It’s hard to believe Karen Johnson-Bey, owner of K’Lynn’s Southern & Cajun Fusion in Rio Rancho, when she says she’s mostly winging it. How could the person serving up enough catfish, gumbo, and fried green beans for a church group of thirty that wants to lunch at 11:00 be improvising? How could a person without a plan stay busy throughout the pandemic or run a catering business alongside K’Lynn’s nearly single-handedly? 

But, sitting by a window in her counter-service restaurant, Johnson-Bey said, “I never have a plan for anything in life. I just do things and it just happens, like, I’m winging it, and it seemed to always work out.” 

And so it has—if the line out the door before noon is any indication. Johnson-Bey is serving up a rare treat in the Land of Enchantment: hearty Cajun and Southern classics with no bayou in sight. In fact, K’Lynn’s, tucked behind a giant Albertsons in the sweeping Rio Rancho Marketplace, sits at some distance from any source of water at all. That doesn’t stop customers from ordering her catfish—crisply fried with a light cornmeal coating, the inside flaky and moist—which is offered on a po-boy or as a plate with two pieces of fish and two sides. 

Prices at K’Lynn’s are light too. The red beans and rice come in a generous scoop, and the baked mac and cheese side, for a dollar extra, is an appetizingly warm shade of orange and deeply seasoned with a distinct tang of dry mustard. The gumbo features a hearty combination of andouille sausage and chicken in a rich, okra-laden base. Shrimp is an optional add-on. Fried okra and green beans are just as lightly battered as the fish, and worth dipping into an extra side of house-made Cajun rémoulade, similar to tartar sauce but amped up with lemon juice and cayenne. 

The chef’s love of cooking started with the dishes she’d see on screen. “I’ve always loved to cook,” she said. “Since I was nine, I would watch cooking shows, and next thing you know, I’m cooking something. And still, to this day, I’ll see something on TV cooking and I have to make it.” 

K’Lynn’s Southern & Cajun Fusion opened in 2015, after a string of short-lived food service ventures. Johnson-Bey started catering for friends in her twenties, and then opened K’Lynn’s Cafe on Alameda and Fourth in Albuquerque, where she served New Mexican and American fare. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I just knew how to cook, but I didn’t know how to operate a restaurant, so it was two years of just craziness.” Later on (but “way before food trucks were popular”), Johnson-Bey had a hot dog truck, which she’d drive up Nine Mile Hill to Albuquerque’s publicly operated shooting range, hawking hot dogs. 

After struggling with these ventures, she called it quits, working at call centers (“I was miserable with a capital M”) but still dabbling in catering, which led her to a gig cooking meals out of what is now half of K’Lynn’s for a nearby rehab center. When the center got an on-site kitchen and the contract ended, she decided to keep the space and give the restaurant business another shot.

Curiously, Johnson-Bey’s background doesn’t include time spent living in Louisiana or anywhere else in the South. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, and her family moved to New Mexico in the seventies after spying an ad in New York for the “beautiful land of Rio Rancho,” as Johnson-Bey remembers it. But her father, from Georgia, taught her to fry catfish, and she learned to make jerk chicken from her mother, who has roots in Barbados and Montserrat. 

The rest, Johnson-Bey taught herself. She’s come to appreciate the rich heritage of Cajun and Creole cooking. “I love it because it has a history behind it, which I looked into as the years have gone on. So it’s a combination of all these different cultures that make Cajun food, Cajun Creole. . . . It comes from Italians, immigrants from the islands, all kinds of different things.”

At K’Lynn’s, she started off with a limited menu: catfish and a few other items. “People would ask me, ‘Hey, are you gonna make étouffée?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, yeah!’ I didn’t know what étouffée even was. And I would look it up and I’d make it, and they’re like, ‘This is really good,’” Johnson-Bey said. “I never told them I didn’t know what they were talking about. I would just find out what it was, and that’s how my menu evolved.”

Johnson-Bey gives the impression of a controlled whirlwind, darting from dining room to kitchen, kitchen to counter, and shouting “Order up!” between catch-ups with staff who seem at ease with the drill, and with one another. But as in most restaurants, Johnson-Bey said it can be hard to find reliable help. Once, someone she was training said he was going to his car to grab something, drove away, and never came back.

It’s her customers, she says, that make the difficult moments worth it. “I have all kinds of stories about customers that are just really, really good people,” she said. “So I think that’s the thing I really didn’t expect, that food brings out things in people.”

When Johnson-Bey started out, customers would stay with her for hours until she closed so she wouldn’t have to be by herself, and some even helped with dishes. One couple she calls by their first names came for takeout every Wednesday and Saturday through the pandemic—and still do. And there was the woman who approached her in the kitchen after sampling her food for the first time: a takeout order of collard greens, okra, mac and cheese, and cornbread that she started tasting as soon as she got in her car. Normally, Johnson-Bey said, she’d bristle at the intrusion while cooking, “but I could just see her face, and I was like, ‘OK, be nice.’ So she’s like, ‘Hey, can I just hug you?’ She goes, ‘This food, I haven’t had since I was seventeen,’ and she was actually crying.” She said the woman ordered more food on the spot and an hour later left a glowing review. Johnson-Bey was touched. “I’m so glad I let her come in there.”

K’Lynn’s had a busy lineup in the weeks following my visit, including a First Sunday event in April that will hopefully continue. But when Johnson-Bey has a little more room in her schedule, she’d love to renew her beer and wine license and host live jazz and blues in the evenings. Music is close to her heart—she plays the saxophone—but the idea is also about bringing more people together. “I just love it. I love what I do. I love my customers,” she said.

📍 4300 Ridgecrest SE, Rio Rancho, 505-453-3068