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Sacks and the City By David W. Brown

It is almost impossible to imagine a time when crawfish was not as ubiquitous in New Orleans as fleurs-de-lis or Louis Armstrong. Until the 1950s, however, if you wanted crawfish in this town, you first had to drive out to the swamps, find a fisherman, buy a sack, bring it home, figure out how to cook it, and — most daunting of all — figure out how to eat it. In truth, however, it likely never would have occurred to you to do any of this in the first place, because crawfish was considered peasant food and had no place in the world of cosmopolitan cuisine. All that changed, in large part, because of the work of one man, who not only popularized the Cajun staple in the city, but in doing so changed the New Orleans cultural and culinary scene forever. His name is Alfred Scramuzza — the self proclaimed “emperor of crawfish” — and the visionary founder of the iconic Seafood City.

A ccording to Scramuzza family lore, the whole thing began as an accident. Before Al got into the crawfish business, he sold produce and other seafoods. One day, a wholesaler came by with sacks in the back of his truck. He offered Al the chance to sell the crawfish — and Al almost turned him down. Who would buy such a thing? The whole saler, a little desperate, said something like: “Well, how ’bout we do it on consign ment, cher? Ya don’t pay me nothin’ ’less ya manage to sell ’ em. Dey prob’ly just gonna go to waste anyhow.”

walked by. At the end of the day, that first batch of crawfish was sold, Al paid the fisherman, and the next day bought more. It ramped up from there. In part, that salesman’s mentality was a result of Al’s upbringing. “He grew up poor in the French Quarter,” said Tony of his grandfather. A child of the Great Depression, Al’s family’s situation was made worse when his father took off in the early 1930s. His mom tried to keep the family together, but food was scarce and the situation became increasingly dire by the day. They’d steal scraps of food when

What the Cajun didn’t realize was that he was dealing with a world-class operator. “My grandfather was a big-time hustler and real good salesman,” said Tony Scramuzza, Al’s grandson and the owner of Scramuzza’s Seafood in Kenner. “He still has that great big personality. He wasn’t ever afraid to go through with an idea he had, even if people thought it was ‘out there’ and crazy — he’d just go full speed with it, and never let other people’s doubts affect it. He went full force.” Al was a first-rate showman. To entice buyers, he paid kids to dangle crawfish from fishing poles over the sidewalk as people

22 ROUSES SPRING 2024