Mudbugs bring Cajun cuisine to Atlanta
A little bit of the Cajun has crept into the area.
With the Roux-Ga-Roux Seafood restaurant having opened in downtown Atlanta, now the Brothers Mudbugs is offering boiled crawfish and boudin and andouille sausages along U.S. Highway 59 in Queen City.
These items are about as
Cajun as it gets.
Curtis and Tony Whitlow are responsible for the boiled-crawfish stand. They are 1972 and 1977 graduates of Atlanta High School who liked to fish in nearby Louisiana and got to wondering, one day, why no boiled crawfish could be found just over the state line in Texas.
So Curtis, a former pipewelder, and Tony, a retired firefighter, learned to prepare the dish, built their trailer and opened their street-side doors a year ago on a parking lot across from their current site.
It worked. The Brothers Mudbugs is open Thursday through Saturday. It takes a full day Wednesday to go to Louisiana for the crawfish and two other days of the week to keep supplies ordered and things organized.
“But we’re having fun,” Curtis said.
“We like to laugh and have fun with our customers,” Tony added.
Their secret, they said, is the eight-and-a-half-hour drive Wednesday to a huge crawfish farm in Mamou, a town in Louisiana’s Evangeline Parish, near the Gulf Coast. The town bills itself as the Cajun Music Capital of the World.
“It’s the best. Takes us a hard trip, but it’s the only way we want to have our crawfish for the public,” Curtis said. He then spoke a little about crawfish and their life cycle.
It’s interesting to know something about the crawfish, which is also called the crayfish, crawdad, freshwater lobster, mountain lobster, mudbug or yabby.
They are freshwater crustaceans that burrow as far as 8 feet into the earth.
At the crawfish farm, 4,000 acres are underwater in ponds separated by earth mounds. Rice is grown in the pond first, then the water is drained, and the crawfish, which were underground to start with, start to push up through the mud carrying their young.
They come to the top, where they are gathered into huge, three-wheeled boats. This boats’ huge third wheel at the back pushes it over any dirt mound.
The Whitlows buy their 800 to 1,200 pounds of crawfish live and put them in refrigeration, which puts the crawfish to sleep. Back in Atlanta, the crawfish are kept in the cold until the brothers are ready to boil and season them with lemon, onion, butter and the Whitlows’ special secret seasoning.
Dinners include about 5 pounds of crawfish. The meat of each crawfish is small, while their shells are large and weigh the most. The diner who knows what he’s doing will also suck the crawfish head for juices and seasonings.
Also included are corn on the cob, potatoes and maybe a side of shrimp.
Boudin is a Cajun-style sausage made of rice, meat and seasoning, and andouille is a spicy pork sausage that’s flavored with onions, garlic and salt and pepper.
The Whitlows say they plan to have a mobile catering service soon.
“Business is good, especially Friday and Saturday afternoons and evenings. At noon, we just serve a small crowd that drops by,” they said.
Curtis spent most of his years in pipewelding, which included work on the Alaskan oil line and the Hawaiian water tower.
“The one that looks like a pineapple. I was way up there holding on with one arm and welding with the other,” he said, surprising even himself now that he actually did it.
Tony worked with the Atlanta Fire Department for 20 years before retiring. He also made a career out of laying floors, tile and carpeting.
The crawfish season ends in June, when the supply runs out and the ponds in Louisiana go back to rice-growing.
Brothers Mudbugs also schedules parties with a dump table. Just set a time, and then on the outside all the boiled crawfish and extras will be poured onto a table for everyone to share.
Louisiana people are known for their good times. With the Brothers Mudbugs here and their dump-table parties, Northeast Texans—or at least Cass Countians—can have some good times, too.