The HOV Lane Blog

Lafayette, Louisiana. Another post from a couple of weeks ago… To cap-off Mardi Gras, we headed to a local favorite, Crawfish Time, for shrimp & crawfish.

Ever since becoming enthralled in the film, Raising Arizona, it has been a great love of mine to call these sea critters, crawdads. I drop the “crawdad” reference a few times before the locals put a stop to it. “WE don’t call them crawdads. Yankees might call them crawdads, but we call em’ crawfish,” I was told by several locals.

I tried to stop, but we were ordering heapin’ hot platters (3lbs to 5lbs) of crawdads — the roaches of the sea!! These things were truly awesome. I fell in love at first bite. Afterwards, I decided to take a few of the feast survivors on the road with me. Later that week, I took them out and treated them to a Hollywood-style photo-shoot.

“Who’s your craw daddy?!!”

“Nobody. How many times do we need to tell you? They aren’t crawdads.” Even “mud bug” is better than “crawdad.” “Mud bugs,” it is, I concluded.

Above, My cousin Lane makes his sauce in preparation for the feast.

The food at Crawfish Time iss phenomenal. There were two other aspects of the dining extravaganza that dazzled and amazed me. One is the saucing ritual. At the start of the meal, you are promptly given a cup filled with mayonnaise. You must then add a variety of ingredients to mix up your sauce, as you like. Being a rookie, Laura mixed it up for me. Everyone’s personally prepared sauce is typically a mix of mayonnaise, ketchup, cajun spice mix, Worcestershire sauce and some sort of garlic sauce. Whooah, it was electric!

The other “best thing” was the hole in the middle of the table (pictured above). It is actually a trash can for a mid-action tossing of shells. It may sound a little iffy, but I assure you it was an unexpected and eagerly-welcomed convenience.

Please Note: The crawfish photos are low-res for posting on the Web. So, you might not be able to see it in your browser, but your name is written on them. You must visit Crawfish Time. When you do visit, just don’t call them “crawdads.”