by John T. Edge
RICHARD’S SEAFOOD PATIO
Opened in 1957 by Ovey “Red” Richard, this corrugated-tin-sheathed building is the oldest known boiling point in Cajun Country. “There was another place over in Lafayette that had crawfish on the menu, but they never sold much of it,” seventy-something-year-old Red tells me. “Hell, even the filling stations sell boiled crawfish now, but it just wasn’t that way when I was coming up. Ask the old-timers around here, they’ll tell you I was the first one. I come from a family of meat men. My brother runs Richard’s meat market, and I’m the only one in the family that strayed, but I haven’t regretted it, no. We got our crawfish out of the rice fields back before they knew to call them crawfish farms. Rice-field crawfish is still the best. They don’t have that iodine taste that deep water crawfish get from eating the water lilies in the basin.”
When Red retired back in 1983, his son Calvin took over the day-to-day operations, introducing a few innovations of his own, including a custom-crafted, and now patented, crawfish tray with a sliding, partitioned insert to keep the empty shells separate from the mound of crawfish, corn, potatoes, and onions yet to be eaten. But he still cooks crawfish the way his father taught him to, plunging the little critters in a saltwater bath to wash the mud off and induce the crawfish to “spit up,” before tossing them in cast-iron kettles burbling with rock salt and red-pepper-spiked water. Though they will sprinkle a bit of extra red pepper on the outside of the crawfish for those who like a lot of heat, Calvin, like his father before him, believes that too much cayenne—especially when sprinkled on the outside—ruins a good tray.
1516 SOUTH HENRY STREET / ABBEVILLE / 337-893-1693
GUIDING STAR
Like Richard’s, the Guiding Star is a simple place, a joint really, with three pool tables on the side and a dining room filled with wood tables papered with old copies of the Daily Iberian. There are some who argue that Hawk’s over near Rayne serves bigger, better crawfish. Others swear by Crawfish Town USA, a tourist spot just off the interstate in Henderson. Others still dote on D. I.’s in Basile, long popular with locals on Mardi Gras runs.
But for my money, if the Guiding Star is not the best, then it’s surely among the best boiling points in the state. It’s a simple formula, really: cold, cold long-neck beers, and fat, sweet, fiery crawfish, seasoned with Tabasco mash, the sludge left after the vinegary liquid has been drained from an aged cask of Tabasco. Owner Ralph Shaubert buys his mash by the cask, but should you be in the area, you can stop by the Tabasco plant on Avery Island and pick up a two-quart plastic bag of the fiery stuff for a couple of dollars.
4404 HIGHWAY 90 WEST / NEW IBERIA / 337-365-9113
Baton Rouge
SILVER MOON CAFÉ
Most everything that issues forth from the kitchen of proprietor Seabell Thomas leaves in a bowl: delicious white beans, soupy, salty, and chock-full of pork; jambalaya, larded with strands of dark-meat chicken and spicy sausage; and even, on occasion, fried chicken, crisp as can be. “That’s so nothing gets away from you,” says Mrs. Thomas, a white kerchief fixed on her head and a bean-splattered apron tied around her waist. “We serve that way so everything stays right where we put it. If it was on a plate, you might lose some of that good gravy over the side.”
The Silver Moon is instantly recognizable to me. Like Mama Dip’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and late and lamented Mama Lo’s in Gainesville, Florida, it’s a black-owned, black-run restaurant, dispensing home cooking to an integrated crowd.
On the day I visit, the parking lot is packed with late-model Volkswagens, Toyotas, and a couple of BMWs to boot. “I Love Tri-Delt,” boasts one bumper sticker. Inside, twelve-odd tables topped with green and white oilcloth are scattered about the concrete-floored dining room. There’s not a spare seat to be had. The patrons are almost exclusively white, fresh-faced sorority and fraternity types for the most part. My companion, a newly arrived Northerner, looks confused.
I try to explain that many white Southerners were raised on food cooked by black women. Even if your parents were of meager means, a black cook was oftentimes hired to cook the evening meals, I tell her. And many white Southerners were wet-nursed by black women. So doesn’t it stand to reason that when these kids leave home for the first time, many of them end up here, craving the food they grew up eating?
206 WEST CHIMES STREET / 225-387-3345
**Lionel Key**
A Touch of the Green: Uncle Bill’s Creole Filé
Filé maker Lionel Key is a proud man. Not boastful, mind you, but proud. Proud of his product, proud to be the inheritor of a family tradition of filé making that began back in the early years of the twentieth century with his late great uncle, Bill Ricard, born blind to a family of farmers in Rougon, Louisiana.
As a youth, Ricard cut sugarcane on Alma Plantation near Lakeland, Louisiana. In later years he turned to making filé, grinding sassafras leaves to a fine, dusky-green powder and selling it to neighbors when they came calling for a bit of the green to thicken their gumbo.
In 1982, Lionel began a two-year apprenticeship at the knee of his uncle Bill, learning the art and science of filé making: when to harvest the sassafras leaves, how to cure them, where to store them, and, most important, how to get the grind right, how to properly plunge a pecan-wood maul into the cavity of a cypress stump brimming with dried sassafras leaves until the leaves have been reduced to a powder, fine as silt, fragrant as a spring flower.
“He used to tell me to listen for the sound to tell if I was hitting it right,” Lionel recalls. “You got to hit the maul dead center to get the grind right, to pulverize the leaves fine like he taught me. It’s a real solid sound, like a home-run ball coming off a bat. The filé ends up much finer. You put some of that machine-ground, commercial stuff in a pot of gumbo and it’ll sink to the bottom quick, but my filé is light as a feather; it’ll just float on top ‘til you stir it in. And the flavor; there’s just no comparison. Mine has a bright lemony punch to it.”
In 1984 Uncle Bill passed away at the age of ninety, but thanks to Lionel, his legacy lives on. Among the fans of Lionel’s filé are some of Louisiana’s top chefs. “John Folse, he uses my filé over at Lafitte’s Landing in Donaldsonville,” says Lionel. “And Leah Chase over in New Orleans, she says mine is the only kind she’ll use at her restaurant.”
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You got to hit the maul dead center to get the grind right, to pulverize the leaves fine. … It’s a real solid sound, like a home-run ball coming off a bat.
”
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But Lionel is quick to add that most of his customers are just plain folks, intent upon stirring up the best pot of gumbo possible. Some Saturday mornings, you can find him selling recycled baby-food jars full of Uncle Bill’s Creole Filé at the Red Stick Farmers’ Market in downtown Baton Rouge.
For those unable to make it to Baton Rouge, contact Uncle Bill’s Creole Filé at 225-267-9220.
Eunice
BOUDIN FOR BREAKFAST
Despite what the folks at Popeye’s Fried Chicken would have you believe, boudin—rice and seasoned ground pork parts stuffed in a sausage casing—is about the closest thing to Cajun fast food. Take a look on the counter of most every convenience store south of I-10 and you’ll spy a crock pot by the cash register, full of taut links flecked with green onion and red pepper. Though there was a day when boudin was a by-product of a wintertime boucherie or hog killing, these days it’s a year-round treat munched on the go with a cold beer in the afternoon or a hot cup of coffee in the morning.
The sign you want to see come breakfast time.
Arneastor Johnson and friend on the porch of the family grocery.
JOHNSON’S GROCERY AND BEST STOP
In Eunice, the Johnson brothers—Wallace, Stephen, and Matthew—have long reigned as the grand old men of the commercial boudin business. When their father, Arneastor Johnson, first opened a little grocery in Eunice back in 1937, boudin was rarely sold retail.
Sure, a farmer might bring in a few links he had left over from a boucherie and trade them for a sack of meal, but for the most part, the pork that filled a link of boudin never left the farm on which that pig was slaughtered. That all changed sometime around 1948 when Arneastor took to selling boudin on Saturday mornings.
“Saturday was the traditional day for hog killings,” Wallace Johnson told me on an earlier visit. “My mother fixed big batches of rice, and they would cook up the meat, chop the onions and celery and bell peppers, and stuff the sausages with an old cow horn. We went on like that for a while until we added Wednesdays. Then when the oil boom hit bottom a while back, we started making it every day because we do a lot of credit business and selling boudin brought us walk-up business, cash business.”
Until recently, the grocery looked little changed from founder Arneastor Johnson’s day. The well-oiled wood floors shone; the shelves were stocked with local staples like Community Coffee and Evangeline Maid–brand bread; the smoke house out back still clouded most mornings with smoke from a smoldering oak fire. Indeed the only thing Arneastor might not recognize was the little arrow-shaped placard they hung from the ceiling a few years back, pointing the way to the meat counter. It read Rue Boudin, and on many a Saturday morning a line full of tourists and locals alike stretches back from the meat counter, beneath the cardboard arrow, and nearly out the door. At press time, Johnson’s was in transition, serving boudin on Thursday through Saturday only, and my allegiance was drifting toward the Best Stop in Scott, where in addition to great boudin, you can snag a bag of cracklins or a stuffed beef tongue.
JOHNSON’S GROCERY / 700 EAST MAPLE AVENUE / EUNICE / 337-457-9314
BEST STOP / 511 HIGHWAY 93 NORTH / SCOTT / 337-233-5805
RUBY’S CAFÉ
Scholar Sidney Mintz argues that for a region to claim a cuisine of its own, it must have an educated, opinionated class of eater, familiar with the nuances of local food and drink. Based on a recent meal at this humble four-stool, eight-table, back-street café, I would argue that no region of the South can claim a greater concentration of such educated eaters than Acadiana. I met five or six of them firsthand while pondering my lunchtime menu choices.
On a battered orange stool to my right sat a man of maybe sixty, extolling the virtues of making coffee “the old fashioned way, like Ms. Ruby does it.” When I asked the waitress what he meant, she chimed in with a lengthy exposition on the fine art of brewing café noir. “Ms. Ruby makes a coffee sack out of unbleached cotton cloth,” she told me. “And she drapes the ends over the sides of a pot with the sack hanging down and pours the water over that real slow like. When she finishes we pour it in smaller coffeepots and put them in skillets filled with water. They stay over a low flame to keep warm, and the water keeps the coffee from burning.”
My next question was directed at a second waitress, embroiled in debate with a clutch of farmers about the prospects for the local crawfish crop. The crawfish were coming in late that year, and, worse yet, they were small. When I asked her whether I should get the pork roast or the stewed and fried shrimp over rice, she fixed me with a look that said, You ain’t from around here, are you, sport? and asked, “So you don’t want the ponce? Why didn’t you ask about the ponce?” After assuring her—and the gathering onlookers—that I bore no prejudice against eating pork stomach stuffed with sausage, she steered me toward the shrimp.
What emerged from the little cubbyhole of a kitchen some minutes later is one of the best meals I’ve ever had the pleasure to eat: a spicy étoufée of shrimp, topped with five or six lacy shrimp, fried in an egg wash and flour batter, the whole affair piled high atop a mound of fluffy white rice. On the side was a lesser puddle of mashed potatoes and a scattering of peas separated by a crescent of cantaloupe. I polished off my plate in no time and asked if it was okay to pop my head in the kitchen to pay my respects to the cook.
I was able to get little information out of Ruby Watts, save that she was born in 1929 and came to work here in 1954 as a waitress when Mae Simmons owned the place. “It’s been mine since 1957, honey, now shoo, this is my dinner hour,” she said. “And if you come back, you try that pork roast.”
N.B.: In the years since my first visit, Ruby Watts passed away. Melinda Aguillard is now the owner, and Theresa Labrano is the cook. They uphold the standards that Miss Ruby set.
221 WEST WALNUT AVENUE / EUNICE / 337-550-7665
Natchitoches
CANE RIVER MEAT PIES
Along the Cane River in the central Louisiana city of Natchitoches, street vendors once peddled meat pies, little crescent-shaped brown bundles stuffed with spiced ground pork, beef, onions, green peppers, and garlic. Inspired by that tradition, James Laysone began making them in the 1960s, first at the Loan Oak Grocery and later at his restaurant, Laysone’s Meat Pie Kitchen, still in business down on Second Street.
But locals will tell you that to taste the best that Cane River country has to offer, you’ve got to have a connection, you’ve got to know one of the older Creole ladies who still fries up a couple dozen every few days to sell to friends and neighbors. Failing that they will direct you to St. Augustine Church in the nearby community of Isle Brevelle, where on the second weekend of October the church celebrates its anniversary with a fair, selling meat pies by the hundreds to raise funds. In-the-know locals fill their freezers full.
New Orleans
f New Orleans is not the South’s premier restaurant city (only Mason, Tennessee, and De Valls Bluff, Arkansas, can mount a challenge based on good eats per capita), then I’ll eat my hat, wash it down with castor oil, and follow that with a relevé of nutria tartare. In fact, New Orleans is such a great restaurant city that writing about its food presents me with a problem. In short: Which restaurants do I choose; which dishes do I sample and report back to you, the reader? Which stories do I tell? Do I take you on a tour of the grand old dining rooms like Antoine’s, in business since 1840 and famed as the origin point of oysters Rockefeller, or Commander’s Palace, the elegant Garden District restaurant run by the Brennan family and once the home kitchen of superstar chefs Emeril Lagasse and Paul Prudhomme?
And what of Prudhomme’s restaurant, K-Paul’s, a Cajun outpost in a Creole city? Shouldn’t any attempt to write about the foods of Louisiana include an homage to this Opelousas native—the man who single-handedly invented blackened redfish and lays claim to having introduced the turducken when he stuffed a trio of deboned fowl filled with aromatic dressings, one inside the other—chicken inside duck inside turkey?
And let’s not forget that frumpy French Quarter favorite Galatoire’s, where generations of New Orleans swells have cooled their heels out front on the Bourbon Street sidewalk, waiting for a table inside the mirror-flanked dining room famous for crabmeat ravigote, trout Marguery, and café brulôt, among many other seminal Creole dishes prepared with French flair.
A peek inside the kitchen at Antoine’s, one of New Orleans’ temples of gastronomy.
The restaurant known as Dooky Chase’s must be a part of this culinary conversation, too, for it has long been the city’s premier destination for Creoles of Color. It opened in 1941 as a sandwich shop, supported in part by the profits that founder Edgar “Dooky” Chase made from an old New Orleans tradition: gambling.
Dooky’s did not ascend to the upper echelon of Creole cookery until Leah Chase, the wife of Dooky’s son, came to the fore, introducing dishes like shrimp Clemenceau, veal grillades, and chicken breasts stuffed with oyster dressing swaddled in a marchand du vin sauce. Mrs. Chase also expanded the restaurant and outfitted the dining rooms in grand style, hanging a fine art collection including woodcuts by Elizabeth Catlett and vibrant oil paintings of Mardi Gras Zulu parades by Bruce Brice.
Little known to all but the neighborhood regulars, Dooky’s has long run a corner sandwich shop, selling fried oyster poor boys on pan bread, stuffed crabs, and a peppery Creole gumbo. By the time you read this, Leah Chase will be, following a post-Katrina rebuild, bac
k at her store. That gumbo, served in a Styrofoam go-cup, was one of the best I have ever tasted—thick with sausage, crab, and fat sweet shrimp, swimming in a smoky, chocolate-brown liquid spiked with cayenne and thickened with filé.
One taste and my problem was solved: the burden of writing about the long roster of great restaurants in New Orleans lifted. I would write of the gutsy, simple fare of New Orleans rather than the temples of haute cuisine, keeping in mind that Dooky’s began as a sandwich shop; Paul Prudhomme was once a skinny kid in knee pants, born in the crossroads Cajun town of Opelousas; and sixteen-year-old Antoine Alciatore first flung the doors open to a humble “pension” on St. Louis Street back in 1840, serving simple foods to the butchers, bakers, and fishmongers of the French Market.
POOR BOYS
Sandwiches may well be America’s most contentious comestible. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, they squabble over who was the first to squirt Cheez Whiz on sliced beef and slip it inside a roll. In Miami, Florida, folks debate the relative merits of the mojo-drenched pork-stuffed treats known generically as Cuban sandwiches. But only in New Orleans are you likely to witness a fistfight over who proffers the city’s best poor boy and how the storied sandwich got its name.
First the name: The more effete will tell you that poor boy is an Americanized elision of the slang term pour boire, translated from the French as “for drinks,” a reference to the tips left on tables that would presumably buy a beverage for a waiter. That explanation may satisfy some linguists, but most native New Orleanians turn up their noses at such rarefied conjecture.
