I like being in a dining establishment that is cozy as mama’s kitchen to the regulars but somewhat foreign territory to interlopers. There was a bit of a delay-I milled with the usual customers, apparently in the way of the drink machine, wondering what I was really supposed to do. I chose a half shrimp-half oyster to eat there, a half sausage to have on the way back and a roast beef to drop off for my wife at home. In the great Louisiana convenience store tradition, there is a meat counter where you make your order. It was the tail end of the lunch rush, with customers lined up around the chip display waiting for their order. I wondered, like I do about many little neighborhood joints like this, how one could bear to cook at home when this was but a hop away? I wondered if they pumped it into the air to tempt the neighbors. The waft of undifferentiated “fry” smell hit me from down the block. I parked around the corner, starving after a hungry hour on rainy I-10. It’s been at least ten years and ten hundred poboys since I’ve been to Olde Tyme Grocery and I posited, how special can a shrimp poboy be? I mean, fried shrimp, bread-it’s a classic that leaves little room for error. They unanimously hollered back “SHRIMP! IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT’S HOLY, GET THE SHRIMP!” You could hear the desperate cry bellowing out of my monitor. My Lafayette friends already have the small convenience store resting just off the U-of-L campus as their go-to eatery, so I hit them up on Facebook for what to get. That meant I needed a quick drive across the Atchafalaya Basin to Olde Tyme Grocery in Lafayette for what may be the best shrimp poboy there is. There are a million poboys to be eaten, or at least that’s how I cut my way through life but on the precipice of what looked to be a busy semester, I needed the best-at any cost, any distance. Unless the professor is your humble author, who has a default way to kill an idle stretch during the day: go get a poboy. In that limbo, one is left wondering what to do. There is a delicious downshift right before the semester kicks into gear: a frantic run of preparation ends with the sudden realization that there is no more ready one can become. When visiting, be sure to bring cash or check they don’t accept credit cards.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |