Omnivore - From Crawfish Shack to Chateau de Saigon
When you can’t get Cajun-Cambodian-Vietnamese seafood, head across the street
It being Mardi Gras and all, a friend wanted good seafood but not the high cost of The Optimist and Lure last Friday night, so we headed to Crawfish Shack Seafood on Buford Highway. Befitting the wild diversity of the area, this Cajun restaurant is operated by Hieu Pham, the Atlanta-born child of a Vietnamese father and a Cambodian mother. He developed his passion for cooking crawfish while attending a Vietnamese Baptist Church convention in Louisiana.
Since Pham opened the restaurant in 2008, it has become cray-cray popular (pun intended). So popular that after we stood in line 20 minutes to order, we were told we’d wait another 45 minutes for our food to arrive at the table. And even then, we’d be lucky if we got a seat, as you can deduce from the photo above.
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I was all tuned up for crawfish, which, as you may know, are in relatively short supply and smaller than usual this year, because of the cold snaps in Louisiana. But we decided to split and headed across the street to one of my standbys, Chateau de Saigon, where we got a table immediately. As usual, I ordered and loved my burnt, crunchy rice topped with pork caramelized in fish sauce (right photo).
So, we went from Cajun-Cambodian-Vietnamese to Vietnamese-Chinese. By this time, my friend was so confused, he kept asking the server about the Korean food he thought he was about to order.
I’m sorry to say this, but we were also discouraged at Crawfish Shack by the less-than-sparkling-clean state of the place. The floor was literally sticky and the nets suspended from the ceiling were in need of replacement or some seriously vigorous laundering. That’s not to say it was unsanitary. In fact, it’s health department rating is 95.