Frankie & Johnny’s on Arabella Street has been feeding Uptown New Orleans since 1942, and every spring the picnic tables out front fill up with people doing the same thing they’ve been doing here for generations: peeling crawfish, drinking cold beer, and staying way longer than they planned.
Johnny Morreale and his brother-in-law, Frank Gaudin, opened the place to feed longshoremen and dock workers near the Tchoupitoulas wharf. The men who built their clientele worked hard, ate big, and didn’t need tablecloths. More than 80 years later, the place still runs on that same logic: fresh seafood, no pretense, and crawfish boiled the way they’re supposed to be.
The boil is the main event. Crawfish come out hot, deeply spiced, and stained red from a seasoning blend refined over decades. The shells are slick with it. The potatoes soak it up. A pile lands in front of you, and the only reasonable response is to roll up your sleeves and get to work, because the table is covered in newspaper and nobody here is keeping score on manners…