If you love po-boys, you already know how you like them. It’s sloppy roast beef or crispy shrimp, thin-sliced ham or fat fried oysters. I bet you even have a precise combination for how you like it dressed.
Just listen to some po-boy pros when they order at the counter. In their confident cadence and specifics, they can sound like surgeons gloved up for an operation. “Hot sausage. Dressed. No lettuce.”
Still, one of the wonderful things about po-boys is the way the same basic idea of the sandwich can dial into our deepest New Orleans food cravings but also open the door for something new.
The humble po-boy is durable and ingrained enough to stand some tinkering and creative interpretation.
This is the time of year when po-boy possibilities are top of mind. The Oak Street Po-Boy Festival returns on Sunday. It’s one of the great eating days on the New Orleans calendar.
This year you’ll about 40 vendors out there competing along Oak Street, and some of the creations are truly wild, reaching across Vietnamese, Mexican, Filippino and deep south slow and low barbecue traditions, to say nothing of po-boys with bananas foster, oyster mushrooms, calamari and escargot, really, a snail po-boy!
But these ideas are by no means limited to the one-day wonders of the festival. New Orleans has a history of messing with po-boy tradition, from the Ferdi special at Mother’s to the catfish and shrimp combo at Guy’s po-boys to a spicy tuna number at Seither’s Seafood in Harahan that looks like it visited the sushi bar.
What I like about all these spots is how they start with a local staple, add a dose of imagination and come up with something delicious and original that still feels like it belongs in New Orleans. They have that crunch of our bread, we find them in perfectly ordinary, wonderful, unassuming New Orleans joints, and they have the company of the po-boy classics there next to them on the menu. They’re still po-boys, and we still love them, even if they’re dressed a bit different.
