The food becomes more aggressive at night,
but stays true to its Louisiana working class roots.
Da Wabbit isn’t the real name of the place except to all the people who go there, and a lot of people do.
The restaurant first opened as a drive-in café in 1949, located on one of the main drags in Gretna, a working-class community across the Mississippi River from the city proper. Sixty-three years later, Da Wabbit hasn’t moved, but the main drag has. And that seems to suit the people of Gretna just fine.
Roughly ten years ago, a new owner came in and took over Da Wabbit, which served decent food but had degenerated into a blue-collar roadhouse that served rivers of cold beer and kept a very busy card table in the back room. The new owner spiffed up the old roadhouse, upgraded the food, chucked the card table, restored some respectability and, as a final signal that things had changed, re-named the pace “Cafe 615 Home of Da Wabbit.”
Well, the new name never took, except as a line of demarcation between people who know better and those who don’t. Naturally, I head about Da Wabbit from my running buddy, Slider Bob, a man with a finely tuned nose for good hot food and better cold beer. Not too long ago, Slider took it on himself to become an unofficial chamber of commerce for both Gretna and nearby Algiers Point, and when it comes to Da Wabbit, his drum beating can be deafening. I had to see the reason for his rabid enthusiasm and now that I have, call me a convert.
Da Wabbit caters to the 95% of New Orleanians who get up every morning, go to the office or the wharf, drive cabs, pay taxes, go to Mass, drop the kids off at school and go out of their way to fit in rather than stand out. The place serves straightforward, Louisiana Mainstream cooking and seems content to repel the remaining, outspoken five percent – the culinary thrill seekers who confuse eccentricity with creativity, see the kitchen as a playing field for curious games of ingredient one-upmanship, and never hear a name they wouldn’t drop.
One look at the place will tell you decorators never descended upon it. The main room has plain beige walls above a chair rail and a rusty red wall below. There are framed posters from Gretna festivals interspersed with seasonal décor for such observed New Orleans holidays as Christmas, Mardi Gras and Saints Football among others. The front room is still a small, dark bar with six tables, but these days it seems to be utilized more as a holding tank for the dining room than a hard-pouring saloon. There’s a front desk separating the rooms and behind it is a whiteboard with the day’s specials, of which there are more than a dozen.
Things move quickly at Da Wabbit, and I don’t know if that’s because the owner is trying to get the tables to turn over quickly, or maybe the people who come to Da Wabbit for dinner like to grab, gulp and git. On our maiden visit, after being slightly startled by how quickly we were asked if we were ready to order, The Sensible One and I never felt rushed or herded. The young woman serving us was well scrubbed and most pleasant and it struck me that it probably wasn’t all that long ago that she was babysitting the kids of most of the people in the room. Just the same, she was top-notch as a server and her memory was impressive. It truly requires a prodigious memory to work at Da Wabbit. The menu is long, and it seems like the list of items on the whiteboard is even longer, yet our server ticked her way down the list without skipping a beat.
Beyond the sheer number of items on the menu and the board, there are no real surprises on the menu. During lunch, you’ll find the usual array of sandwiches, soups, salads, and plate lunches. On Thursday one of the daily specials is white beans and rice with smothered rabbit, while the every day house special is Da Wabbit Hamburger Steak. Go figure. Somehow it makes sense here.
The food becomes more aggressive at night, but stays true to its Louisiana working class roots. It’s heavy on seafood – fried (of course), grilled or broiled – and there’s the usual pork, chicken and steak. Everything, with the possible exception of the steak, seems to be cooked in a variety of ways and finished in a wide array of sauces; the most common seems to be a variation of buttery cream sauce containing either shrimp or crawfish. If one word describes the cooking to working class folks in Louisiana, it would probably be “familiar.” The Sensible One prefers to call it “comfort,” and when you consider the aforementioned house specialty is a hamburger steak smothered in mushrooms and onions, she probably has a pretty valid point.
Due to the length of the specials list, we had to ask our server to go through it a second time, which she did, surprisingly cheerfully at that. While she went through the list, I found myself changing my mind about every three items, and totally forgot that I was going to order the fried chicken, to which I’d been tipped off by several blogs and articles.
As things turned out following the recitation, we split an off-the-menu appetizer of a half dozen panéed frog legs served on a garlicky bed of onions, red bell peppers, black olives and capers sautéed in a butter sauce with a strong Italian overtones. Beyond being enjoyable, it was easily enough for the two of us.
The Sensible One ordered crawfish etouffée pair with fried catfish filets. What ultimately arrived we could have easily split and contentedly waddled away. Even though crawfish etouffée is one of the mainstays of Cajun cooking, in truth it can be a complex dish loaded with potential pitfalls for chefs of any level. Da Wabbit’s version of the old classic was delightful – a perfectly balanced blend of smoky roux, fresh seafood and layers of spice that, while definitely peppery, didn’t require a fire extinguisher as a washdown.
Her catfish was just fine. It was fried catfish, for Pete’s sake, a food so simple it would be a waste of perfectly useful adjectives to point out anything beyond the fact that the filets were thinner than many, but thicker than the gold standard thin catfish served some forty-five miles away at Middendorf’s.
After bouts with indecision following my forgetting about the much-praised fried chicken, I finally ordered Soft-Shell Crab Orleans – but only after a full explanation. Over the years, I’ve learned that the names given to dishes are essentially meaningless in a city brimming with chefs whose cooking styles identify them as everything ranging from old school conservatives to freewheeling daredevils. What arrived was a traditionally fried soft-shell on a slab of grilled garlic toast and covered with a crawfish, cream and cheese sauce. Also on the plate were a side of pasta covered with the sauce, and some green beans that were grilled with other vegetables suspiciously similar to those which had come with the frog leg appetizer.
It was here where I encountered the one disappointment in what came out of Da Wabbit’s kitchen. While the sauce exquisitely yet subtly complimented the soft-shell crab, when ladled over pasta there was an overpowering flavor of cheese that tasted more processed than natural. The Sensible One said it tasted like Velveeta™ and while I’m not willing to be quite that disparaging, it was the only misstep in what was otherwise a superb meal.
People looking for a hip, urban dining experience might do well to avoid Da Wabbit. Of course it can probably be said that people looking for a hip, urban experience of any sort might want to avoid New Orleans altogether. Despite the city’s well deserved reputation for partying every bit as hard as it works, if not harder, the West Bank very much remains a working class city to its residents, and when it comes to cooking, most residents find more comfort in the trailing edge of a chef’s knife than they do in its cutting edge.
Da Wabbit unapologetically and brilliantly caters to its West Bank clientele and, as the West Bank begins to finally take on its first whispers of social cachet, more people are discovering places that have curiously remained undiscovered for decades.
For visitors who are looking for a truly reflective dining experience instead of some quick buck artist’s pre-packaged version of warmed-over clichés, there are a lot of worse places to start than Da Wabbit. Yes, it’s real name may be “Café 615 Home of Da Wabbit” these days, but this is New Orleans, chere, and very few things here are ever exactly what they appear to be, with one possible exception being Da Wabbit. Thank goodness.
Da Wabbit
Louisiana Mainstream
(Approximately 5.5 miles by taxi from the
corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Ave.)
615 Kepler Street, Gretna
Open Monday thru Thursday, 11 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Friday, 11 a.m. - 10 p.m.; Saturday, 5 p.m. - 10 p.m.
Telephone: (504) 365-1225
No website
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