Photo by Ryan Hamilton, courtesy of LPB.
Still from LA64, episode 1, which features the Abbeville Giant Omelette Celebration.
When the inaugural episode of LA64, Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s new road-trip-worthy travel series premiered on February 2, host Karen LeBlanc led viewers on a flavor-filled journey to Abbeville in the heart of Vermilion Parish to learn what makes one of Louisiana’s oddest community festivals tick.
The Giant Omelette Celebration—an annual tradition observed each November for decades, revolves around the preparation of a communal, 5,000-egg omelette, by cooks wielding eight-foot paddles, in the middle of Abbeville’s Concord Street. The celebration’s origins can be traced to the town of Bessières, France, where the tradition of cooking a communal omelette on Easter Monday has been observed since the early 1800s, when Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly marched through, and demanded that villagers prepare a giant omelette large enough to feed his army.
Photo by Ryan Hamilton, courtesy of LPB.
LA64 host Karen LeBlanc with Mr. Perry, a crawfish farmer in Vermilion Parish.
In the course of the episode, LeBlanc introduces not only how this obscure French tradition found its way to a town in south central Louisiana, but also other little-known elements of Vermilion Parish’s culture, including: Abbeville’s Sicilian heritage, the foundational role of a former cattle auction house in the emergence of Swamp Pop; and in tiny Kaplan, visits to Suire’s Grocery to taste what might be the best turtle sauce piquant in the state. The team visits Crawfish Haven/Mrs Rose’s Bed & Breakfast, where guests spend the night on a working crawfish farm, setting out into flooded rice fields to pull crawfish traps and gather mudbugs for their very own crawfish boil. By the end of the episode, LeBlanc and viewers alike are left with a new appreciation for the elements that make Vermilion Parish singular among Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes, and with a fool-proof formula for this brand-new travel series.
[Read more about the iconic Suire's Grocery in this article from our February 2017 issue.]
With episodes scheduled to air throughout 2026 and into years to come, LA64 reveals Louisiana’s many different faces—from the ground, from the waterways, and from the air, thanks to panoramic aerial footage shot by filmmaker, producer, and licensed drone pilot Ryan Hamilton—each unveiling how Louisiana’s unique landscapes shape each parish’s history and heritage. In ensuing episodes, viewers rode with LeBlanc (and flew with Hamilton) to St. Landry, Sabine, and Jefferson parishes, and explored the legacy of southwest Louisiana’s No Man’s Land, met culture keepers striving to preserve Acadiana’s tradition of brown cotton weaving, and learned how Grand Isle’s live oak groves help protect historic buildings against hurricanes on Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island. In the process, the show’s thesis, and a universal truth about travel, are revealed: sometimes the most meaningful journeys await just beyond the places and destinations we think we already know.
Photo by Ryan Hamilton, courtesy of LPB.
Shot from Episode 1 of "LA64" in Vermilion Parish
Episodes in Season 1 of LA64 air at 8 pm Mondays on LPB statewide, and online at lpb.org. Still to come are St. Martin (April 6), Lafourche (April 13), Rapides (April 20), Franklin (April 27), Caddo (May 4), St. Mary (May 11), Beauregard (May 18) and DeSoto (May 25). Find links to past episodes at lpb.org/la64.
