The website for Gourmet Magazine is the latest to heap praise on the Hub City’s mingling of food and music. Lafayette is included in a Gourmet feature titled “The Next Big Scene” that highlights cities large and small that possess, in our case, great roux and rhythms:
New Orleans always gets top billing in the Pelican State, but Lafayette is Louisiana’s true food and music lovers’ secret. Known for Cajun-zydeco music, the city has recently been earning accolades for its Acadian classics, smoked meats, and vintage-cool vibe.
The Venues and the Menus: In this capital of Acadiana, it’s rare to find food without music (and vice versa). You can wake up Sunday morning to Cajun music and a breakfast of biscuits topped with boudin patties, poached eggs, and crawfish étouffée while a 14-foot alligator looks on at Prejeans (don’t worry, the gator’s stuffed). Don’t miss the crawfish boils at Randol’s, another dance hall where you can dance to live zydeco nightly. And there’s a whole new generation carrying on the Cajun torch, from local-boy-made-good Donald Link’s outpost of his famous New Orleans restaurant Cochon to the sophisticated fare at the French Press, which nods toward the region’s French past. Bands like the Doc Marshalls, Feufollet, and the Malfecteurs can be found reinterpreting their French musical heritage at venues like the Blue Moon Saloon along with indie rock acts like the Givers.
Yes, we know, it can be cringe-inducing when outsiders write about Acadiana culture. But props is props.
Lafayette joins Athens, Ga., Birmingham, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, Providence, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Maine on the list. See it here.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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