On the Detroit subway, seafood-boiled restaurants are packing spiny king crab legs, slender snow crab legs, shrimp, crayfish, and lobster into bags full of corn, potatoes, and sausage. The bounty is submerged in a large-flavored butter sauce enhanced with ingredients such as garlic, vanilla, and lemon, and sometimes something that looks like a handful of cajun spice is added to the package to give the liquid a deep wine red color.

The chef packs seafood in transparent plastic bags, which are usually placed in barrels and then placed on the table. The diners tied up their bibs, put on a pair of plastic gloves, and started peeling, cracking, chewing and soaking while dumping the beer.

The seafood boiling ceremony is a cartoonish sloppy, a bit sensual, and very popular. In recent years, about 20 boiling suppliers have appeared near the Detroit Metro, with names including Mad Crab, Crafty Crab, Saucey Crab, Crab House, Crab Hut, and Krazy Krab or Crazy Crab. Saucey Crab and 168 Asian Mart are now hosting karaoke nights where their seafood is boiled, and the acclaimed chef Max Hardy's view of the genre, What's Crackin', is expected to open soon on Fashion Avenue in Detroit.

The restaurant owner said the reason for the popularity of the concept is simple: mixing salt, butter, spices, crustaceans, and approved foods is a successful formula.

"You got the bib. You got the gloves. You tasted it. Then you went in. It's an experience," said Angie Middleton, the owner of Saucey Crab, who has restaurants in Detroit and Southfield.

The wave not only hit Detroit—in the past few decades, hundreds of similar restaurants have been packing seafood across the country. Although the concept can be traced back to seafood boiling in Louisiana, this craze is actually food history The ideas of scientists and Gulf Coast chefs more accurately mark Viet-Cajun, the fusion of Vietnamese and Louisiana cuisine and culture.

Viet-Cajun boiling involves some subtle but important differences. The main one is: crustaceans are packed in plastic bags filled with thick sauces. In the traditional Louisiana boiling process, the shellfish will not be soaked in the butter sauce bag and will not be paired with the dipping sauce. Vietnamese-American immigrants are responsible for this adjustment, which occurred in Houston, not New Orleans, sometime in the late 1990s.

"About 20 years ago, all of this was born and multiplied in Houston," said Kiet Duong, who opened a crayfish cafe in a food court in Houston's Chinatown in 2013. He estimated that there are eight Vietnamese-Cajun seafood boiling points within three blocks of his restaurant, and said that this dish is now part of the identity of the city like the sirloin.

But what we saw in Detroit is still a bit different. Viet-Cajun restaurants across the country are mainly owned by Vietnamese Americans and/or are part of a corporate chain. This was established in the suburban part of southeastern Michigan (Crab Du Jour, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, recently opened a branch in Dearborn as part of a rapid national expansion), but Detroit (the blackest major city in the United States) ) Most of the restaurants are owned by blacks, and some have soul elements. Detroit Crab House Ribs and Soul Cafe opened for the first time in 2009 and now has two branches, claiming to “bring the taste of seafood boiled to the city” and offers ribs, pork chops, chicken alfredo, baked potatoes, vegetables, etc.

Middleton said the sauce is also different. She said that the restaurants in Vietnamese-American restaurants are good, but the restaurants in black restaurants are “different. You get more spices and more flavor,” she said. Those words may be fierce, but Saucey's lowest spice level, known as "light-footed lion", is electricity with cayenne, and the hottest "piping piston" is very hot and can even melt.

This concept may be particularly popular here because many people are rooted deep in the South and their families arrived during the Great Migration, so seafood boiling is "a natural choice for the people of Detroit-a natural advancement," Hardy said.

In any case, the boiling restaurant in Detroit represents the localized evolution of an already fascinating story that illustrates at a deeper level how American imperialism, immigration and immigration, and local flavors shape the country’s food and culture.

The boilers in Detroit came to their craft along different paths. Middleton, a former hair stylist and co-owner of Sauce Bar on Seven Mile Road, saw how the boiling night of the bar took off in 2017 and opened Saucey Crab the following year.

To the east, DeCarlos Stewart is a proud entrepreneur who sees boils as a business opportunity. A few years ago, he added crustaceans to the menu of his late-night take-out restaurant Detroit Wing Spot, which he now describes as “if McDonald’s sells lobster instead of cheeseburger”. Before joining Wing Spot, he had no cooking experience, but he taught himself art by watching online videos and cooking shows. Boiling is prevalent, so Stewart set out to build a sit-in restaurant centered on seafood boiling in Warren, which is expected to open this fall.

"For me, it's trial and error," Stewart said. "I have YouTube and my imagination. You start looking for inspiration and say,'OK, what is pop music'? What do people want?'"

In Madison Heights, Detroit Pho and Crab were one of the pioneers of seafood boiling in the area. It is owned by the Le family, who moved here from California, where boils of Vietnamese Americans have been popular for about 15 years. The family once ran a nail salon, but they saw the opportunity to open their first concept store in 2017 and were eager to try it. Pho and Crab is still one of the most popular boiling points in the Detroit Metro and also offers a variety of Vietnamese dishes.

On a recent evening, its restaurant highlighted the power of food to bring different groups together, something that few other foods in the Detroit subway can do.

Co-owner Peter Le touts that the fresh garlic and ingredients he used in the sauce-rather than a pre-made cajun spice blend-are the secret behind the restaurant's success, but from a broader perspective , He thinks the popularity of the concept is very simple: "People like seafood, they don't just want to cook it-they also want the sauce on it."

In Louisiana boils, crayfish and other crustaceans absorb all the flavor from coriander, mustard seeds, lemon, bay leaf and other seasonings added to boiling water, as well as corn and potatoes. Drain the pan, place the goods on the table and separate them as they are, without sauce. In the Viet-Cajun boiling—and the changes we saw in Detroit—the chef sometimes cooks the crustaceans with spices first, but usually shakes them in a plastic bag butter sauce bath, and the diners remove the shellfish from the plastic bag. .

"The main difference between the two is the sauce. When boiling in Louisiana, you put the garlic and seasonings in the pot, then take it out, don’t soak it in the sauce-you just have it as is Just eat it," said Duong, who runs the Houston Crayfish Cafe. "The sauce adds an extra layer of flavor."

New Orleans has not had such a restaurant until recent years, points out Anh Luu, a Vietnamese chef who runs the kitchen at Bywater Brew in New Orleans.

“The people here are very traditional to local food, and boiled crayfish is something that the grandparents of the people in the river mouth taught them to make,” she said. "They took some time to change the way they wanted to eat crayfish."

Although the details of the origin of Vietnam-Cajun are vague, it is generally believed that it happened in the food court of the Hong Kong Mall in Houston's Chinatown. The origin point theory is supported by the earliest media mention of Vietnamese-Cajun seafood boiling. This is a story titled "Asia-Cajuns" by Robb Walsh, a food writer from Houston Press in 2002. In it, Walsh expressed his shock when he saw a new concept in the early iterations of the mall.

"While I was waiting for a few pounds of cooked crayfish at the Cajun Corner restaurant, I noticed a young Vietnamese-American approaching a small table full of condiments near the front desk. He poured a few tablespoons of ground red pepper into it. In a small bowl, pour mayonnaise and ketchup and stir well.

"Is that the crayfish dipping sauce?" I asked him in disbelief.

"Yes," he said. "I like it's really hot."…

"With a tray in my hand, I study the condiment station. I have eaten crayfish for many years, but I can't say that I have eaten the dipping sauce."

Soon after, boiling bags appeared, and in the early 2000s, the aggregates would be filtered to California and then spread across the country.

There are several reasons why Viet-Cajun is so popular. Both the Gulf of Mexico and Vietnam are coastal areas with similar climates. Reliance on seafood, and there is no shortage of salt and spices, Luu said.

She brought Viet-Cajun beyond seafood cooking, and also developed dishes with Southeast Asian, Gulf and even Mexican ingredients, such as the crayfish étouffée corn flakes made with fried wonton chips, or "phorrito", as the name suggests, it is a kind of river. Burrito.

It is worth noting that, thankfully, Viet-Cajun cuisine has not changed when it became mainstream. Luu pointed out that under normal circumstances, spicy food developed by immigrants or regional populations will be "diluted" or reduced in spiciness to suit the tastes of white people.

In fact, the opposite seems to be happening-Detroit's dishes may become hotter, which may be caused by several factors. The United States is an increasingly diverse place with an ever-evolving collective palette, and now it demands more authenticity.

Luu also pointed out that social media has played a significant role. In fact, in the east of Detroit, Wing Spot owner Stewart said that he first learned about this dish through the Internet. Despite all the flaws, social media does provide more opportunities for chefs to do it right, and the result is a cuisine that is still intact when it arrives in Detroit.

"Real Vietnamese food is super spicy, and...all Southeast Asian flavors are sometimes considered too salty or too sour, but I think people are prepared for it," she said.

Still, with the boiled bag version becoming popular across the country, it sometimes seems to be lost or ignored that it is not an invention of Louisiana. At first, some Vietnamese Americans even downplayed this fact. As the New York Times pointed out in 2010, a popular Vietnamese-American chain that thrived in California in the 2000s "portrayed Mr. [co-owner] Nguyen as a beer drinker from Seadrift, Texas A good boy. Ms. Ngo, his bride born in Kansas, is called "Yo'Mama."

But at this point, Viet-Cajun is even more so. Vietnamese Americans have lived in the Gulf region for several generations, and the two cultures are intertwined. Luu believes that Viet-Cajun is more like an American regional cuisine than just some "fusion" dishes.

"This is a cultural fusion, because Vietnamese have lived in New Orleans for so long," Luu said.

"I was a kid, and I thought,'You know, you're right, I wasn't born for this,'" Stewart recalled with a smile.

Many years later, Stewart is still in the east and has no cooking training. He transformed an old party shop into Wing Spot, which was originally named for its wings and the lamb chop recipe he developed by watching cooking shows on YouTube . At the same time, he developed his other company, Voo Vodka, which he said was the first high-quality vodka brand owned by a black American. He described building the business as "organized chaos," but he was successful in both.

In 2018, there was another thing on social media that caught Stewart's attention: seafood boiling. He returned to YouTube to study the concept and draw inspiration, and develop his own ideas on this basis. His taste is big and bold, but his seafood is steamed, not boiled.

Wing Spot goes well with lamb chops, but people really like crabs, lobsters, shrimps, crayfish, mussels and other shellfish, dipped in butter sauce, with minced garlic, chili powder and Stewart’s secret series Other spices and herbs.

"I have not yet served 1 million customers, but I am continuing to achieve my goals," Stewart said. "I asked you to call me, so this is a good indicator of progress there."

On Livernois Avenue, chef Max Hardy is making progress at his upcoming restaurant What's Crackin'. He grew up in Detroit and was known as a "star chef" in Miami. Before returning home, he cooked for Missy Elliot and NBA star Amar'e Stoudemire and others, and then founded the pre-Caribbean comfort food concept on the Rio Grande River Bistro and Coop, a Caribbean fusion restaurant located in the food hall of the Detroit Shipping Company in Midtown.

Seafood boiling is not a big leap compared to his current industry. He said he made six to seven sauces, including some he described as "a spicy coastal seafood mixture", herb butter, jerky, curry And lobster is similar to the butter sauce of lobster soup, but more like butter.

What's Crackin' will bring the day’s catch locally, but the crabs will be caught from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay near Chrisfield, Maryland. Hardy said this is “the source of all the best crabs” and then fly into Detroit. .

"I think it would be good to find the source of the crab directly," he said.

The restaurant will welcome diners with the atmosphere of a big island, seafood murals and bright reds and blues-Hardy says it's like home on the coast.

"It will be fun," he added. "You put on an apron, take a cookie, and make it. And it has many flavors, with different sauces, crab, fish, lobster, shrimp, etc. This is what people want."

The inspiration for Saucey Crab in Middleton can be traced back to her days as a hairdresser in Chicago. On the rest day, she and her daughters would gather together to buy crabs and a case of beer. In a few years, she will move to Detroit to open a Sauce Bar with her husband, and start a seafood boiling night on Wednesday.

"People lined up outside the door," Middleton said, so she opened her first Saucey Crab store in Southfield in October 2019, and with the surge in business, Detroit opened a second store.

Her menu also offers po' boy, high-quality catfish sandwiches, gumbo, fried oysters and more. Middleton said that she did a lot of business at first, but two developments stalled: the pandemic and dozens of new boiling restaurants opened after her. Despite this, business is picking up, and more and more people are pouring into her brightly colored restaurant in Southfield.

In Detroit Pho and Crab, colorful lights illuminate restaurants and bars, and the walls are filled with nets, swordfish, crabs and seagulls. In addition to boiling, it also offers a range of traditional Vietnamese and Cajun dishes, from gumbo soup to po' boy to bun bo Hue, a delicious soup powered by lemongrass and coagulated pork blood, a staple food in central Vietnam .

In Warren, Stewart’s new restaurant will provide a full-service bar with robotic bartenders. For all new restaurants, the question becomes: "Will the Viet-Cajun boiling and the twists and turns of Detroit stay?"

Stewart thinks so. "People just tasted a series of seafood delicacies. Why do people like cheeseburgers, why do people like French fries? It's just their business, that's it, do you know what I'm talking about?" he said.

"Unless the seafood goes bad, I don't think it will disappear anytime soon."

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Tags: food and drink, Detroit, seafood, crab, boil, boil bag, lobster, Vietnamese, Houston, cover story

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