Photo by Chris Staudinger
The Chef Menteur Highway was the first automobile road that accessed the marshy eastern edge of Orleans Parish. Some call it Highway 90, but most call it “Chef Highway.” Either way, I like the road for how it lulls you gradually into a quiet state of nature while, at the same time, stupefies you with weird, cacophonous surprises along the way.
The highway leaves the city along the ridge of a bygone bayou. As the road tunnels underneath the oaks of Gentilly Boulevard, it begins curving in long sweeps across the landscape where the waters of Bayou Gentilly once flowed. Atop the old ridge sits McKenzie’s Chicken In-a-Box, a square green building from the ‘40s that serves some of the best fried chicken in New Orleans. I wasn’t swayed to stop, though. In the back of my car were three crab nets, and I intended to use them in the salty waters at the end of my road.
As the road rises and spans the Industrial Canal, it takes its famed name: Chef Menteur, which translates to “The Lying Leader.” Passing the great glistening twenty-two-inch rims on display at various auto body shops, one might wonder who Chef Menteur was and what great lie made him so famous. Some stories say he was a Choctaw chief who deceived his own tribe and was banished with a few family members and friends to a strip of land at the very end of the bayou. Others suggest that a French leader broke a promise to a native tribe in the area, making him the liar. Still others point to the owner of the shuttered “We Never Close Po-Boys” between Read Boulevard and Wright Road.
Down farther, the road crosses Interstate 510 and enters its “outer space” phase, where an entire layer of the city has been effectively peeled away. To the left of the road are the ghostly roller coasters of the abandoned Jazzland theme park; to the right, a NASA facility that is building the most powerful rocket the world has ever known. A 1904 Times-Picayune Guide to New Orleans called this area “Prairie Tremblante,” the trembling prairie. It was described in the volume as a “swampy expanse lying within the municipal boundaries of the city. It is inhabited by squatters who eke out an existence by hunting, trapping, and fishing. They are mostly of the Austrian, Chinese, and Malay races and live a life peculiar to their class.”
More than a century later, the squatters have left; but the area is still much wetter and more forested than the rest of the city. It’s now known for its thriving Vietnamese community. Among the trees, the Van Hanh Buddhist Temple, with its three-tiered pagoda roofs and a two-story statue of the Buddha, dominates the NASA side of the highway. On the opposite side is the Dong Phuong Oriental Bakery, which has become famous over the last thirty-three years for its spiced meat pies, cakes, breads, and bành mì sandwiches. I stopped at the Minh Cành Supermarket to buy bait for my crab traps. The meat department sold livers, hearts, bellies, and feet; but there were no fresh chicken necks. I settled on gizzards and kept driving east.
About two miles past Dong Phuong, the highway cuts through the 24,000-acre Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, which, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is “one of the last remaining marsh areas adjacent to Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne” and the largest urban refuge in the country. There’s a dock for paddlers and a boat ramp for duck hunters, trappers, and fishermen. I could have turned off the highway there to catch crabs from the park’s Ridge Trail boardwalk, but I hadn’t even made it past the hurricane levees and out to the wilds, the third phase of the Chef Highway.
The camps past the levees are set high on stilts, announced by hand-painted signs at their long driveways. The names on these signs reflect a flavor of people willing to try life on this land bridge, wedged on a narrow isthmus between the lake and the Gulf, names like The Hardheads, Livin The Dream, By-You-Self, Greener Pastures, and Gailforce.
A 1917 issue of Motor Age Magazine describes the difficult construction of this stretch of the Chef Highway. Before the road, writes William K. Gibbs, the area was “a vast marsh that is but a few feet above sea level at low tide, consequently at high tide it is practically underwater.” Dredged clay was used to shore up the ground, but the first dredge boat sank in the lake. When a big enough embankment was finally made, slag from the steel mills of Birmingham had to be brought in by rail to stabilize the earth for heavy cars.
Gibbs writes that the road wasn’t ordered by the government; it was a project of a group of businessmen who wanted easier access to the sport fishing camps and clubs along the wilds of the isthmus. Mr. P. M. Milner spearheaded the effort. Through the governor, he arranged for a camp of prisoners to lay a hard dirt road towards the abandoned Fort Macomb, which was renovated into the exclusive clubhouse of the Motor League of Louisiana.
Today, the nineteenth-century fort has again fallen silent. Other than a spooky cameo in the True Detective series, the fort has been left to crumble into the water. Next to it, though, The Hi Tide Bar and Grill is painted a lively yellow, and a happy hour crowd was forming as I pulled into its gravel parking lot. I bought a link of crawfish boudin and a cold drink, noticing that every wall, ceiling, floor, and air-conditioning vent had been painted in fluorescent bayou scenes. There were peeping scuba divers on the walls of the women’s bathroom and barnacles at the bases of columns, all the work of Rain Webb who lives on a sailboat in the bayou behind the Hi Tide. He spends his days in his studio—a shipping container next to the bar—painting commissions for the regulars who fill the stools in the bar. He’s lived in New Orleans and elsewhere in the country, but, he said, he likes Chef Pass because it attracts a special blend of people, the ones who aren’t taking the Interstate—weird people on long-distance bike trips, people traveling from the tip of Mexico, people circling the world on a solar-powered boat.
The air was suffused with salt, boat fuel, and the exposed mud of the marshes, and the sun was starting to sink down over the west end of Lake Pontchartrain. I learned about a dock on the opposite side of the Chef Menteur Pass Bridge, just past Fort Macomb, where people had been catching crabs. But I still hadn’t reached the end of the road: Fort Pike, the camps of the Rigolets, or Art & Donna’s Crazy Al’s Bar—Open 7 Days.
Orleans Parish ends at the Rigolets, which translates to “little ditch,” the place where a series of bayous and inlets allow the waters of the Gulf—and the people traveling it—to mix with the waters of New Orleans and the lake. The 1904 Times-Picayune travel guide called the Rigolets “a thriving little town with miniature dockyards and several residences of proportion” known for the “many tortuous narrow-yet-deep waterways which intersect the marshy ground in all directions ...” That description feels like the contemporary Rigolets, but the man-made parts—the marinas, the road, a huge bridge—have grown slightly while the marshes have significantly shrunk at the rate of about 350 acres each year. When Fort Pike was completed in 1826, about two hundred feet of marsh floated between it and the main pass of the Rigolets. Today, all of those marshes are gone, and a narrow rock wall is the only barrier between the walls of the fort and the water.
Intending to enjoy the bounties of these waters before dark, I skipped Crazy Al’s. Back at the dock, I managed to tie my gizzards into the nets and throw them out; but the tide was rushing in too fast for my nets to settle, the mosquitos were getting thick, and dusk was settling. By the time it was totally dark, I caught two shrimp and a phosphorescent jellyfish.
Back in the city, I found myself standing in line at Lucky Jean Seafood. It was late, but Cathy Tran was single-handedly running the front-of-house with ease. She was on a first-name basis with many of the faces in the long line at her register. The menu offered everything from poboys to Philly cheese steaks to General Tso’s chicken. I ordered a shrimp poboy and two pieces of corn from their seafood boil, and I was happy. Cathy told me that Lucky Jean was the name of her husband’s shrimp boat, which was trawling its nets for shrimp down Highway 90 off the Mississippi coast.
Details. Details. Details.
McKenzie’s Chicken In-a-Box 3839 Frenchmen Street (504) 943-8908 Lucky Jean Seafood 6721 Chef Menteur Highway (504) 245-7842 2 Sisters ‘N Da East Soul food 9901 Chef Menteur Highway (504) 242-0469 Dong Phuong Oriental Bakery 14207 Chef Menteur Hwy (504) 254-0296 • dpbanhmi.com/DP_Bakery/Welcome.html Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge Highway 90 Ridge Trail & Madere Marsh Unit (Look for the interpretive kiosks four miles east of Dong Phuong on Chef Highway) (985) 882-2000 fws.gov/refuge/Bayou_Sauvage Hi Tide Bar and Grill Venetian Isles 20824 Chef Menteur Highway (504) 662-0993
