Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [121]
While it has become something of a tourist attraction and muffulettas are the only sandwich on the menu, the Central Grocery still feels like a neighborhood store, its yellowed walls decorated with travel posters, the air inside smelling of garlic and sausage and provolone cheese. Shelves are stocked with imported olive oils, sauces, and pasta—reminders that New Orleans’ largest ethnic group (as well as some of its best Creole cooking) is Italian.
There is no table service at the Central Grocery. You step up to the counter and give your order, at which time the sandwich makers go to work assembling it—an exacting process you can watch from where you stand. Once the sandwich is ready, it is cut into quarters (enough for four normal appetites) and wrapped, at which point you can take it to a counter toward the back of the store to unwrap and eat it.
Champagne’s Breaux Bridge Bakery
105 Poydras St.
337–332–1117
Breaux Bridge, LA
BL | $
This charming nineteenth-century one-room bakery in the crawfish capital of the world caused us to stomp the brakes as we drove past early in the morning. The smell of just-baked bread was irresistible. Inside the door, a small card table was arrayed with loaves. They are the familiar-looking south-Louisiana torpedoes, like French baguettes but about half the weight. Some are wrapped in paper, the others in plastic bags. “You want soft, you get the plastic,” advised the gent behind the counter. “For crisp, paper.” Our paper-wrapped loaf had a refined crunch to its crust and ineffably feathery insides. It’s delicious just to eat, but oh, how well this would scoop out to be become a seafood boat filled with fried oysters or shrimp!
Cooked meat pies were displayed along the bakery counter, and good as they looked, we hesitated about getting one because who wants a cold meat pie? “We have a microwave,” said the woman behind the counter.
“Lots of people, they come in and they take two or three hot, to eat,” said the man who had been our bread counselor. The warmed one we took out to the car was nothing short of spectacular: rich, moist, and vividly spiced.
We also walked away with a bag full of sugar cookies and one big, flat cookie filled with coconut. Delicious!
D.I.’s
Hwy. 97
337–432–5141
Basile, LA
LD | $$
Big round beer trays heaped with crawfish emerge from the kitchen trailing hot spiced steam through the dining room as accordion notes with a triangle beat bounce from the bandstand. Set back from the two-lane in the middle of nothing but rice fields and crawfish ponds, far from any town or major highway, D.I.’s is a brimful measure of Acadian pleasure. If it hadn’t been for Sulphur, Louisiana, policeman and good friend Major Many McNeil, we never, ever would have come across it. When we told Many we were on the lookout for a true Cajun eating experience, he said D.I.’s was it.
Daniel Isaac (“D.I.”) Fruge has been known to neighbors for his well-seasoned crawdads since the 1970s. He was a rice and soybean farmer who began harvesting the mudbugs, boiling and serving them on weekends to friends and neighbors: $5 for all you could eat. They were served in his barn the traditional way—strewn in heaps across bare tables—with beer to drink on the side.
D.I. and his wife, Sherry, now run a restaurant with a full menu that includes steaks, crabs, oysters, frog legs, flounder, and shrimp, but vividly spiced crawfish are the star attraction. The classic way to enjoy them is boiled and piled onto a beer tray—a messy meal that rewards vigorous tail-pulling and head-sucking with an unending procession of the vibrant sweetwater richness that only crawdads deliver. You can have them crisp-fried into bite-size morsels with a salty crunch, and there are crawfish pie, étouffée, and bisque.
No longer a makeshift annex to Monsieur Fruge’s barn, D.I.’s is a spacious destination with multiple dining rooms and dance floor. The Cajun music starts at 7:00 P.M., with an open-mike jam session Wednesday.
Domilise’s Po-Boys
5240 Annunciation St.
504–899–9126
New Orleans,