One wants to make the right choice, so I consulted the wisdom of the ancients (Facebook, in this case) to see where I should spend an errant luncheon in Lafayette. It opened up the floodgates. One contingent of online foodies was dead-set on Laura’s II or Creole Lunch House. Another was lobbying for Johnson’s Boucanière hard enough that I was afraid it was going to come to blows should the factions meet in the real world. Yet another recommended I watch the documentary Raised on Rice and Gravy, about the Lafayette plate lunch scene, if only to confound my choices. Finally a coin toss set my target on Creole Lunch House. A friend of mine that grew up in Lafayette had been monitoring the decision process and cooed, “Ooh, that Creole stuffed bread.” Good ol’ coin toss.
I shot over the Atchafalaya as quickly as I could on a Friday afternoon, accounting for the fact that I almost always get lost in Lafayette’s warped grid of French-named thoroughfares, pulling into the gravel parking lot of Creole Lunch House just at the tail end of the lunch shift, only to discover it was a cash-only business. Circling for the nearest gas station with an ATM sign, I passed three more plate lunch spots, ones that even my Facebook cadre didn’t know about. The ATM was broken at the place boasting frog legs on their sign, and the boudin balls were beckoning me at the next convenience store. I considered abandoning my original quest and just snacking my way through the convenience store scene, but I had a goal.
I was further thwarted when I got back to Creole Lunch House; the last of the creole stuffed bread had been sold, though a fried pork chop plate with greens, red beans and rice and gravy did a lot to console my heart. Breading and deep-frying a pork chop might be considered overkill, but then so might the fins on a classic Cadillac, or the lapels on a zoot suit. The greens were expertly seasoned, not too salty nor too tangy; they were left with enough earthy twinge to counter the richness of the pork chop. The red beans performed a similar balancing act. These weren’t the rich, creamy New Orleans style creole red beans, but thinner, almost soupy.
The star of the show, with the stuffed bread in absentia, was the rice and gravy. The gravy in question was left over from chicken fricassée, but I suspect this gravy finds itself in a lot of dishes at Creole Lunch House. Rice and gravy is a magic dish to me. It’s so simple, leftover from the main meal even, yet something about the alchemy of the starch in the rich potliquor of stewed meat creates culinary gold, warming the heart, filling the belly, clogging the arteries, all of it. It is a complete thing. My friend that cooed about the stuffed bread told me that during her college vegetarian days, she’d steal over to Creole Lunch House just for the rice and gravy, a fix that at least approximately allowed her to maintain her resolve for the rest of the week.
The exterior of Creole Lunch House is just that, a house indistinguishable on the block except for the bright yellow sign out front. The interior, a soft sunlit pink room speckled with framed pictures and accolades from newspaper and magazines over the years. The beauty of these places that stick around for decades is that they can be perpetually discovered. They are waiting right there for you. Each first plate of rice and gravy is like a personal moon landing.
Raymond came around from behind the counter to check on me; evidently I appeared more dismayed about the stuffed bread situation than I actually was. “Thee Heavenly Donut in Baton Rouge carries them,” he reassured me. “They buy them directly from us.” Raymond is the son of Merline Herbert who opened this plate lunch spot in in 1983 after retiring from teaching school. “She just wanted to do something different, so she opened the restaurant in the little building in the parking lot and in 1986 purchased this house and renovated it into a restaurant.” Raymond claimed that he and his dad were the willing Guinea pigs for his mother’s recipes and has worked in the restaurant pretty much since it opened. “I started working here because I wanted a car,” he explains. “I got tired of riding my bike to school.”
I asked about the difference between the Creole cuisine of New Orleans and that of Acadiana. “This is traditional Louisiana home cooking that you would find at someone’s house, where someone is going to take the time to prepare it.” Raymond offered, “In New Orleans, it’s a little more commercial or chef-oriented. Here you want to get filled up, you want to fell happy, and hopefully can go back to work after.”
I had to do exactly that, so I bid my adieu to the sweet, shady house on 12th Street, making a mental appointment to hit up Thee Heavenly Donut on the way back, followed by another to come back to Creole Lunch House the next week to score the stuffed bread from the source. But, as always, life got in the way and I just didn’t make it back in time. Too many choices, too many deadlines got in the way.
I found myself at the second to last day of JazzFest, thinking about how I was going to finish all the projects I had before me, which as usual for me, coincides with me figuring out what to eat. Honestly I go to JazzFest for the food as much as I do the music, and the food stands were stretching out to the vanishing point before me. I’d already had my requisite cochon de lait poboy from the Love at First Bite, a WWOZ Mango Freeze, a greens plate from Bennachin the week before, and a United Houmas Nation fry-bread taco that morning. I’d eaten the world yet was determined to find something new, some culinary hole in my life that needed to be filled, looking for a sign and lo, I turn my head and see an actual massive sign reading CREOLE LUNCH HOUSE – CREOLE STUFFED BREAD.
There was Mrs. Herbert handing them out as fast as a Red Cross relief worker. I tried to explain to her the serendipity of finding the stand, but my excitement turned my story into gibberish, so I just handed over my $4 and pointed.
It was worth the wait. The small pod of brown bread fit perfectly in my hand, each bite revealed the strata of pork and rice and jalapeños and Italian sausage. The bread became its own pocket, holding in the splash of verde chili sauce on offer—Raymond’s Hot Sauce to be precise. It was the perfect JazzFest food. I wanted to proclaim this find to the gathered masses. This is what you’ve been searching for! I know the Raymond that made the sauce! The sausage! The bread! The stuffing!
But I didn’t. I realized I have more effective pulpits from which to radiate my praise and besides, we are all on our own journeys, culinary or otherwise. We have our own choices to make, and in the making do we find which one is the right one for us.
Details. Details. Details.
Creole Lunch House
713 12th Street
Lafayette, La.
(337) 232-992
.jpg)