Felt like it was time to get crab season started so I made the trek out to Central to Carlton’s place. I used to work for Carlton at Café LeGrange way back when it was next to the Bombay Bicycle Club (later TJ Ribs) and boiled a whole lot of crawfish offsite with him in Big Blue, a trailer he built that featured half a milk pasteurization vat with sixteen burners underneath that could boil three thousand pound of crawfish at a time. We would hire the Bud Girls to bartend when we would do five thousand pound boils with jambalaya and fried catfish and boudin balls for some of the major valve companies in the Baton Rouge area. I’d also run out to LA Fish Fry to pick up two thousand pound pallets of salt and all the other ingredients to blend Carlton’s own recipe for powdered boil in a Butcher Boy blender, then load up the 100 lb sacks of seasoning we would take with us on boils along with all the sacks of crawfish and potatoes, cases of corn and Crown, and who knows how many kegs of Bud Light and Natty Light. Those were the days my friend/we thought they’d never end but time and tide, so forth and so on. I could go on and on more than I already have because working for Carlton always felt like working with Carlton, like instead of going to a job every day, I was headed over to my friend’s house to help him put together a swing set in the backyard for his kids. I’ve been lucky to find guys like that to work for most of my life. Carlton’s got his own crawfish ponds now, and that’s a big part of his business interests, but he’s still got a retail store where you can buy that seasoning, homemade crawfish pies, crawfish tails and fresh catfish, and they do plate lunches and seafood platters as well. Wish the place wasn’t so far from me, but worth the trek for boiled crabs and crawfish for sure.
