With the onset of crawfish season each year, the cooks in the kitchen at L’il Dizzy’s Café (1500 Esplanade Ave, 504-569-8997, ldizzyscafe.com) start stuffing the 10,000 pre-cleaned crawfish heads the restaurant will need for the 3,500 or so portions of bisque sold annually from their booth at the Jazz Fest where they serve three in every bowl, two if the stuffed heads are extra-large. Concocted using family matriarch Janet Baquet’s recipe, Li’l Dizzy’s crawfish bisque is of a distinctly Creole style due to a base of peanut butter-colored roux that is cut through with the addition of a touch of tomato sauce. The rusty-hued stew is offered as a special during crawfish season when we are lucky.
There is nothing simple, nothing tidy, about crawfish bisque: Not the arduous process of making it, the messy Barbarism required to eat it, nor the lengths to which one must now go to secure a bowl of this rich bliss. In years past making bisque – which only took place during crawfish season – was at least a two-day process.
In 1957 a feature in Holiday magazine described ladies dining on bowls of crawfish bisque at Galatoire’s. The article stuck for its description of the women delicately employing either cocktail forks or pinkie fingers to scrape the stuffing from the crawfish heads bobbing in the bowls before them then gingerly hanging the empty heads along the edges of their cream soup bowls in a fashion that reminded the writer of a string of pearls.
It just sounded so civilized. Clearly, the writer took a bit of poetic license and glossed over the ladies’ frustration as they attempted with knife or fork in one hand, to impale the slippery stuffed heads against the bottoms of their bowls and, splashing gravy on their blouses, tried to pry out the stuffing with an implement (or finger). Or, perhaps they attacked the bisque as most of us do and simply plucked the heads from their bowls with their fingers, sucked the stuffing out using their tongues as implements, dropped the empties on their bread plates, and started fishing for the next head.
Galatoire’s stopped serving the laborious dish in the mid-1960s. Most other restaurants followed suit around the same time, save for the erstwhile Bon Temps Café, where the Pierce family kept it on the daily menu until they closed the restaurant in early 2020.
What to drink
Bill de Turk, a wine and spirits consultant with Rouses Markets (rouses.com) recommends a classic French unoaked Chardonnay, such as Louis Jadot Pouilly Fuissé with crawfish bisque. “The Chardonnay will have enough body and heft to stand up to the depth and intensity of flavor with the bisque,” de Turk said.
