This review is just a little different, but I thought it would be fun to post it anyway. When Bobby and I lived in Idaho, we had a small cafe that we ran for a while there. Since Bobby is from Louisiana, it was called the Cajun Kitchen Buffet. Bobby cooked the food, and I prepared everything for the salad bar, and made desserts, as well as served food to our guests. Most people in northern Idaho had never had Cajun food before, and it was a different experience for them, and we soon had a regular bunch of customers that came at least once a week. Sometimes, we even had requests for different items on the menu, one of which was alligator. One family that came each week with their kids was totally thrilled to try eating alligator meat, and happily told the adventure to all of their schoolmates the next week. Bobby always had fresh crawfish, and I usually saved a few of the liveliest ones and kept them in a small aquarium for people to see, and sometimes, we even took them over to crawl around on someone’s table, which always provided a good show for everyone who was there. Here is an article that was in the local online paper when we first were getting ready to open the restaurant. http://ruralnorthwest.com/artman/publish/printer_3299.shtml The picture was after Bobby finished painting and adding an outside walkway.
I do love crawfish, although I seldom if ever see it here. You have to eat a lot though...not much meat in them. Ive never had alligator but my husband did... When I was little, we used to eat frog legs a lot...my mom would fry them but then the embargo with Cuba and you couldn't get them anymore. Have seen them though in stores as an adult.
Wonderful!!! @Yvonne Smith and @Bobby Cole , do y'all have a favorite Cajun recipe? Or two..... or three?
It was actually very short lived. Around 2 years or less into it we decided that the winters were too brutal to continue. The spring and summer months were crazy busy but the rest of the year was snow and cold. We did have one saving grace during the winter which was the snow plow guy who had to remove the snow on our parking area because that’s where the school bus had to turn around. On most mornings at about 5 or 6 A.M. I would be out back splitting wood for the fireplace in order to keep the restaurant and store warm but alas, even with a cleared parking area, good food and a warm restaurant, the traffic on our stretch of the road from Idaho to Montana was scarce during the winter. If I would have had the foresight to do it, we should have had seasonal openings instead of trying to muscle through the entire year.
I’ll be happy to throw some out here in the next couple of days and see which ones you like! Some are very simple and some a bit more complicated but all of them are delicious!
That was one of the problems we had with a cafe here in Millinocket. The winters were expensive, with the heating costs, and demanding of my time too, with snow removal. At the same time, there weren't very many customers during that part of the year because people didn't want to leave the house.
Yeah, since we featured a buffet and considering I am a staunch believer in consistency, we lost a lot of food. I guess we could have just made a limited menu but that consistency thing is a major hand up for me. Fortunately, most of the buffet food didn't go to waste entirely because we often fed a lot of out of work mill people and who couldn't afford to feed their families the type of food we were able to produce. One time, we even traded 4 pairs of tennis shoes for a cord of wood so that a family could put good shoes on their kids. They also gleaned a lot of the leftovers so on one hand we lost some monetary profits but on the other we gained quite a few blessings.
One of the other reasons the winter business was slight was the availability of a beer and wine license. We bought the building from the Kootenai Indian tribe and with it came a full liquor, beer and wine license. The building also came with a separate bar which we converted into a pantry prep area so we never considered opening up for cocktail service but we did want to be able to serve beer and wine. In that part of the country, a lot of folks will not travel too far for a family style meal sans a beer. Food cost on a buffet plus the white board specials ran about 35% but draft beer only runs about 5% meaning that there's a lot more profit from beer than food and brings up the ticket value considerably. Long story short, the tribe somehow found themselves remiss and didn't pay the yearly license fee and lost it. There are only about a dozen licenses allowed in the whole county and was set up first come first serve so we wound up in the back of the line. Since we were making payments to the Kootenai's and not a bank there was nothing we could do about it short of simply getting belligerent and making demands after we had already pumped thousands into the reconstruction of the building so our hands were tied. I really didn't need a war with entire native American nation.
I was just thinking of some of the events that went on at our place and one thing in particular shines out for me. As you can see from the above pictures, a whole mountain range and woods acted a backdrop for the restaurant and it was because of that backdrop that the sad story unfolded. One weekday and when we first opened, it was pretty slow for lunch with nothing much happening when 2 men and a lad walked in and sat at a table across from and facing the sliding glass doors in the back of the restaurant. It wasn’t long before we all found out that they had been out since the wee hours of a cool morning hunting for wild turkeys but remained bagless for all their hard efforts trekking through the hillsides and forest. The ragged threesome sat making some idle conversation whilst occasionally telling a few people who perchanced to wander close to their table all about their less than rewarding morning. Simply put, they were indeed a pitiful and depressing sight to behold and it got even more pitiful when the youngest of the troupe looked up, pointed at the sliding glass door and yelled for all in the restaurant to hear, “Turkeys”!!! Yes, as the three lightning struck individuals sat with mouths gaping wide open, there stood two fully grown turkeys looking, what appeared to be straight at them, through the glass doorway!
Walmart sent me a warning that I had an old photo account that they were going to close since I had not used it in a long time; so I signed in to see what pictures might be in their files that I had uploaded at some point , in order to have prints made. One of the pictures that I found was this one taken of our little cafe, and shows @Bobby Cole happily chatting with some of our guests at the restaurant. As a side note; the sliding glass door on the far right is the one Bobby referred to in his previous post, where the turkeys were lurking. You can see the trees just outside the door, and there was a small trail that the turkeys would wander around on out behind the back of the restaurant.