Jason Seither grew up boiling crawfish in the backyard with his father, a fisherman, and cooking beside his mother, which explains half of what comes out of his kitchen on Hickory Avenue.
The other half is harder to account for. Seither opened his restaurant in Harahan in 2004, and the menu has been drifting somewhere unexpected ever since. Southern fried crab fingers meet Japanese sauces and seared eel in a dish called Kung Fu Tuna. The Volcano arrives as an upside-down Asian-style taco salad built with fresh ahi, crab salad, and shrimp. The Totem Pole stacks crab stuffing, crispy soft-shell crab, fried eggplant, and a shrimp kabob into a tower. There is a sushi po-boy with snow crab and eel that has won awards at the Oak Street Po-Boy Festival.
None of that shows on the outside. The building sits behind a parking lot paved with old oyster shells, the menus are laminated, and nobody has spent a dollar on the facade in twenty years. Reviewers keep writing some version of the same sentence about not letting the exterior fool you…