Month: March 2017

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Crabby Jack’s on Jefferson Highway is part Dr Bob gallery, part crazy-fab poboy emporium.
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If you’re thinking of having a day of Jacques Leonardi places feeding you (which, let’s face it, would be a completely wonderful day), it’s going to be lunch here at Crabby Jack’s, and supper over at Jacques-Imo’s.
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This is maybe the best poboy in town. It’s between this and Bevi. Yes. Here, the fried shrimp, roast beef, fried green tomato with shrimp remoulade. Crazy-messy and luscious and hot, it’s all just right.
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Last month, nola.com ran If po-boys were invented in 1929, how was Louis Armstrong eating them a decade earlier? putting into question the poboy creation legend that they were given the name from the 1929 streetcar strike.

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LA Magazine — that’s Los Angeles, not Louisiana — writes that they’ve found the best poboy there, and it’s the ‘gumbo mumbo’:
Shrimp, chicken, ground sirloin, sliced beef hot links, onions, and bell peppers are tossed in a vinegary sauce and—through some miracle of physics or perhaps sheer force of will—held together by two firm hunks of house-baked bread. It’s less a sandwich and more a soulful stew precariously bound in starch, seeping harmonious notes of acid and heat.

We finally made it to the Shreveport institution Herby K’s last summer —
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When we were walking up, I knew it was family-friendly, but had momentary doubts as it sure looks like package store / bar on the outside
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It was good — they had coloring sheets and crayons in cups to keep kids busy. And of course Av had their famous dish, the shrimp buster, which was pretty great

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After leaving, we ran across a Shreveport Jitney Jungle which still has its signage. Every time I see one, I think of Eudora Welty and her almost daily trips to the Jitney #14 in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, where mid-century, she was tipping the bagboys a dime, sometimes a quarter.

Willie Morris first met Miss Eudora at the Jitney as a child when he went there with his great-aunt Maggie Harper, who lived across the street and treated the store as her own private pantry.

(I found this sign in 2005 in south Alabama)

That Belhaven Jitney is now a McDade’s, still with the tudor styling just like the Welty home, and is proudly local: when there last month, they had a nice display of Crechale’s comeback sauce by the registers.

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(found this Jitney butcher paper at an antique store in Woodville, Mississippi)

We were in town for Beth Israel’s 50th anniversary celebration, and had a nice supper at Lou’s Full-Serv, next door to the McDade’s.
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Bonus: Shug made friends with one of the #catsofbelhaven outside the restaurant.

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The new Joan Didion book, South and West, is reviewed at Vogue, and mentions the passing of her opportunity to meet Eudora Welty:
But in the summer of 1970, Didion was in limbo, between books, following an idea she could not yet fully articulate, that for some years the South had been America’s true “psychic center.” She acts on the impulses of a traveler (searching for the grave of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi); she has some of the curious dialogues with strangers that are a signature of her stories; she has some of the rarified experience that come with being Joan Didion (gin and tonics on a bayou during a thunderstorm with Walker Percy). She elects, though, not to go to meet Eudora Welty because that would mean going to Jackson, Mississippi, where there was an airport from which she could easily fly home to California…