I had the whole fried catfish for lunch today at Parrain’s on Perkins. Can’t tell you how many of these I’ve dropped in the grease myself over the years. I learned to fry at Mike Anderson’s original restaurant on Highland Road. Tim Hood and Mike Ryan, future owners of The Chimes and Parrain’s, were already there when Kevin Smith and I wandered in looking for work and Glenn Juban hired us, telling us how much we would appreciate the “artistry and camaraderie” of Mike Anderson’s Seafood Restaurant. We didn’t have a whole lot of choice in jobs at the time. My VW bug had bitten the dust before we could even start the BREC jobs we had lined up (we were roommates at the time) so we had to be in walking distance of Ivanhoe St. I was in and out of LSU and the Reagan administration had capped the limit on student loans at the same time the university deregulated tuition. The restaurant industry ended up with a whole lot of over educated cooks and bartenders and servers right around that time. Kevin was done with school and Mike’s is where we ended up. My last semester of undergrad I carried twelve hours of coursework and fried fifty hours a week at Mike’s. I had a seven am French class that I drug myself to with a huge cup of coffee and white flour dingleberries from the night before still clinging to my forearms. I would hide behind my wraparound shades and snooze through most of class. Barely got by with a D even though I was very close friends with the instructor. An hour before closing the bar staff would start bringing rounds of Bud and Miller in 9 oz plastic cups to the kitchen so we could start winding down and getting ready to clean up. Most of the time we would end the night at the Bayou “you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here” and depending on who was closing we might stay on after the doors were shut for a few more brews and games of pool. Graduation day Mom and Pops took me out to lunch at Pinetta’s after the trek across the stage, but as soon as we were done I had to go back to Mike’s to get ready for the dinner rush. I remember filleting a thirty pound case of collarbone catfish in just under nine minutes when I got there that afternoon before setting up a hundred seafood platters. One frogleg, one Metompkin softshell crab, two catfish fillets, three shrimp, and five crabfingers wrapped in foil so we could pull them out of the cooler and add a stuffed shrimp and four oysters, two hushpuppies, fries, and onion rings. We served icy fishbowls of beer back then as well, and the ribeyes were 16 oz but two or three inches thick because the cattle weren’t hormone inflated. And the lump crabmeat cocktail was 4 oz of real jumbo lump. You’d have to charge better than twenty dollars to put that on the table today. The whole catfish at Parrain’s was delicious. I’m convinced that when you cook fish on the bone the marrow seeps out into the fish and gives it that clean sharp taste that you just don’t get from fillets alone.
