ABear's
Sometimes a left-hand turn leads you to one of the best Cajun restaurants around
“You sure this is where it’s at?” I asked my mom when we made a left-hand turn down a street where I’ve always gone right.
I grew up practically around the corner in Houma, Louisiana, but only recently did I venture to the venerable ABear’s Café on a short stub of Bayou Black Drive. It’s been there for fifty-one years and is one of the best Cajun restaurants around. Who knew?
Not me. But then I’ve always set my sights on the distance. In my little bedroom in Houma, huddled around the warmth of the stereo I bought with my first doughnut shop paycheck, my world was populated with tapes from New York City, London, Australia…anywhere but here. I had to travel the world’s music before, in my late thirties, I really got a taste for Southern blues. I mentioned that to my dad, and he asked if I wanted any of his mother’s old blues 78s that had been gathering dust in a closet just outside by bedroom door. Therein were Guitar Gable, Jimmy Reed, and Bo Diddley in the original shellac. It’s a little like finding out King Tut was buried in your yard.
This day in particular, I was headed down to the end of Grand Calliou Road to take in some local fare in the bayou-strung Dulac, hoping for a culinary dispatch from the end of the earth; but the restaurant I’d planned on was unexpectedly closed, with few other options down there. Mom said, “Well, there’s ABear’s back in town.”
We sat at the light for Barrow Street and Bayou Black Road. I’d turned right there a million times—I went to a church youth group at First United Methodist right there and later, would zip off that way to Thibodaux to take in the Colonel’s Retreat’s liberal ID policies in the 1980s. Much of my formative years involved a right turn at this intersection; yet she said to go left, and there it was tucked behind a giant oak tree on a short dead end where the Intracoastal Canal meets Bayou Black.
Jane Hebert and her husband bought the place that had been the family home of Judge Edward “Jimmy” Gaidry. “I think there were eight or nine kids raised in here,” said Hebert. And with a modicum of changes, it remains. A bustling lunch crowd trod the same hardwood floors as have countless hungry Houmans at ABear’s for a half a century.
“Fifty-one years, actually,” Hebert said. “My husband did all the cooking until about five years back.” Hebert is a common enough name in the area that I wondered about the outsider-friendly spelling. “That’s what it sounds like,” she flatly replied.
A-Bear’s was resplendent in its homey-ness. Its whitewash walls and beadboard ceiling filled the room with cathedral light as contractors consorted with local businessmen and bridge-club ladies foudn their tables. I loved the woman seemingly penned in at the old-fashioned cashier’s counter, flanked by glass display cases filled with Mardi Gras decorations. She, like the restaurant, carried an air of always having been there.
Wherever I go, I always try the gumbo, and not out of some Louisiana jingoism. I want a gumbo to knock me out, and yet most restaurant gumbos are dishwater thin. The broth in ABear’s was smoky, rich, and brown—chunky with shrimp. It bode well for the meal. Even the potato salad that came with it was tangy and substantial.
I got the special: Catfish ABear with a side of red beans. An extended fan of thick catfish filets was delicately blanketed with “ABear sauce,” which lay on the spectrum somewhere between Hollandaise and tartar sauce. Slightly acidic, it elevated the earthiness of the catfish. The generous helping of Creole-style red beans tied the whole plate together. I know this sounds like a lot of fancy talk for a catfish plate lunch, but it really was that good. I inquired about the nature of ABear sauce. “Actually, my husband invented that” is all Hebert revealed.
I generally prefer a brown jambalaya to a red one—a common variant you’ll see among Terrebonne Parish Cajuns, where tomatoes are added to the rice, shrimp, and sausage—but the one at ABear’s might turn me around to it. Again, it made the fat, juicy shrimp pop in the dish. This was turning out to be one of the best Cajun restaurant meals I’d ever had, and it was making me a little angry.
“Why haven’t we ever come here before if it’s just around the corner, right here by the church?” I asked my mom. Rhetorical question, of course; we couldn’t really afford to eat out much growing up. Hebert told much of the same about her childhood: “I grew up in what they call Big Bayou Black. We didn’t even have a vehicle. We’d cross the bayou in a little flatboat that my dad made and then catch a ride on the Greyhound bus to get to Houma. If we did that two or three times a year, hey, we were doin’ great.”
I would take such an arduous journey to get here for the restaurant’s Friday all-you-can-eat catfish and live music nights. I asked Hebert how she and her husband got in the business:
“My husband was born legally blind, and he was cooking on the quarter boats up in Cameron, around there, and in the early ‘60s they started enforcing the insurance, and he couldn’t pass the regulations. His dad was working at the water plant just around back and saw this for rent, so we took it over. I mean, he could have chosen to settle on disability, but we’ve always worked.”
“We’re pretty famous for our peanut butter pie,” said Hebert. And I can see why. Cajuns have a lock on a lot of culinary wonders, but pies are not among them. I sampled the peanut butter and the chocolate pie and was in a swoon of fluffy wonder. Their chocolate pie was a perfect, airy consistency, thicker than French silk, but not so much as pudding. The peanut butter pie was something I imagine Elvis gets in heaven.
Dropping my mom off before heading back to Baton Rouge, I started eyeing the familiar side streets that for decades have been rendered invisible with familiarity. Later, I did the same in my own neighborhood, wondering what undisclosed treasure I’d find if I, just once, turned the other way.
Details. Details. Details. ABear’s Café 809 Bayou Black Drive Houma, La. (985) 872-6306 Monday–Friday: 10:30 am–2:45 pm Friday nights: 5:15pm–9 pm, with all-you-can-eat catfish and live music