Today's Cajun Seafood in New Orleans

Today's Cajun Seafood landed on our radar after some unsavory locals sold the joint to us as the place to go for spicy crawfish and boiled turkey necks. So after a humbling trip to Caffin Avenue and the rest of the Lower Ninth, and after fried chicken livers and pepper jelly brunch at Elizabeth's in Bywater, we stopped by Today's for a pound of crawfish ($3.59) and a turkey neck ($1.80).

Today's Cajun is a lunch counter. It's a small space with four tables on one side where guests can sit and eat, but most folks get their food to go. A lot of the menu is prepared foods that are kept warm in steam trays. The meats continue to braise as they sit in their cooking liquid, so when an order is pulled the result is incredibly tender, flavorful protein. That was exactly the case with the turkey necks, which are cooked at Today's in the same boil that crawfish, sausages, pigs feet, corn, and just about everything else on the menu is. The combination of celery salt, paprika, black pepper, bay, chili, and cayenne that make up the boil yield a deeply satisfying, spicy, salty, and undeniably Cajun plate of food.

Delicate turkey meat willfully left the bone as we pulled at it voraciously with predatory fingers. By the time we realized we should get forks and eat like the civilized people we're not, what was left on the paper plate resembled a strange carcass toasting on hot sand in some far away desert. And as the last head from the pile of spicy, meaty crawfish was sucked and thrown onto the graveyard, we were left standing over our kill like proud vultures riding a liberating Creole wind.

Today's Cajun Seafood | 1700 Mcshane Place | 504-940-5995 | map