If you know me, then you know the best part of my trip is not staring at cypress stands; it’s getting out and eating the food of South Louisiana. My projects are assigned to me, so sometimes I end up in the middle of nowhere in St. Helena Parish with nothing to eat, and, Occasionally, I’ll get assigned a project on the North Shore, where the eating establishments are endless. Then, there are days like Wednesday.I was back in Larose for a third trip to an extensive mitigation bank project. The two previous times, we grabbed lunch at a truck stop/casino, which now seem to be located in even the most remote parts of the state. This time, we passed on that truck stop in Larose to see if we could find anything further down Bayou Lafourche. We passed a Subway and a Quizno’s, but neither of us thought a sandwich would satisfy our mounting hunger. As we wandered aimlessly around Galliano and Golden Meadow, hunger pains finally got the best of us as we pulled into Galliano Truck Plaza and Casino. Yep. That’s exactly what I thought-another truck stop. It’s not like truck stop food was new to me. From tater logs to chicken livers, from Wesson Truck Stop to the Country Buffet in Pickens, I know my way around the cardiac cuisine of the road.
I inspected the menu, which consisted of most of the usual suspects: greasy double cheeseburgers, oversized onion rings, and crispy chicken strips. Yet, there were also some things I should have expected, but still caught me off guard.
The second I saw the mini hot dog PLATTER, I was reminded of my college lunch staple of Betty’s corndog nuggets and rotel cheese dip. However, my corndog daydream was hastily interrupted as I focused on something written on the chalkboard next to the counter- boudin bites. Being that I have only seen these on 3 menus throughout Louisiana, and the fact that they were only $1.00 , I had to get an order.While shoveling the freshly fried boudin balls down my throat, three guys walked into the empty truck stop diner with their Cajun Reeboks on. They walked directly to the order counter and in some sort of broken Cajun French- English asked, “what you got to eat?” At first, I assumed they couldn’t read the menu, but when the waitress sharply replied, “shrimp and crab fricassee”, my last boudin ball hit the plate. What the hell, was there some kind of secret menu like at In-N-Out Burger, and what truck stop has a fricassee? The three men sat down, and just a few moments later, an older man decked out in his navy blue coveralls came out from the kitchen holding 3 massive bowls of the fricassee. Even though I had just devoured a whole order of fries, a cheeseburger, and almost all of the boudin bites, I started to salivate at the site of the fresh potato salad and the overflowing bowls of stew filled with right-off-the-boat-shrimp and a massive whole crab. We asked the waitress if we could possibly get a to-go box of this secret stew to take home. As she looked at us like we were Phil Berquist, she explained that the old gentleman from the kitchen is one of the shrimp boot guy’s parraine. Every Wednesday, they let him use the kitchen and to cook whatever he wishes. The worst part, the down home Cajun dishes that he slings out of the truck stop’s kitchen aren’t made available to general customers. Instead, they are reserved for his kinfolk and his family’s friends, and only on Wednesday afternoons. After letting out a few "got dang it"s, we left the Galliano Truck Plaza and Casino empty handed. Places like this make me never want to depart from culinary-centric South Louisiana.
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