At Boudrea and Thibodeau's layers of cardboard and newspapers cover the tables. There's no cutlery, just containers of hot sauce and several giant-size rolls of paper towels.
Boudreau and Thibodeau's advertises Cajun cooking, as do many eating places in this city an hour's drive southwest of New Orleans.
The appetizers, all deep-fried, arrive on plates: Onion rings, shrimp, oysters and boudin, a Cajun blood sausage. A few bites and you've reached your saturated fat limit for the week, possibly longer.
The main course ingredients, all boiled, arrive in buckets: Shrimp, potatoes, a spicy Cajun sausage called andouille and corn on the cob, followed by crawfish, freshwater critters resembling miniature lobsters.
I haven't eaten since breakfast. Neither has the journalist from Montreal's La Presse sitting across from me, so we wreak havoc on the mound in front of us.
"C'est bon, c'est bon,'' she keeps exclaiming.
Bits of shell go flying, seafood juice splatters shirts and slacks. It's great fun, particularly washed down with bottles of Abita Amber, a Louisiana beer that puts the ubiquitous Bud Light to shame.
Cajuns, if you remember your high school history, are descendants of Acadians, French Catholics expelled by the British from Nova Scotia in 1755. Some started trickling into Louisiana a decade later and flourished.
Cajun cooking, a local chef explained, is a mix of seven cultures -- French, Native American, Spanish, African American, German, Italian and British. So you find gumbo, an African word for okra but used to describe a popular stew-like soup, and bread pudding, a British favourite, on the same menu.
Of the four Cajun restaurants we visited, A-Bear's Cafe was tops. (The name is a play on the French pronunciation of the owners' name, Hebert.)
A typical lunch special is smoked sausages with red beans, rice and either potato salad or coleslaw for $6.75 or a big bowl of gumbo, either shrimp or chicken and sausage, with potato salad for $6.95.
Appetizers include crab fingers, fried cauliflower, crawfish pies, catfish, hush puppies, fried okra and popcorn shrimp. Sweet potato fries are a popular side dish.
Jane Hebert, whose husband, Curly, does the cooking, brought us a taste of grilled catfish. When I asked about the sauce, she replied: "It's a buttery-based secret.''
I did learn why their red beans are superior to what I eat at home: Theirs are made from scratch, not via a can-opener.
Houma chef Roy Guilbeau says you boil the beans, dump the water, and boil them again. In the second cooking he includes what he calls "the holy trinity'' of Louisiana cuisine -- celery, green peppers and onions -- which he sautes first. He adds oregano, parsley and green onions at the end of the second cooking, along with chopped smoked sausage.
The Cajun food at Bayou Delight, about 10 km from Houma, near Gibson, is also tasty. The lunch special the day we visited was only $5.99, and that included homemade peach cobbler. Favourites include fried catfish topped with shrimp sauce, soft-shell crabs, alligator etouffee, and oyster or shrimp gumbo.
Dinner at Big Al's Seafood Restaurant in Houma resulted in a mass swearing-off of anything deep-fried. The frog's legs were okay but the crab claws, alligator and other bits and bobs had been left in hot oil so long they tasted pretty much alike.
One word I didn't see on any menu was "blackened."
In the 1980s, famed New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme introduced this term for searing meat and fish with pepper and other spices. Blackened meat and fish became all the rage. But heavy-handedness with the hot stuf led to the belief that Cajun cuisine was super spicy.
The real stuff isn't.
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