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In 2017, at Al’s 90th birthday celebration, Billy Nungesser (then-lieutenant governor of Louisiana) presented Al with the Louisiana Seafood Ambassador award. In response, Al declared that there are too many “crawfish kings” out there, and that he is the “Crawfish Emperor.” Who could argue with that? In Louisiana, seafood is almost always a family business. Al and his future wife, Sarah, met as teenagers in the French Quarter, where they both grew up, in the 1940s. They later had four children. Though none of the kids took over the Seafood City empire, and Al closed its doors in 1994, the Scramuzza family wasn’t finished with crawfish just yet. “My grandfather had closed the business when I was real young,” Tony told me in an interview. “I was never interested in it, and never thought I would get into it. In fact, I always thought the opposite.” Though the Scramuzza family represents one of the great cultural success stories of the city and they were hard workers, they weren’t loaded, and there was no empire to hand to anyone after Seafood City closed. And anyway, Tony wanted to find his own path in life. His background is as varied as his grandfather’s. He worked construction. He was a mechanic. He did valet. He worked in EMS. He was a bartender. “We did a humongous business there,” Al told The Times-Picayune in 2017. “We sold seafood. We shipped seafood. We were wading in seafood; that’s how much we used to handle. We sold billions of pounds of crawfish every season. Not millions. Billions.” At its height, Seafood City could sell 50,000 pounds of crawfish on a Saturday, not even counting the myriad other creatures of the local sea it carried.

things, with Al explaining times and temper atures and ingredients and seasonings. To eyes in 2024, this seems unbelievable, when crawfish suffuses the New Orleans culinary landscape and we just pick up the basics by cultural osmosis; but in a pre-Internet world, where everyone’s uncle didn’t own a crawfish pot, how would you even begin to know where to start? Look, anyone can sell a product. But the salesman became a veritable ambassador for the lowly crawfish hole. And over time, his empire grew to take up the entire block. Scramuzza had something that comes along rarely, but when it does, burns white hot: He was a showman of, by and for the city of New Orleans. In the broader landscape, Seafood City wasn’t just a place to buy seafood; it became a cultural hub: a place where the community’s love for food and festivity converged. Scramuzza understood the soul of the city — our love of celebration and family gatherings, and our city’s deep rooted culinary traditions and its openness to new experiences. To fully create the crawfish culture in the city and then transform the culinary landscape, Scramuzza turned to television. It’s worth noting that crawfish wasn’t the only business that he went full bore into. Over the years, said his grandson, he started a record label (Scram Records). He painted Christmas trees. He founded a production company (Muzza Productions). He even ran for the state legislature. (“Don’t be a looza, vote for Scramuzza.”) So making commercials was right up his alley. He wrote them, starred in them, and sang in them. As New Orleans blogger Chuck Taggart once transcribed the famous jingle: Seeeafoood City is-a verrry pretty, Down at Broad ‘n St. B’nawd, Stay with Al Scramuzza and you’ll nevuh be a loosuh… At the end, a crowd of people would sing the kicker: 1826 North Broad! The marketing was both ahead of its time and strangely perfect for the city. The commercials were more than mere adver tisements: they were mini-events, full of humor, local flair, catchy tunes, slogans and jingles. You’ve got disco music playing in the background, a distinct local dressed as a doctor and holding a stethoscope to a

crawfish, saying to the creature in full-blown Yat-speak: “Yoo arrrite…” and then brushing its teeth. “Force of nature” is an overused expres sion, but I’m not sure how else to describe the man or what he was doing. As Seafood City grew in the ’60s and early ’70s, Al was like a one-man band suddenly leading an orchestra. And he wasn’t just writing commer cials and making deals. Behind the scenes, he was doing the job of a small businessman — even boiling the crawfish. “Once you get big in the seafood industry, it kind of consumes you,” said Tony. “You’ve got to really go 100% to get where he got.” Al would frequently be there alone, boiling all night, thanks to Seafood City’s unique setup in the back. “He set up his boiling room and — look, it was a crazy situation back there, man. They had all kinds of conveyor belts, where basically one person could boil a lot of seafood. It was almost like a mini factory of a boiler room. There were hoists and such where one person could lift the big baskets of seafood and dump them on the tables to get it all sorted and ready for the next day.” At its height, Seafood City could sell 50,000 pounds of crawfish on a Saturday, not even counting the myriad other creatures of the local sea it carried. “We did a humongous business there,” Al told The Times-Picayune in 2017. “We sold seafood. We shipped seafood. We were wading in seafood; that’s how much we used to handle. We sold billions of pounds of crawfish every season. Not millions. Billions.” At the same time, Scramuzza was shaping the nature of the crawfish market. It was essentially an entirely new product. People didn’t know how to buy them, sell them, cook them, peel them or serve them. There were no expectations of price because they weren’t really being sold anywhere else. Today we live in a world that he helped create.

24 ROUSES SPRING 2024