(New Orleans Advocate)- Santa’s sack isn’t the only bundle being met with joy and glee around New Orleans, not among boiled seafood fans.
Sacks of crawfish have been turning up at seafood markets and restaurants, providing an early taste of the full season to come and making crawfish at Christmas a distinct possibility, The Advocate reported.
“We started getting some here and there back in November,” said Sonya DiCarlo, who with her brothers runs Clesi’s Restaurant and Catering, in Mid-City. “But now it’s so steady, we’ve just added crawfish to the menu daily.”
DiCarlo’s brother James Clesi started the business as a mobile seafood boil catering operation, and this summer the family built their first stand-alone restaurant. Crawfish are the Clesi brand’s calling card, so they’ve been eager for the season to begin. They didn’t quite expect it to start in December, though, and neither did many of their customers.
“We welcome it with open arms, but I think it caught a lot of the customers off guard,” DiCarlo said. “For lots of people it’s similar to king cake. As much as they love it, they only associate it with a certain season.”
In any given year, some small crawfish harvests can begin turning up as early as Halloween. Such examples, however, normally amount to just a trickle, produced by farmers banking on higher prices for the limited supply of their product on the cusp of the season.
Dr. Greg Lutz, a crawfish specialist with the LSU AgCenter, said the more consistent supply of crawfish now coming out of some Louisiana production areas bodes well for the season to come, though he quickly added a caveat.
“If we hit a real cold snap,” he said, “we could be back to square one and end up with just an average season at best.”
Factors influencing the volume of crawfish for a season include rainfall, temperatures and storms that can track all the way back to the last season, he said.
“What a lot of consumers don’t grasp is that the way the season turns out is really the result of what’s been happening 10 or 12 months out,” Lutz said. “But up to right now, the conditions have been pretty favorable to get off to a good start.”
The vast majority of American crawfish production happens in Louisiana, where the mudbugs are farmed in rice fields and harvested from wild areas across the Atchafalaya Basin.
Each year, excitement about the crawfish season seems to grow, stoked in no small part by social media. As this year’s early appearances of crawfish trays on restaurant tables have been photographed, posted and shared, more people have started seeking a taste of their own.
This time of year, though, consumers have to keep two things in mind, said Clint St. Philip, general manager of Captain Sid’s Seafood, a retail market in Bucktown. Prices are bound to be higher, he said, and the crawfish are simply not as large and meaty as they will be later on.
Still, he said, crawfish in December always turn people’s heads. He chalks it up to a short memory.
“Every time this happens, the same people say the same thing,” he said. “They can’t believe there’s crawfish. I think people just aren’t attuned to crawfish until the spring.”
Spring is when the price drops, and the overall quality of the crawfish coming into the city rises.
At markets this month, boiled crawfish have been running around $5.50 a pound, or $4.50 a pound for live crawfish. That’s easily twice the price seafood lovers can expect in the spring. At restaurants, the price is significantly higher.
“People will do anything for a taste this time of year,” St. Philip said. “I have regulars who normally come in for 10 or 15 pounds. For now they’re getting two or three, just something as a little reminder.”
Kent Bondi has been selling crawfish for 30 years from his Castnet Seafood market in the Little Woods neighborhood of New Orleans East. He has to pinch himself sometimes to believe the price that crawfish are fetching early in the season. After all, he remembers selling them for 30 cents a pound back in the day. But it’s all part of the seasonal supply and demand cycle for a local craving, he said.
“People are just nibbling at the edges now,” Bondi said. “We might do 400 pounds a day now, but keep in mind a normal day when the season is really here is more like 2,000 pounds for us.”
Still, the coincidence of crawfish coming in and holiday visitors coming to town has put crawfish boils on people’s minds.
“They have family in from out of town, so they’re thinking: Pick up a few pounds, have a few beers with them in the back yard,” Bondi said. “That’s a nice outing for the holidays right there.”
