DI's Restaurant

I asked my family to take me to a Cajun restaurant while I was in town and they drove me 45 miles off the beaten path to DI's.  This is exactly what I was hoping for and loved every second of it.  Cajun band, awesome staches, and of course fantastic Cajun food.  I had gator, BBQ blue crab, and crawfish étouffée.  This is as real as it gets!

DI's restaurant is five miles from nowhere, a huge restaurant set in the middle of their own crawfish farm.  Not surprisingly, they have the best crawfish I have ever tasted.  There are no reservations, so there can be a wait.  Usually, there is a cajun band for dancing.  But on the night we visited there was  the traditional cajun Mardi Gras chicken run.  For pictures of the food and festivities see <a href="/redir?url=http%3A%2F%2Fphoodphotospolitics.blogspot.com&s=4ed6d69ec234af49cfe6117d56262544a4f567f4b87dbc3090a9bb0d9adc4544" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://phoodphotospoliti…</a>

This is my best friend's family's favorite Cajun restaurant.  A little detour from I-10 on the way from Houston to Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, it's in the middle of nowhere amidst crawfish farms and rice fields.

The staff is so small town and cute.  Super friendly.  Everything is available on the dinner menu for lunch except, unfortunately, the boiled crawfish.  Fried crawfish, yes, but not boiled.  On nights, they have live music and dancing and such as well - it's a pretty popular place.  Our waitress told us about it (even though my best friend, who took me there, already knew) and said that they could open the sliding doors in front of the stage so we could take a look if we wanted to.  We said that was okay, but I half expected to pull away the wooden "curtain" and find the Chuck E. Cheese/Showbiz Pizza robotic animals at their instruments. :P

The fried crawfish was lightly crisp and addictive, as were the fried okra.  The charbroiled oysters  were huge (in size and in number) and came swimming, out of shell, in a lemony butter sauce with more butter to dip them in.  They were so rich and there was so much of it that even with us helping, my famished friend could not finish them.  A shame.  Actually, none of us could finish all our food.

Healthy place this is not.  But for authentic no-frills country Cajun food and hospitality, this is it.  And for locals' nightly entertainment, there is no other.