Creole Eats and the Great River Road: Day Seven

Waking up in the heart of Creole country, Louisiana on New Years Day, only one thing really comes to mind: Where can one find the most lavish, over-the-top brunch in town? 


It’s actually easier said than done, because Lafayette restaurateurs like everyone else enjoy spending the holiday at home with their families, not at work serving the likes of me. We make three fruitless stops before giving up and heading out of Lafayette toward Baton Rouge, deciding there must be some good road-food restaurant that’s open, and we will just have to find it. 

That happens about 10 exits along the highway— barely outside Lafayette. A billboard leads us to the coolest, most colorful highway outpost, where a half-dozen restaurants offer everything from Cajun-style alligator to traditional Creole cuisine to a boudin/cracklin’s drive-through. We get our brunch: baked oysters with crab meat on top, fried green tomatoes, barbecued shrimp and fried soft-shell crab. Although we’re nearly too full to walk, I insist on picking up a pound of cracklin’s (fried fatty pork back) at the drive-through on the way out, because when will we ever have a chance to do that again?

Baton Rouge is bigger and more imposing than expected. The port is immediately noticeable as you’re driving across the bridge into town, and the light is so beautiful this time of day, we decide to detour and take photos of the waterfront. We park as close to the water as possible, then take off on foot, and scramble up a small hill to find ourselves not at the water’s edge, but instead at a casino.  Happily, it’s quite picturesque from the outside, though not all the waterfront is. Large sections of it are either industrial or covered in scrubby grass. The Port of Baton Rouge is a commercial port first and foremost, and most of its facilities are for cargo handling. We don’t spot any touristy restaurants or cruise ships.

We get onto Highway 61, the Great River Road, for the final leg of today’s journey. We plan on overnighting in the historic town of Natchez, then jumping on the Natchez Trace early the next morning. The Great River Road is one of the drives I’d been most excited about, and it does not disappoint. While some drives take you through parks or historic preservation areas, this drive takes us through living, working, small-town Dixie. We pass by factories and farm houses, railroad sections and roadside barbecues. Sometimes our pace slows to 25 or 30MPH as we pass through a little town. Too often, we cruise past a grand antebellum mansion or plantation and barely have time to snap a picture. We promise to each other that we’ll come back another time…and next time, we’ll actually stop and visit.