Halfway between Austin and New Orleans along the 10 is Beaumont, TX, an oil and port town of 100,000 people, where we decided to stop for a few nights on our way to the Big Easy. Cajun food, alligators and airboat tours have been on our minds, so as soon as we settled in at the campground I began looking for a place to eat.
I almost took us to a chain – it had good reviews on Yelp, as if that’s ever been a reliable guide – and then I found Vautrot’s and something about it spoke to me. We headed across town, through rice and oilfields, a nearly submarine landscape hovering just above the watertable.
The gulf is maybe a dozen miles away, and having just passed through Houston we knew this area was hit hard by Hurricane Harvey, a reality underscored when our host explained that the reason his RV park was always full was that most of the residents were tradesmen volunteering and working to rebuild the area, as he is himself.
Still, as we drove to Vautrot’s we hadn’t prepared for what would come next. As we pulled off the highway we thought at first that the place had closed, but then there was the handwritten sign directing us around back. We pulled around, into a small neighborhood behind the restaurant, and there was a travel trailer – not much bigger than what we are living in at the moment – setup in a small, makeshift court, with a few tables and some string lights in the trees. We both knew, immediately, that we had made the right choice to come here.
I knew we were early – they opened at 5 and it was just a few minutes past – so there were no other customers around yet. As we approached we were welcomed by a friendly young man and we exchanged pleasantries. We walked up to the trailer and were again enthusiastically greeted by a lovely woman who helped us navigate the menu. Each time we hemmed or hawed, she offered that we could just give have a little of each, so we ended up with a pretty good cross section of their menu:
- Fried catfish and shrimp, with fries, slaw, and various dips and dressings
- Boudain balls, which we ordered knowing nothing about other than the recommendation
- Gumbo, with shrimp and sausage, because you’d be nuts not to order gumbo at a time like this
- Fried onion blossom, because we were hoping to land at least one dish Wes would devour, and if nothing else this’d be it
- Two sweet teas, because duh
After ordering we milled about and quickly became drawn into conversation with David, the gentleman who’d originally greeted us, and the story he told still brings tears as I write. He helped his father build Vautrot’s – from carpentry to menu – about 25 years ago, and then grew up in the place, around the food and the people. By reputation it’s a local institution, and many of the reviews I’d read properly referred to its former life.
In 1994 they were nearly wiped out by floods that hit southeast Texas – a cataclysmic event in the area that caused massive destruction and hellish conditions like when the nearby San Jacinto River caught fire – but they rebuilt and were open again in only a few weeks. Then some years later they were hit by a blaze and the restaurant was closed for a few months as they recovered, but they again reopened in the same structure David and his family had once built. Finally, now over six months ago, Hurricane Harvey did what so many other catastrophes had failed to do and left their restaurant and many of the neighborhood homes behind it unrepairable. Undeterred, David took 0ver the travel trailer his mother had been living in, but which too had been damaged beyond habitability by Harvey, sitting on what was once the foundation of her home. He gutted the trailer and handily converted it into a functioning kitchen, and again was serving excellent cajun seafood the way his family had done for so long.
As we talked, he was laying down more pavers to grow the usable patio area in the waterlogged yard around the trailer. In his tenderness and warmth throughout the conversation, and in the doting interactions with Wes, deeply endeared him to us so he could have served us two microwaved Filets o’ Fish from McDonalds and we would have been thrilled. But, of course, he didn’t.
We were quickly presented with an extravagant pile of food, so we spread it out and began to indulge as David went back to work. As we were digging in, other folks began to arrive for dinner, and we quickly go sucked into conversation with a young couple, Shauna and Vince, friends and frequenters of Vautrot’s. She was sweet, outgoing, and a wonderful ball of contradictions. A self-described super-Texan, born and raised in eastern Texas, whose first comment to us regarded her spiritual beliefs regarding chakras, and the next a mild resentment that people from other parts of the country assume she packs a sixgun when they find out where she’s from. When Wes nearly took a nasty spill, giving his mom a scare and causing her to spill her sweet tea, Shauna bolted to the trailer to make sure she got another on the house. Like most everyone we’ve met on our travels, she defied pigeonholing, proof that we are all individuals, and that no region, no city or state, can be defined by some mythological average resident, that no one place has a lock on humanity, kindness, or generosity. Everywhere we go we are hit by this obvious, but easily forgotten, fact.
This isn’t really a restaurant review, per se, but I will come back to the food, oh the food, for just a moment. Had we been sitting in any place with four walls, plumbing, and a floor, I doubt we could have done better with the food. Fries and fried onions, ok, you can get them anywhere, but that wasn’t why we went to Vautrot’s. The catfish was excellent – though I’m afraid we buried it under other food and let it get a little soggy – and the fried shrimp was incredibly good… Stephanie’s first comment – not a big shrimp-eater, by the by, was “I can taste the ocean”, intended as every bit the compliment. Vautrot’s gumbo wasn’t like any I’d had or made – it was smoky and rich in a way I still can’t place, and I’m having the leftovers for breakfast. And Boudain balls – some kind of rice and meat ball – were just my kind of jam, their only flaw the fact that we only had one order.
Vautrot’s was the perfect entrance into southeast Texas, easing our way into Louisiana with great Cajun food garnished with a powerful story and human connection, served outdoors on a blustery, moist afternoon. It really doesn’t get much better than this.
