IN a back room at his elegant restaurant, Herbsaint, the chef Donald Link has a conventional office filled with electronic devices, a photograph of his wife and children and four nondescript black swivel chairs.

There’s just one maniacal touch: his sausage closet. Inside it, where others might stash paper supplies or cleaning products, he has rigged the space with S hooks and loops of string. Like a secret, surreal forest of meat, big sausages dangle vertically from wall to wall. The air is kept at a constant 55 degrees — a sausage’s favorite temperature, as it happens. Nearby is a spray bottle of water with a bit of vinegar in it that Mr. Link uses to clean them off and encourage a dappling of beneficial mold.

“I couldn’t help it,” Mr. Link said. “I ran out of room everywhere else.”

It’s all preparation for his newest venture, Cochon Butcher, which opened Tuesday. The 1,000-square-foot combination meat market and 25-seat cafe is inside the same century-old brick warehouse that houses Cochon, the down-home Cajun restaurant that gained Mr. Link national attention.

Mr. Link, 39, wants Cochon Butcher to be “like all the little specialized markets in Cajun country, where everybody goes to get their Cajun meats and sausages — things you can’t get at the regular grocery store.” Though a sprinkling of mostly mass-produced Cajun meats has long been available in New Orleans supermarkets, this is the first time the city has seen all the iconic Louisiana-style charcuterie items house-made by a notable chef and under one roof: the thick smoked sausage known as andouille, the garlicky fresh links called chaurice and the smoked seasoned ham known as tasso.

Transplanting Cajun cuisine into the kitchens of sophisticated American restaurants from the rural communities of Southwest Louisiana where it lives has always been tricky. Most urban chefs get Cajun food right to roughly the same degree that Hollywood actors manage to reproduce faithful Southern regional accents — which is to say, almost never. Most people outside Louisiana, meanwhile, are burdened with wild misconceptions of the cuisine that were formed in the days when anything from fish to popcorn could be rendered “Cajun” with the application of a spice mix.

But Mr. Link has a leg up on many. He grew up in and near Lake Charles, La., in a sprawling family of cooks who answer to names like J. W., Bubba and Billy Boy. Mr. Link has 35 aunts and uncles, and many more cousins, most of whom make their own deer and pork sausages, farm their own crayfish or grow their own rice. A few of them open their back doors and shoot dinner as casually as other Americans stop for packages of boneless chicken breasts.

“They live in their own world out there,” said Mr. Link, sipping a double espresso one recent morning as the roar of blenders drilled through Herbsaint’s dining room — a batch of tomato and shrimp bisque in the making.

Herbsaint is Mr. Link’s original white-tablecloth flagship, and for the most part he hits the higher Creole notes there. But in 2006, seven months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged his house and marinated everything he owned in six feet of fetid water, Mr. Link opened Cochon, where he finally succumbed to his own fierce nostalgia and began offering the rustic Cajun foods he grew up eating. These include hogshead cheese (a poor man’s tête de veau) served with pickles and crackers, and fried chicken livers on toast dabbed with pepper jelly.

Authentic Cajun food has always been basic fare, flavored with plenty of salt and a mirepoix of bell pepper, onion, garlic, celery and parsley. Main courses are mostly one-pot dishes, like chicken and sausage gumbo, shrimp or crayfish stew or pork roast au jus over rice.

“Cochon is the only restaurant I have been in anywhere that approaches the true flavors of Southwest Louisiana cooking,” said Gene Bourg, a former restaurant critic for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. “I can’t think of another restaurant that comes as close.”

It may come as a surprise to tourists here, but the Cajun food of the Louisiana bayous has always been slim pickings in New Orleans. “It’s under-represented because this was never a Cajun city,” Mr. Bourg said. “There’s a significant segment of the population that’s Cajun-descended, but the Creole style of cooking has always been predominant.”