We Couldn’t Care Less About Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras
You can send us all of your Mardi Gras and Fat Tuesday press releases and special offers that you want, but you should probably know that like most of Philadelphia, we couldn’t care less. That said, we do care a whole hell of a lot about crawfish — something hard to come by in Philly — and so we started getting really hungry when this photo came across the Foobooz desk a few hours ago.
“We got 50 pounds of live crawdads today,” says Mark DeNinno, chef-owner of Chris’ Jazz Cafe on Sansom Street. “This is for the pick meat. We’ll use the meat from these for the crawdad cheesesteak, crawdad pot pie, crawdad mac-and-cheese and crawdad egg rolls.”
As for the crawfish whose heads you suck, they’re being overnighted next week from Louisiana to Philadelphia International Airport.
“I’ll go down there on Tuesday morning and pick them up,” DeNinno tells us. “It will be 200 pounds of live crawdads, and it’s a lot cheaper if I just pick them up myself.”
DeNinno sells buckets of crawfish — some people call them crawdads and some people call them crawfish, but they’re the exact same thing — for $15 or, if you can really put away a lot of crawfish, it’s $45 all-you-can-eat. He’ll continue to run crawfish specials throughout the season, which usually extends into June.
Tuesday night’s party will also feature live music, lots of beads, and Abita beers, which is all well and good. Just give us a few buckets of crawfish and leave us alone.
Below, DeNinno gets up close and personal with his crawfish.
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