Olde Tyme Grocery

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. In that limbo, one is left wondering what to do. Unless the professor is your humble author, who has a default way to kill an idle stretch during the day: go get a poboy.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

I parked around the corner, starving after a hungry hour on rainy I-10. The waft of undifferentiated “fry” smell hit me from down the block. I wondered if they pumped it into the air to tempt the neighbors. 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?

It was the tail end of the lunch rush, with customers lined up around the chip display waiting for their order. In the great Louisiana convenience store tradition, there is a meat counter where you make your order. 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. I like to cover my bases.

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 like being in a dining establishment that is cozy as mama’s kitchen to the regulars but somewhat foreign territory to interlopers. It’s where you get to experience the soul of such an operation.

For instance, there was a long line of t-shirts mounted on the wall near the ceiling. I assumed that Olde Tyme Grocery sponsored a Little League team or something like that until I peered closer. They were at least two dozen custom-designed shirts celebrating Lent, the forty-day Catholic season when the devout must give up something dear for the duration and abstain from meat on Fridays—all in the service of considering the suffering of the Lord.

Setting the moral good aside, Lent is a great season for seafood restaurants—shrimp and oyster poboys are exempt from Lenten restrictions. The t-shirts have images like a crawfish and shrimp decrying from the fryer, “Though you cried & we nearly fried—Still alive for ‘95.” According to the restaurant’s website, they are awarded to the hard-working staff at the end of Lent and are “some of the most coveted shirts in Lafayette and are only worn by those that have put in blood, sweat, and tears.” I question the true suffering one goes through, limping along on shrimp poboy Fridays; but then it’s one of the great things about Louisiana culture that manifests in its food. It’s a tradition rooted in faith and observance; yet we manage to have fun with it.

Lost on these philosophical musings over novelty t-shirts, I fail to hear the cashier holler out, “Anyone want to pay now?” She is looking at me.

Poboys are not always the most photogenic dishes, unless you are really into lengths of bread; but Olde Tyme knows how to dress an old standard up. Deep golden fried shrimp and fat juicy oysters hang off the bun like a shapely, bare leg dangling coyly off the mattress. A drizzle of hot sauce across a stray lettuce strand, the tomato just cold enough, mayo just tangy enough, the bread with just enough tack that it doesn’t pull out your fillings—the poboy dressing is the perfect stage for their oyster and shrimp star attraction.

When confronted with the idea that a poboy is just another name for a hoagie or a sub or bomber or what-have-you, I’m compelled to disagree, not on a sentimental Louisian-ista stance but an ideological one. The right poboy is a synergy of ingredients; they reflect each other and become one new delicious thing, and Olde Tyme might be the best at it. The whole thing tastes like a magnification of oysters or poboy, a larger taste that seafood cannot muster on its own.

I polished off the shrimp and oyster halves in the name of journalistic thoroughness, but took to the sausage poboy out of pure gluttony. There was no way it was going to last even the ride back to Baton Rouge. A dense Polish sausage with a rich brown skin, slight cayenne and black pepper profile, and Olympic-precision snap to its bite: again, all resting in a perfect setting. I killed it off and, with a bleary gaze, cast eyes on the roast beef wrapped up to take home. “Don’t,” warned a stern resolute voice in my stomach, muffled from the damage I’d just done.

The contractors at the next table were detailing the fallout from jobs around the Atchafalaya region. A couple of high school students took up a table in the corner, a last gasp before school commenced—just like mine, perhaps. I made my way out of the homey dining room and through the divine riot of the convenience store, to-go poboy in hand. A few hours later, my wife declared it the best roast beef poboy she’s ever had, even slightly cold and carried across a swamp and a river to get to her. “I KNOW,” I texted back, suddenly echoing the all-caps zealotry that confronted my first inquiry about the place. But I get it now. I know.

Details. Details. Details.

Olde Tyme Grocery

218 West St. Mary Boulevard

Lafayette, La.

(337) 235-8165 • oldetymegrocery.com