Fat Tuesday traditionally kicks off crawfish season for Texans, with corporations and restaurants hosting boisterous boils that draw hundreds of people.
But in 2021? Hardly anyone will geaux to a mudbug bash.
“I’ve often said it would take a nuclear holocaust to shut down crawfish,” says David Snell, a Frisco resident and private pilot who has been hosting crawfish boils in Dallas-Fort Worth since 1998. “I’d always thought crawfish would go on forever.”
He’s determined to keep selling crawfish during the coronavirus pandemic, but time is short, and with mudbugs, “you only have a few months to make your money.”
March, April and May are the “chateaubriand of crawfish season,” says Richard Hotard, director of sales for Frugé Seafood in Louisiana. Every year, the company supplies several million pounds of crawfish to Texas event purveyors and restaurants, starting with their first Texas customer, Aw Shucks on Greenville Avenue some 30 years ago.
Today, Frugé's drivers haul live crawfish 375 miles from the crawfish fields in Branch, La., to Nate’s Seafood in Addison, Big Fish in Grapevine and dozens of North Texas restaurants like Dodie’s, Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen, Fish City Grill and Flying Fish.
Last year, Snell’s Cajun Crawfish Company managed to sell 80,000 to 90,000 pounds of crawfish at the beginning of the season, or about half of his usual sales, before the coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of corporate events and family gatherings.
But 2021 is worse than 2020: Those crawfish boils weren’t canceled. They were never scheduled.
Worse still, Mardi Gras is two weeks earlier this year than it was in 2020. Fat Tuesday will fall on Feb. 16, a frigid day in Dallas-Fort Worth, during a time when most North Texans have not received their COVID-19 vaccines and public health officials warn against group gatherings. Even in South Louisiana, Mardi Gras 2021 isn’t anywhere near normal because parades have been canceled. Even “geaux cup” bars are closed in New Orleans.
Prayers, please
Cody McCommas, a Denton pastor who runs Bayou Boils part-time to make money for his family of four, usually squeezes 40 crawfish boils into each spring.
“There’s only 10 good weekends in crawfish season,” he says, and his team drags multiple trailers across North Texas for back-to-back events. Last year, he saw a 90% reduction in events due to the coronavirus pandemic.
McCommas remains hopeful, saying crawfish boils are part of his ministry. He’ll host smaller events this year.
“I have the two best jobs in the world: I get to work with people, minister to them and help them meet their needs. And I get to do kind of the same thing during crawfish season,” he says. Many of his events are charity related.
Last year was already challenging for McCommas and his wife, who fostered a blind, premature baby while raising their two girls and opening a new church, Christ Community Church in Denton. The church was supposed to host a party for its grand opening in spring 2020. Instead, their celebration was virtual.
“We had to change everything about how we serve people,” McCommas says. He says his churchgoers’ needs were “astronomic,” and the crawfish business was put on the back burner.
“It took me a while to get through the first hit with the church, and then I could think about the crawfish business. But the Lord was faithful,” he says. “I think we can survive as long as we keep being clever and creative.”
Making crawfish ‘a Monday through Friday thing’
Interestingly, the pandemic forced Texans who love crawfish to change their habits, Hotard says. Whereas eating a few pounds of spicy crawfish was often a group event — at a bar, house party or corporate function — Hotard says Texans in 2020 started to eat crawfish like many Louisianans do: at home.
“Here in Louisiana, we consume it on a regular basis,” Hotard says. His wife often asks him to bring home 10 pounds of crawfish in the middle of the week. Texans are now starting to make crawfish “a Monday through Friday thing,” he says.
And while the event business is suffering, Frugé's sales went up 12% in 2020, compared to 2019. Restaurant owners found that a few pounds of boiled crawfish, placed in a paper sack, worked well for takeout.
McCommas and Snell are doing takeout, too, by selling boiled crawfish to individual customers. Snell relates it to grocery-store pickup, with a Cajun twist:
“You pull up to us, you have a cooler in the trunk. You don’t even have to get out,” he says.
Cajun Crawfish Company’s pickups are at 1671 Riverview Drive in Lewisville. Bayou Boils’ are at 3500 Fort Worth Drive in Denton. McCommas will also deliver crawfish. Both take pre-orders online.
In any other year, selling small batches of boiled crawfish probably wouldn’t have made sense. But any profit is better than none, McCommas says.
For anyone who is willing to drive in the snow on Fat Tuesday, Snell will be out in below-freezing temperatures, boiling crawfish at Rock & Brews and Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux, both in The Colony.
Snell hopes to have recurring events at Walk-On’s, the Revel in Frisco and Oak Highlands Brewery in Dallas once crawfish season gets underway.
“I’m just looking for a way to survive,” Snell says.
