NATCHEZ — Richard “Bingo” Starr is best know around town as the head chef at the Stanton Hall Carriage House restaurant.

Around hunting circles, however, Starr was the tag-along before he became a renowned cook.

“I grew up in New Orleans, and I’d always come up this way starting about age 3 or 4,” Starr said.

“The Fudickar family had a place at Lake St. John and the Biendenharn family, which is a big Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines family in Louisiana, had a place on Lake Bruin, so I had been coming up here all my life.”

But Starr said he only got to come on the camping trips in the area because of his dad, Richard Sr.

“When I was little, the hunting trips were a father-son thing,” Starr said. “He was Big Richard and I was Little Richard, so it was kind of me being the tag-along.

“Then I started cooking, and it got to where I would cook at the camps. I was doing full-blown menus and importing venison from New Zealand. It got to be where Little Richard was coming, and you can bring dad along.”

Starr’s family had a restaurant in New Orleans called Bull’s Corner, and him working for his uncle there is what got Starr interested in cooking.

“For me, that was summer camp, after-school, babysitting and dance class all rolled up into one,” Starr said.

After that, Starr went to Culinary Institute of America in New York. Following that, he got the chance to work for Emeril Lagasse at the Windsor Hotel in New Orleans. That was where the nickname “Bingo” was born.

“I had an English chef there, Kevin Graham, who called me ‘Ringo,’ because my name is Richard,” Starr said. “One night he gave me a special on the grill station. It was one order after the other.

“He was yelling at me the whole time, and finally the last one I got was 100 percent right, and he said, ‘Bingo, you finally got it right!’ After that, I was Bingo.”

Starr has been working at the Carriage House for a year and a half, but mostly spends his hunting time away from town. On opening weekend of gun season, Starr took his son camping with him and his friend John Besh in Butler, Ala.

“He has a 2,800-acre deal out there,” Starr said. “There, I was known as Richard, not Bingo, and it took my a while to catch on to that.”

The hunt was his son’s first deer hunt, Starr said. The experience wasn’t what he was normally used to when he hunted.

“With a 4-year-old boy in the stand, there ain’t a lot of quiet going on,” Starr said.

Although he doesn’t hunt much in the area anymore, Starr said his favorite memory hunting in the Miss-Lou is not of a kill, but of getting lost.

“Johnny Fudickar dropped me off as a stand, telling me they were ‘putting the chef in the best spot,’” Starr said. “I later found out that no one had seen a deer there in 10 years.

“I shot a doe with my bow and started tracking it, then got turned around. They started yelling for me, but I was down wind and couldn’t yell back. Finally, after several hours, I ended up on a road and hollered. Turns out, I was right around the corner from the camp.”

For Starr, the chance to hunt is a time of bonding, and the kill is only a bonus.

“Before, I’d see these people once or twice a year,” he said. “There’s all this cooking and hanging out and being out in the woods. That’s the best part. The kill is last to me.”