Po’ Boys, the hot subs of New Orleans

Have you ever heard of a cold cut po’ boy? I haven’t either. Though the sandwich is New Orleans’ take on the sub/torpedo/hoagie/hero/grinder style of sandwich, the fillings of a po’ boy are generally hot–fried seafood or shredded roast beef in gravy–accompanied by remoulade, tomato and lettuce, sometimes pickle, on a crusty section of baguette.

I often like to dive into the history of a sandwich when I write these posts, but as it turns out, the PBS series Mind of a Chef has this one covered for me.

There are a ton of places serving sandwiches they call po’ boys around town, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes in the same restaurant. In the past I’ve been a fan of the pork belly po’ boy from local favorite BIG & little’s, which consists of deep fried cubes of pork belly served with lettuce, pickles, and a maple glaze and was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Yet more ridiculous was a short-lived experiment with pork sausage, fried shrimp, hot sauce and blue cheese dressing. However, they also serve up (seasonally) a fantastic and relatively authentic soft shell crab po’ boy. I wasn’t able to get there this month but just thinking about the many great sandwiches I’ve had there over the years has me craving a return visit.

Just last month I happened upon the food truck Boo Coo Roux and tried their fried shrimp po’ boy. They serve the po’ boy on a decent baguette, crusty and light, and the shrimp are well fried. The sandwich is a bit on the non-standard side, with pickled fennel in addition to the remoulade, tomato and lettuce, but it’s a tasty enough lunch when the truck swings by.

My quest began in earnest early in April, as I began demanding that my wife accompany me to various Cajun restaurants around the area to try the food. We started with a restaurant not far from our home in the south suburbs of Chicago that I found by a simple Google Maps search for Cajun restaurants. It turns out there are quite a few in our area. Sadly, most of them are Popeye’s “Louisiana Kitchen.” They do sell po’ boys at Popeye’s but they’re not what I’m looking for.

Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop in Lansing, IL, on the other hand, is exactly the type of thing I’m looking for. While verifying on their website that the menu did indeed offer a po’ boy sandwich, I found this video from local Chicagoland foodie show Check, Please! The concept of the show is that three regular folks each recommend their favorite restaurant. Each of the three visits each restaurant, then they all get together and have a discussion moderated by the show’s host. Dixie Kitchen was featured on the show back in 2001, and the fella who recommended it, while less well known at the time, is someone you’d probably recognize these days. (Apparently the episode never aired, but the footage still exists)

Mindy warmed up with a plate of fried green tomatoes–her favorite–and I had a cup of gumbo while we waited for our entrees. The fried green tomatoes were crisp and tart, and the gumbo was salty and smoky from a substantial presence of andouille; it was quite good, though served a bit on the cooler side than I’d anticipate. We were highly anticipating our entrees. Unfortunately, they were not quite as good.

The fried oyster po’ boy from Dixie Kitchen looks good, and I can’t fault the oysters themselves, which were perfect. Unfortunately, the bread was soft and a little gummy, not crusty at all, and the bland remoulade made the whole thing kind of a mess. Those oysters though!

I’d probably go back just for the oysters, and ask them to heat up the gumbo a bit.

Even closer to us is Nita’s Gumbo in Country Club Hills, IL. Nita’s, in addition to the namesake gumbo, serves po’ boys in both chicken and fried shrimp varieties. Of course I had to try both.

The fried shrimp po’ boy from Nita’s is fine–the shrimp is quite good, the remoulade is OK, a bit tart but otherwise undistinguished. The bread is toasted nicely though and has a light enough crumb to make the whole a decent nosh.

The chicken po’ boy, on the other hand, is something else. The chicken is fried crispy, and seasoned quite aggressively. In addition to the normal remoulade spread on the bread, there’s a spicier orange sauce applied directly to the chicken. We liked this sandwich so much we went back and got several more the next night. If I had to complain about it I’d say the chicken was too salty, but I’ll be honest, I like things that are maybe a little too salty, especially when they’re deep fried and covered in hot sauce.

As for the gumbo at Nita’s–the roux appeared to have been cooked to a deeper darker color, resulting in a greater depth of flavor. It was less salty, and focused more on seafood than on the salty smoky andouille (not that I have a single problem with andouille, I’m smoking some homemade andouille as I write this post). It was a very good gumbo.

Sadly Mindy was unable to accompany me on this quick lunch expedition to the original Heaven on Seven in downtown Chicago. Located in the Garland Building in the Jewelers Row on Wabash Avenue, the building is full of jewelry shops for the most part, but at one end of an otherwise nondescript hallway on the seventh floor, a doorway beckons. Small, busy, with an open kitchen in one corner, Heaven on Seven boasts walls full of Cajun kitsch (at least where they aren’t full of hundreds of hot sauce bottles).

Heaven on Seven has a number of po’ boys on their menu but I was interested in trying a classic po’ boy I hadn’t found on any other menus around town, the roast beef debris po boy. This features a cheap cut of beef, seasoned with plenty of garlic and braised until tender then sliced very thin. The bits and pieces that shred off the edges of the roast when slicing (debris) are returned to the braising liquid, which is thickened into gravy. So roast beef with debris is essentially a sloppy pot roast sandwich, and who doesn’t like one of those?

The roast beef and gravy were deeply savory and not spicy at all–at least not until I added one of the everpresent hot sauces to the sandwich. The pickles were crisp and briny the way I like them. The tomatoes and lettuce and sauce were fine but to be honest, I couldn’t tell you whether it was mayonnaise or remoulade, as the sandwich was all about the beef. It came with a small dish of cole slaw and a cup of gumbo, which was fine but not memorable and also got the hot sauce treatment from me.

There are only so many sandwiches I can eat in a month, so I closed out my po’ boy journey with a trip to a bit of an outlier, a “Louisiana Seafood” restaurant just outside Chinatown called Asian Cajun.

I met Mindy there for lunch one day, and as it’s quite near her office she was already sitting down and had ordered for both of us when I arrived. Of course she knew what I was after, the soft shell crab po’ boy.

As opposed to the dramatic presentation of the BIG & little’s soft shell crab po’ boy pictured above, with the crab fried whole and splayed out atop the bread, this sandwich had the crab cut into smaller pieces and arranged such that it could be eaten as a sandwich. I understand the appeal of both approaches, and appreciated the ease of handling. The crab pieces were crisp and light, and the sandwich was served with leaf lettuce, tomato, remoulade, and surprisingly raw red onion. Not a lot of it, and more for garnish than anything, but I hadn’t seen raw onion on any po’ boys so far this month so it was a bit odd.

Better than the remoulade was the spicy orange sauce served on the side. I wasn’t able to get a name for it but it could have been a chili aioli. It gave the sandwich some needed kick–I’m not sure if the remoulades in New Orleans are as bland as the ones I’ve had this month, but I much prefer my own version and its zesty cayenne and horseradish kick. This sandwich was good–I very much liked the crab, and the bread was toasted to the perfect light crispness–but I found myself envying Mindy her lobster fried rice.

And that’s when you know it’s time to quit–when you’d rather eat just about anything other than the sandwich you’re writing about. I’ve had plenty of decent po’ boys this month, none that really knocked my socks off, but good sandwiches that I’d be happy to eat just about any other time. If I could have combined the pickles from Heaven on Seven with the bread and spicy sauce from Asian Cajun and the fried oysters from Dixie Kitchen, it might have been just about the perfect sandwich.

Maybe I’ll try making my own some day but for now, April is over and it’s time to move on to a new set of sandwiches. Thanks for reading, and watch for our May sandwiches to be posted tomorrow!