Posted by Bruce Bilmes and Sue Boyle
, April 08, 2009 17:35
The Thursday forecast for New Orleans included wind. Not what we wanted to hear, as one of us has an aversion to flying in even the best of conditions. Sure enough, we “enjoyed” a Coney Island Cyclone of a landing at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Got our bag, got the car; now what? It’s about 11 am. We could try to check in early. Or get breakfast. But we decided to go straight to lunch. Sure, the landing was rough, but that’s never killed our appetites before, and it didn’t today.
We drove to Bozo’s, a few blocks from the entrance to the Causeway across Lake Pontchartrain.
Bozo’s is known for seafood, oysters and wild catfish in particular, and a roux-less gumbo. The oyster dozens we saw passing our table were simply enormous, the hugest raw oysters we’d ever seen. We heard a customer ask the gentlemen opening the bivalves at the front of the restaurant how the current oysters measure up, to which he replied, “Pretty good, but not as good as they had been.” Tables were occupied mostly by men on their lunch breaks. We seemed to be the only tourists in the joint. And lucky we arrived as early as we did: by the time we left there was a good wait for a table.
A basket of hot, well-buttered bread was brought to the table. The shatteringly crisp stuff made for a terrific makeshift instant breakfast. For lunch, we went with cups of intensely flavorful chicken and andouille gumbo – ahhh, to be back in the land where people know how to season their food – and followed that with a grilled shrimp po’boy and a fried catfish platter (those oysters were just too big for us to handle). The greaselessly fried, crunchy catfish was moist within, the highly seasoned cornmeal crust hiding flesh that tasted of, well, catfish – there was none of that soapy taste that can be the downfall of lesser catfish. The po’boy? Sue’s short-lived attempt at (relatively) healthy eating would end soon after. Not bad, not bad at all, but it just didn’t measure up to the rest of the meal.
We left Bozo’s happy in the knowledge that we enjoyed a worthy start to our six-day culinary trail. The wind whipped sharply as we walked across the parking lot to our car, and dark storm clouds rapidly moved across the sky as the first drops began to fall.
Coming up… Twisters and Turbodogs.
