Photos by Denny Culbert
There’s a nostalgic ambience at Fricassée Café & Bakery in Carencro, with its blooming chef’s garden out front, the oversized porch where diners like to linger, and the toile curtains and folksy artwork adorning the walls. It makes sense. Fricassée exists within the former home of owner Eddie Gary’s grandparents. Gary and his wife, Renee, once lived there as well, raising their children on the family homestead.
“We always had Christmas here, Easter,” Renee Gary said. “The family would meet here.”
Later, the Garys used the house at 3823 North University Avenue for their candy business—they have operated Nanny’s Candy Company for twenty-six years—until they moved the praline operation next door and renovated the home into a restaurant.
It’s that down-home feel that makes Fricassée Café so inviting. In addition to the homey décor inside, diners can eat outside beneath live oak trees lined with birdhouses and a menagerie of animals waiting to be petted out back—rabbits, goats, and chickens.
“We use the eggs but that’s it,” Eddie Gary said of his miniature farm. “People are welcome to head back there and pet the animals.”
Eddie and Renee sold pralines to vendors in French Quarter shops through Nanny’s Candy Company, but they loved to entertain on the side. With this in mind, the couple worked on an idea for a retirement business that would be open weekdays only, and Fricassée Café was born. Their original plan was to utilize the house for the restaurant and eventually build themselves a smaller home in the back. “A small house with a big kitchen,” Renee Gary added with a laugh.
Eddie Gary still takes to the road two days a week selling pralines, but the couple opened Fricassée Café & Bakery in summer 2014, serving Creole and Cajun specialties for lunch on weekdays through the self-taught expertise of Chef Larry Nico Jr. of Lafayette. As word spread through the community of the wonderful food being served at the old Gary compound, business picked up, and the restaurant now serves a limited dinner menu on Fridays and Saturdays.
Lunch at Fricassée Café is as casual as the atmosphere, offering typical noontime dishes such as salads, burgers, and poboys. One of the more popular items is the house-made chicken salad, served over fresh greens or an avocado, which may be paired with the restaurant’s signature corn and crab bisque.
The café sources fresh seafood for its platters with several standouts: the stuffed shrimp platter with salad, house fries, and French bread; the fried shrimp platter that can feed two as a whole order; and the seafood platter that mixes things up, including a cup of bisque, stuffed and fried shrimp, catfish, and fixings.
Two unique dishes not to be missed are the catfish fries appetizer and the Louisiana bluepoint crab croquette. The farm-raised catfish comes thinly sliced, battered and fried so that it resembles French fries and armed with an artisanal tartar sauce for dipping. The croquettes are panko-battered and fried, served on a croissant with a New Orleans-style tartar sauce.
Dinner is limited, Gary explained, but includes fried seafood, beef options such as New York strip and ribeyes with sauces, boiled crawfish, and crabcakes with a horseradish aioli.
Specials are announced regularly on the restaurant’s Facebook page—items such as pork fricassée over roasted corn grits, crawfish quiche and crawfish étouffée, and fried catfish filets served with spinach au gratin.
Because Fricassée is also a bakery, diners should save room for dessert. The house pistachio cake hails back to a recipe Renee Gary’s mother brought back from the Amish country when Gary was just a child. Crushed pistachios are included in both the cake and the frosting, the latter of which is a combination of homemade whipped cream, powdered sugar frosting, and pistachios, all topped with coconut. “It was a family favorite all of our lives,” she said. “It’s like a cloud. It’s super light.”
Another favorite is the tuxedo cake: truffle chocolate mouse layered between white sponge cake and topped with chocolate ganache. “And every weekend we make our fresh blueberry glaze, and you can get anything topped with that,” Gary added.
The restaurant is truly a family affair. Renee Gary designed the menu and the restaurant’s décor, using a chicken as a recurring theme. Feed sacks are framed as wall art, salt and pepper shakers differ from table to table, and there are always fresh flowers. One wall sports a collection of cookie molds brought back from the Garys’ travels to Belgium.
Staff members could almost be family members, Gary said, having worked in the business for years. “They bring a lot of skill, a lot of class to the place,” she said.
Details. Details. Details.
Fricassée Café & Bakery
3823 North University Avenue
Carencro, La.
(337) 886-6353
