To have great po-boys, you need someone who can make the bread just right. You need someone with a good line on affordable, high-quality seafood and someone with no fear about perhaps applying too much roast beef gravy.
The other essential ingredient is the customer with a local palate, the customer who will disregard national ad campaigns and coupons and bypass a rogue's gallery of fast food brands to get to a respectable po-boy shop.
Humble though they may sound, po-boys don’t happen on their own – po-boys happen because of a specific food culture.
These days, though, you may wonder if that po-boy culture is changing. After all, how far can a po-boy go and still be considered a po-boy?
To one view, the po-boy is comfort food. Just listen to the way people order them at the register. They rattle off specs for how theirs should be dressed, what filling combinations they want, whether this is toasted or that is melted. It sounds like the same practiced way that people order their coffee or their martini, just so.
Seen another way, though, the po-boy can be a canvas for creativity, a sturdy loaf sliced down the middle and pried open for whatever theme or ideas will fit inside, drippage be damned.
This notion of new school po-boys is expanding, and yet the sky is not falling. That’s because, as close as we keep the comfort food value of po-boys, there’s such a strong case for po-boys as a low-cost, low-risk avenue to explore different flavors.
Ample proof will be on exuberant display this Sunday at the Oak Street Po-Boy Festival, where dozens of high-concept, left field examples of where a po-boy can go are served alongside straight up classics that show where they came from.
In this setting, people compare the options head to head, eating sample-sized sandwiches from New Orleans’ great po-boy purveyors and contenders of all stripes. Judges name winners in a whole menu worth of categories, and the public picks their own people’s choice winner too. Just make sure you keep some napkins handy, this exercise in democracy can get deliciously messy.
