In Alexandria, Louisiana, out in the country off Highway 28, past Paul’s Paint where a cobbled-together, silver rocket car has been cockeyed constructed on the roof like a cross between the “Batmobile” and a DeLorean, on down a dead-end road in a turtle slew of Lake Kinkaid, there is a low slung, wooden, multi-leveled, funkily-weathered restaurant named Tunk’s: “A place where a man would always be comfortable taking his family.” according to the back of the menu. Only if his family could gullet down bizarrely copious amounts of shrimp and crawfish piled up deep and colorful and aromatic on big trays. It was “All You Can Eat Shrimp and Crawdaddy” night when Fred, Will and I arrived.
After an all day meeting and three presentations, we were still dressed for business and not for the messy task of chomping the third cousin of a cockroach, aka: the deep south crawdaddy, aka: mudbug, aka: “where’s the meat and what’s that yellow goo squirting out of it’s head when decapitated?” You better be ready for some manual labor when you order a load of these little red aliens. We thought we were.
I am no fashion plate by anyone’s definition and for those who know my jeans and Hawaiian shirt wardrobe, this is basic information. As we parked amid the Corvettes and pickups, Will looked at me in my rare tie and dress pants and said, “I never thought I’d ever be saying this to you, but I’d lose the tie.” I did. Good advice.
We sat outside on the deck and ordered the special and instantly the waitress arrived with a forklift filled with things that had been bottom feeding earlier in the day. I have never seen so many dead crustaceans as the woman came, bench-pressing what looked like hundreds of pounds of boiled shrimp and crawfish mounded up in an Antietam-ish array of tasty victims. In the kitchen, there had clearly been a massacre and we were about to eat the losers.
Dozens of shrimp with the heads on smiled at me through eight-inch whiskers as I ripped legs and peeled shells and pinched heads. Body parts of crawfish piled up like cordwood as Fred and Will looked like extras in Braveheart devouring the enemy in an ocean of culinary corpses. We ate and ate and ate.
Boats pulled up to the dock as the sun dropped on the other side of the building, leaving us in the cool, reflective, blue shade of a late afternoon scene from a Dave Robicheaux novel. Water birds arched on the ripples across the slew in the warm cattails. People arrived and ate right on their boats and turtles bobbed, waiting in the water for scraps, and a few skinny cats patrolled the docks for dropped treats. A boat tied up, manned by four Australian Shepherds wearing red bandanas – dogs rescued from Katrina. The band started inside the ice-cold-air-conditioned darkness where cigarette smoke and dancing juxtaposed with families out on the deck. It was a perfect sunset.
I wondered if the rural people who drove to this place to eat in their boats had any idea how beautiful the experience was or if they took it for granted. I wished that Richmond had a place like this. I thought about Angela and all of the Broussard’s we had seen and met in our travels down here and I thought how much Dee and Sunny and Tim and Scott would have enjoyed this evening in a place that makes you know that taking the back roads is always the best way to travel.
Tags: Cleco, Clients, Coworkers, Food, Louisiana, South, Travel