It’s smallish, around a dozen tables, a
size that seems
to be a harbinger of good chow to come
in New Orleans.
If, as it is said,
confession is good for the soul, let me do my scruffy soul a little good.
I have always had a soft
spot (not to be confused with my often soft head) for places that can politely
be called “shacks,” when not being less graciously called “dumps.”
Surely you know the type of
place I’m talking about. You’re driving down a back street that’s totally new
to you, when you see a semi-ramshackle joint and drive right on by, even as you
comment to your companion, “Gee, I bet they dish up some pretty good chow in
there.” When or if you stop, you take a chance, and the odds are roughly 50-50
the meal will either be awful or border on the divine. Sometimes the food ends
up being right in the middle, sure, but when the place is enough of a dive,
you’re either going to vote it up or down.
The greater New Orleans area
is covered up with mid- to downscale dives, but one I happened across when lost
and looking for someplace else has become more of a favorite with every visit.
Seither’s Seafood has only been around since 2004, making it a relative pup in
a city where it seems that most restaurants of its ilk are at least a half-century
old and on their second, third or higher generation of family ownership. One
look at the building tells you it either had a couple of previous business
incarnations or a singularly hard decade.
Seither’s is hidden away in
suburban Harahan, a bedroom community with an apparent case of multiple
personality disorder not terribly far from the rickety Huey P. Long Bridge.
Parts of Harahan are white collar, housing legions of sales representatives and
other types whose lives are bettered by proximity to nearby Louis Armstrong
International Airport, but the township is mostly middle-class leaning toward
blue collar. The combination restaurant and neighborhood fish market is located
on Hickory Avenue, a desultory strip of small, nondescript businesses for which
high-visibility locations or heavy traffic counts are of seemingly little consequence.
The joint is
quintessentially Crescent City. Before opening the place, its proprietor, Jason
Seither, sold cars for a spell and worked as a bartender in another combination
restaurant and fish market in the next suburb. His namesake restaurant has made
as much of its solid reputation through roast beef poor boys as it has for
seafood. From all appearances he’s making pretty decent money in a place most
people don’t know exists and is tough to find for those who do. All this seems
to add up to success in “the city that care forgot,” where few people stick to
the rules and many seem to make them up as they go along.
Once you walk in the gaudily
painted glass door of Seither’s, you enter a room that looks exactly like what
you’d expect from outside. It’s smallish, around a dozen tables, a size that
seems to be a harbinger of good chow to come in New Orleans. It’s a relatively
homely room that leaves no doubt that you have entered perhaps the archetypal
mom-and-pop café. The walls are the
color of lemon icebox pie, the furniture utilitarian and in place of napkins on
the plain tables are rolls of paper towels. A drop ceiling with recessed
fluorescents gives the room all the ambient charm of a bail bondsman’s office.
All of that is, of course, mercifully secondary to the food.
Years ago, roughly around
the time Methuselah and I were a pair of rascally schoolboys, any café or
restaurant’s success or failure was determined entirely by the quality of the
food served on the plate. Somewhere in the not too distant past, people stopped
simply going to lunch or dinner but rather became participants in “the dining
experience.” It’s my personal theory that the whole “experience” angle was
cooked up by marketing hotshots hired by restaurants where the food sucked. At
any rate, it’s Seither’s retrograde and, one suspects dogged, commitment to a
laser-like focus on the food that keeps the glass front door swinging open and
shut.
The success of Seither’s
roast beef poor boy is based upon two divergent factors. The first of these was
the havoc wreaked upon the city’s seafood industry by Hurricane Katrina in
2005. When Seither’s reopened shortly after the storm, shrimp and oysters were
nigh on impossible to find and buy. Consequently, the fledgling restaurant was
forced to concentrate on the foodstuffs it could actually procure for simple
survival.
The second factor was also
driven by necessity. While many poor boy shops purchase pre-cooked beef for
their sandwiches, Jason Seither was still in his early years struggling for
survival and he found that he could buy uncooked sirloin tip roast for less.
This he did, slowly cooking it in what he refers to as “crock pot style,” a
process thought to yield a richer integration of meat and gravy. While
self-appointed poor boy purists regularly argue about beef cuts and cooking
techniques (a continuing, irresolvable argument no one ever wins), Seither’s
version of the New Orleans classic quickly developed a loyal following and
remains one of the most commonly ordered items to this day.
Perhaps the most unusual
thing about the roast beef poor boy’s popularity is that the sandwich comes
from a restaurant that’s an adjunct to a fresh seafood market. It’s certainly
not uncommon for a poor boy joint to be serving both meat and seafood
creations, to be sure, but it’s somewhat unexpected and perhaps moderately
ironic for the restaurant satellite to the seafood market mother ship to set
the cornerstone of the combined operation’s reputation upon a foundation of
sirloin tip.
It would be a shortsighted mistake, however, to overlook Seither’s seafood poor boys. The shrimp offering
overflows with expertly fried shrimp, the taste of which explodes with the
unmistakable sweetness of the shellfish when it’s freshly caught
On a recent visit, The
Sensible One saw a blackboard special called the “Oysterpalooza” or some
equally gimmicky moniker. Essentially it’s Seither’s take on the “Peacemaker,”
a combination fried oysters, bacon and cheddar poor boy so named because it was
often given to angry wives as a peace offering by husbands staggering in from a
hard night of carousing. It was as good as it was big, and the size of it
straddled the line between the words “mammoth” and “gargantuan.” We could have
easily split the silly thing and waddled out of the joint without even thinking
about dessert.
Other poor boys that looked
equally intriguing were one featuring a crab cake topped with shrimp sauce, and
the shrimp remoulade special the kitchen prepared for the 2010 festival
honoring the city’s legendary sandwich.
During crawfish season, the
heart of which is generally considered to run from Mardi Gras through Memorial
Day, parades of beer trays holding piles of steaming mudbugs steadily stream
from the kitchen, augmented by traditional corn-on-the-cob and new potatoes.
While the bevy of other choices have so far kept me from sampling a mountain of
scorching bugs, I find myself wondering if I’ve made a mistake every time I see
or catch a whiff as another tray parades out of the kitchen. They are reputed
to be among the city’s best, and the prospect of a steaming pile of them
probably merits a single-digit spot on my personal bucket list.
As good as all the sampled
chow is and yet-to-be-sampled promises to be, I’m quite sure that if I brought
up the Seither’s name in a game of Word Association, The Sensible One would
immediately blurt out, “Onion rings!” As much as she considers herself a
connoisseur of the deep fried gems, in truth she’s more of a fanatic. While the
Seither’s thick cut and heavily battered entry into her relentless quest for
the indisputably best onion ring in the world is the most recent to be awarded
the crown, it joins a list that over the years has included “frings” at
K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, the mountainous servings of thickly slicked rings
at Mandina’s, Café 615 (“Home of Da Wabbit”) on the West Bank, Katie’s in
Mid-City, a brief nod to the thin-cut rings at Charlie’s Steakhouse and even an
honorable mention to the deep-fried green pepper rings at Franky and Johnnie’s
Uptown roadhouse. Nonetheless, it remains a ringing endorsement, and one richly
deserved.
One of the true joys of learning
New Orleans, where joy’s pursuit is part of the hardwiring, is coming to terms
with the hope that all it takes is making one more turn and you face the very
real possibility of stumbling upon a restaurant that’s not only good for lunch,
it may be one for the ages.
When I think about another
visit down that scruffy Harahan back street to Seither’s, and I find myself
doing just that more and more, I am struck by the unexpected convergence of exigent
circumstances, inventiveness, resolve and karma it seems to take to elevate a commonplace
neighborhood café into a restaurant worthy of a pilgrimage across a city renowned
for its eateries.
In a way, it’s like a
lightning strike in that you know it happens, you’ve seen it happen, but you
know the odds are long that it will ever happen to you. But it happened for
Jason Seither and if you’re willing to wander a little bit out of your war, you’ll
be rewarded with the chance to savor its power.
Seither’s Seafood
Neighborhood Casual
279
Hickory Avenue in Harahan
Open
Tuesday – Thursday, 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Friday,
11:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Saturday,
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Visa
and MasterCard Honored
No
reservations
Telephone:
(504) 738-1116
No
website
Food Photos: TereeC.@yelp.com
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