THE MOTTO OF Brother’s Crawfish might as well be “Snap, crack, slurp, and repeat.’’ On a Friday night at this new Dorchester restaurant, every table is nearly elbow deep in a messy heap of red crustaceans. Hands pluck crawfish from shared baskets, snap off and crack open the tiny lobster-like tails, and tug out the tender white tail meat. Slurping follows. Like good Cajuns, diners raise the crawfish heads to their mouths and — with gusto — suck out the flavorful “fat.’’
This could easily be a crawfish boil in Cajun country, until you notice the spring rolls, fried rice, and coconut drinks. The 25-seat spot is the first to bring the growing Viet-Cajun food craze to Boston: Cajun cooking and crawfish served with a Vietnamese twist.
The cuisine has roots in Louisiana, where Vietnamese immigrants who had been fishermen settled. “The delta of south Louisiana is very much like the Mekong Delta geographically and natural history-wise,’’ says Jerald Horst, a fisheries expert and coauthor of “The Louisiana Seafood Bible: Crawfish.’’ As they prospered in the fishing industry, the Vietnamese took land jobs, many as seafood retailers. “Thirty-five years ago when I began my career in the [Louisiana] seafood industry, the seafood market owners were about 90 percent Sicilian. Now it’s over 90 percent Vietnamese,’’ says Horst. “And, of course, if they’re going to sell seafood here, they gotta sell crawfish. It’s our flagship food, and it segued right into their culture.’’
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