Beyond the Plate: Pastime Poboy
When your lunch hour demands a poboy
A new food-focused series on the established places around the area whose flavors and atmospheres keep us coming back for seconds (and twenty-seconds).
Most visitors to Pastime Restaurant have stopped in to the South Boulevard landmark enough to know the drill: you write your order down, you grab a table wherever you
like (or wherever’s still empty), and you catch up on notable moments in LSU’s pigskin history, told in framed articles that crowd the walls, until the loudspeaker crackles a version of your name.
I’m here because I craved a shrimp poboy, because 10 am creeped around at work and I whimsied up a remedy to the Tuesday blues: two crusty lengths of bread grinning with breaded shrimp, mayo’s sweet tang, and the chilly touch of tomato and iceberg lettuce. No pickles, please.
My grip on the poboy is a two-handed muzzle at first, but it’s not long before I’m down to one thumb and one middle finger, pinching three-bites-worth of bread that I circle slyly over the tomato’s rosy spatter. The fries, a mound of gold and salt, are a pretty companion, but I leave them, callously, to go cold. My attention’s saved for the stray shrimp lolling at the plate’s edge. And is that one more breadcrumb I see?
Pastime Restaurant 252 South Boulevard pastimerestaurant.com