Comments (1) Best Crawfish Boil - 2008
Rosey Baby Crawfish & Cajun House
If you plan to take action on the advice given in any of these Best Of selections, let it be this: Run this instant to Rosey Baby Crawfish & Cajun House. Sit at one of the half-dozen bar tables. Order a bucket of crawfish boil; they come in one-, two-, and five-pound sizes. Which size you get will depend largely on how many friends you have with you and how much beer you're willing to drink. More beer? More crawfish. More crawfish? You get the point. What you'll get is the most authentic, ass-kickingly spicy boil of bugs this side of Baton Rouge. The Babe has hundreds of pounds of the little critters shipped from Louisiana weekly. Each day, the chefs fill a big ol' pot with corn, potatoes, and a bombardment of secret spices before tossing in the live crawfish to simmer slowly in their own sauce. By the time they hit your bucket, the craws are bright red and teaming with a rich, heady broth that bursts forth when you rip open their shells. The trick is to suck up that liquid before pinching the sweet, prawn-like meat from their tails. To some, this sounds like a lot of work for just a little meat, but at the Babe the process becomes rhythmic: Twist, suck, pinch, eat, swig, repeat. There's nothing like being two pounds into a fiver, sweating from the spice and slightly loopy. Ah, good times. But remember when we said run? Yeah, do that. Rosey Baby only does the mudbugs when they're in season, from December to early July.
