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And if I say, “Seafood City, very pretty,” you will say: “1826 North Broad.” As it turned out, simply bringing crawfish to the city wasn’t enough. Al Scramuzza could sell dozens of sacks a day, but he was thinking bigger; and for that, he had to teach the city that crawfish was more than a weird food eaten by backward Cajuns. Let’s face it: They’re not the most appetizing creatures before they go into the pot. So to get the city on board, Al had to get creative. He moved the company to a building on Broad Street at the corner of St. Bernard, and eventually called it Seafood City. The fishing poles were a mainstay, as were a kind of rolling master class in how to cook the

in deep, deep Cajun country; French was the dominant language in almost every household. When Al got there, he started striking up deals to buy up as much crawfish from the local fishermen as he could afford, to bring back to the city. In those days, the price of crawfish was something like three cents per pound. After that, Al was off to the races. It doesn’t take Morgus the Magnificent to know that, for Louisianans of a certain age, there are a few jingles that trigger Pavlovian responses. If I sing, “Rosenberg’s, Rosen berg’s…” you’ll respond: “1825 Tulane.” If I say, “You’ll have to see the Special Man!” you will say: “Let her have it.”

they could — okra, peppers, potatoes — but one by one, he and his siblings were sent elsewhere. His sister became a nun, and he and his brothers ended up in Hope Haven, an orphanage in Marrero on Barataria Boulevard. Around this time is also when Al first learned to boil crawfish. It was a poor man’s food — a trash food — and the young Scramuzza was indeed a poor man. But crawfish was ideal for the circumstances because, if you were an enterprising boy, you or your neighbors could go out and catch the crawfish yourselves, and pilfer scraps from produce stands, and ply the boil with seasonings until it resembled something like food. It could turn into a neighborhood event, and the hungry could get a good meal. “That may have been part of what started his drive as he matured,” said Tony. “Part of growing up that way and having to learn how to hustle and make something out of nothing — that’s what he did.” The drive — and also the ability to teach New Orleanians how to boil crawfish — helped Al find fast success selling them by the sack. Soon, he was outpacing his Cajun supplier and decided to go straight to the source: The fishermen at the docks. Bayou Pigeon is culturally about as far from New Orleans in 1950 as you can get without a passport. Adjacent to the Atchafalaya Basin in the southernmost tip of Iberville Parish, it was (and remains today) a fishing village

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