THIS BUG’S FOR YOU Thanks to plenty of rain last summer, Cajun country should be crawling with crawfish this year. The good news for Texans is that we don’t have to go all the way to Louisiana to get our fix of mudbugs. There are plenty of Cajun-oriented restaurants in southeast Texas that serve the tasty freshwater crustaceans during the season, roughly January through June. You’ll get the real deal at the Beaumont location of Don’s Seafood and Steakhouse (which has five independently run outposts in Louisiana). The best deal at Don’s may well be the dinner platter, a feast of crawfish six ways, including fried, sautéed with jambalaya, in an étouffée, and in a gumbo. Those ready for the pinch-the-tails-and-suck-the-heads experience should try Van Choate’s Cajun Cookery, in Orange, where the tables are equipped with rolls of paper towels and plastic buckets that fill up quickly with discarded shells. The crawfish purist, however, will want to make the pilgrimage about twenty miles across the state line to the Boiling Point, in Sulphur. To find it, just ask one of the locals or look for the bright aqua roof and the happy red mudbug painted on the exterior.
