now even more famous chicken salad — consistency.
“It’s the same way every time we get it, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You get no surprises,” Lindsly said.
It’s a recipe locals have appreciated for decades — in much the way they appreciate the homegrown and small-town vibe of the store itself.
Lindsly has owned Calvin’s since 1996, but he started working at its predecessor, Piggly Wiggly, when he was 16 and started as a bagboy and worked for 19 years until Piggly Wiggly announced it would be closing its doors.
With the help of Dr. Richard Hill, who owned the shopping center, Calvin Lindsly was able to buy the store.
Finding video notoriety is not new to Calvin’s. Somehow, back in 1996, Tom Brokaw and his team at NBC read the little blurb in “The Advocate” about the American success story of going from a bagboy to owning the store. They sent a team down to Baton Rouge to do a story. The NBC film crew was in town on the day the Calvin’s Bocage Market sign went up.
Brokaw called it “the classic model of starting at the bottom, working hard and winding up at the top, owning the store — literally” in a segment called The American Dream.
“His customers are his friends. They remember when he started at the store at the age of 16. They remember him bagging and mopping,” Brokaw said.
A walk through the store today yields the same results.
When asked about the secret to the success of this small-town feeling grocery store, Calvin Lindsly said, “We’re community. All my friends have been shopping here all my life.”
And, as if on cue, an older gentleman pushing a cart down the dry goods aisle sticks out his hand to shake Calvin Lindsly’s hand and says, “That’s the truth, Calvin.”
This article was originally published by a www.theadvocate.com . Read the Original article here. .