Photos by Paul Scannell
André Dore makes crawfishing look easy. Dore, 37, is a gentle giant of a man, a Cajun shrimper and crawfisher who operates out of Vermilion Parish in the lush lowlands of Southwest Louisiana. When he’s not out shrimping, the former oil rig crane operator works for Barry Toups, harvesting crawfish on the Henry, Louisiana, native’s twenty-eight acres of verdant bayou. It’s a skill he’s had since before he was old enough to drive.
These days, Dore often totes visitors in Toups’ motorized flat-bottomed boat built for traversing the low-lying marshes and levees of Cajun country. On one recent chilly February morning, a visiting New Orleanian rode shotgun on what was, for her, a virgin crawfishing voyage. “Not too many people who aren’t from around here have done this before,” said Dore.
Barry Toups is seeing about changing that. Toups opened Crawfish Haven/Mrs. Rose’s Bed and Breakfast in Kaplan in late 2014, initially as an uber-comfy camp for hunters and anglers drawn to this wildlife rich region. “Then I got to thinking—why not give folks a chance to crawfish?” said Toups, a retired school maintenance manager with a strong streak of entrepreneurial spirit.
Now, during the season, which lasts roughly from late February through around Mother’s Day, guests at Mrs. Rose’s can crawfish the old-fashioned way, with nets in the pond behind the house, or, for $50 a person, hop into the boat with either Dore or Toups and troll alongside some of the 375 pyramid-shaped traps set along Toups’ land. Following Dore’s lead, they can don rubber gloves and pull the trap out of the water, emptying the squirming contents onto a center console for sorting into sack-bound chutes. If the crawdads are too small, they go back into the water along with the skeletal remains of the porgie bait fish that drew them into the trap in the first place. It’s not unusual for one excursion to bring back seven or eight sacks of crawfish, more than two hundred pounds of the sweet-tasting freshwater crustaceans.
Guests at Mrs. Rose’s can also buy fresh-from-the bayou crawdads at market price, about $2.75 a pound, and have their own boil in the well-outfitted boiling shed in back of the house. Barry Toups will do the boiling free of charge.
Toups is pretty sure that Mrs. Rose is smiling down on the goings on in her white clapboard home located on rural Highway 35, about forty minutes southwest of Lafayette. This house was home to Rose Mae Robichaux and her family from 1958 until she passed in 2013. After Toups bought some land she had for sale, he became a friend and surrogate grandson to Robichaux in the last few years of her life. “Her kids don’t live close by, so I’d pass by and check on her pretty often,” he recalled. Mrs. Rose wanted Toups to have first refusal on buying the home after her death. “She was one of a kind, Mrs. Rose was,” he said. “She mowed her lawn on the Monday before she passed at the age of 92—that’s just how she was.”
Toups is quite the craftsman, building some of the home’s cypress furniture himself and fashioning a full-on screened boiling shed that is more man-cave than back porch. There’s piped propane to fuel up to three boiling pots, a big-screen TV for watching the game, and, if your crawfish picking gets really messy, a bath with shower for hosing off.
Extremely particular about his boil, Toups spikes the water with mash from the nearby Tabasco plant on Avery Island along with liquid and powdered crab-boiling spice. Besides the crawfish, red-skinned potatoes, ears of corn, and rounds of smoked sausage go into the mix. Once the pot comes to a boil, he waits about five minutes and then scoops the fiery red crawfish and fixins into big plastic tubs. He adds some more spice then closes the lid and shakes those bugs up before dishing them out onto long tables lined with newspaper. Sammye Levy, a Mississippi native who has called New Orleans home for thirty-five years, said she’s never tasted better crawfish. “Maybe it’s because they were swimming in the bayou just a few hours ago,” she said. “That’s about as fresh as it gets.”
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Although Crawfish Haven has been spruced up some, staying at this circa-1903 Acadian home still feels like a visit to a favorite Maw-Maw’s, the kind of place where you feel comfortable putting your feet up and sitting on the porch a spell. There are wonderful reminders of Mrs. Rose sprinkled throughout, including family photos and her gorgeous framed needlepoint creations on the walls. The three-bedroom, two-bath B&B can sleep up to thirteen, with rooms priced from $125 for a queen with a shared bath to $150 for a bed with a king and private bath. One bedroom is lined with bunks and singles to accommodate a small crowd, priced at $125 for two and $25 for each additional sleeper, $10 if they are under 10 years old.
For family affairs, you can rent the entire house for $375 for six, adding on $25 per additional adult and $10 for kids younger than 10. The country setting is downright bucolic, complete with a ramshackle barn and the crawfish pond out back. It’s a fine base for exploring Vermilion Parish, not far from the charming town of Abbeville, known for its eclectic shops and seafood restaurants, including the excellent SHUCKS! in the center of town. On your travels, pass by Suire’s Grocery & Restaurant, a family-owned Cajun eatery celebrating forty years of feeding locals the likes of homemade crawfish étouffée and turtle sauce picante. Chances are those crawfish were swimming in the bayou a few hours ago—that’s just how they like it in the small towns and fishing communities here in the heart of South Louisiana.
Crawfish Haven/Mrs. Rose’s Bed and Breakfast 6807 Highway 35 Kaplan, La. (337) 652-8870 Btoups4692@gmail.com crawfishhaven.net Suire’s Grocery & Restaurant 13923 Highway 35 South Kaplan, La. (337) 643-8911 suires.yolasite.com SHUCKS! 701 West Port Street Abbeville, La. (337) 898-3311 shucksrestaurant.com
