![]() ![]() ![]() (Me, thinking to myself, "Well, Bobby, you didn't want to do another Tex Mex in Houston show so you were looking for some different angle.") "Well, Jay, the Louisiana influence here is really strong, how did that come about?" So, when he threw out his questions on camera to me, I kind of had to freeform my answers and come up with something that sounded profound and valid! LOL. I remember asking Bobby beforehand if he wanted to go over the questions he was going to ask and he said we'd just wing it. Through my friendship with Robb, I ended up being on an episode of Bobby Flay's Food Nation, hosting a crawfish boil in my backyard and talking about crawfish and the Louisiana and Vietnam influences on the Houston food scene. The success of Crawfish and Beignets led to copycat restaurants and before long, this "build your own" became the way it was done in Houston. Instead of doing the final pre seasoning, they laid out batches of different sauces and spices so that the customers could build their own specific seasoning recipe at the table, by adding the ingredients they liked to the bag filled with crawfish. They brought their knowledge for cooking up batches of crawfish with them when they opened in Houston. The family members had lived in Louisiana and worked in Louisiana style restaurants there. It began with one place, Crawfish and Beignets. I remember talking once with Chef Trong Nguyen who told me that his place could get crawfish from the west coast at times when it wasn't available in Lousiana.but that was many years ago that I talked with him. Historically, it was a short season but now, crawfish farming can go from January through August. The traditional crawfish season begins around the time of Lent. Product of a couple of historical accidents, it became the de facto way to have crawfish in the Vietnamese community here. Many many years ago, Houston Press restaurant critic, Robb Walsh, had one of those aha moments when he observed how the Vietnamese community had embraced crawfish and how a new way of seasoning it was evolving in Houston.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |