NOLA restaurant’s barbecue shrimp isn’t anything like KC cuisine. You gotta try it
I was eyeing the BBQ Shrimp Poboy at Liuzza’s by the Track, a neighborhood joint in Mid-City known for its po’boys and gumbo.
The menu said it was the restaurant’s “signature dish.” Barbecue, New Orleans, po’boys — seemed like it checked all the boxes for a little story in my Kansas City newspaper.
Across our high table, Ian McNulty offered a gentle warning.
“The barbecue shrimp po’boy is one of the great misnomers of New Orleans food,” said McNulty, the longtime food writer for NOLA.com. “A reasonable mind might expect something off a smoker or perhaps cooked on a grill and doused with barbecue sauce. None of those things are true.”
But it’s fantastic, he added. “It’s an old-fashioned New Orleans standard by now. What if I got it and we can do a little teamwork here?”
We placed our orders: BBQ Shrimp Poboy, Garlic Oyster Poboy, two cups of gumbo. It was nearly 5 p.m., and the after-work crowd was starting to trickle in.
“Can you drink on the clock?” McNulty asked.
Hell yes, I said. Two big schooners of beer, then — pilsner for me, IPA for Ian.
We settled in. Like anybody interested in New Orleans’ food and drink scene, I’ve been following McNulty’s work for years. He gets scoops, he points his audience to hidden gems and his enthusiasm for the restaurants of the city glows in all his stories.
McNulty also just seems like a really nice guy. I looked him up when I got in town and asked if I could buy him dinner someplace quintessentially New Orleans.
He chose Liuzza’s by the Track, on the corner of Ponce De Leon and North Lopez streets. The “track” in the name is a reference to the New Orleans Fair Grounds, which are just a few blocks away and where Jazz Fest is held every spring.
“But the rest of the year, during horse-racing season, it’s where the railbirds go to place money on the ponies,” McNulty said. “And this is one of the places they come afterward.”
Liuzza’s — incredibly, no relation to Liuzza’s Bar and Restaurant, about a mile away — has been a bar since the 1930s, but wasn’t remarkable for its food until new owners took over in the 1990s and started to prioritize the kitchen.
“Nothing high-cuisine or anything, but they put these little twists on New Orleans style, little things here and there,” McNulty said. “It’s one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants because it hits that sweet spot where it conforms with the cultural texture of New Orleans food but finds its own way to do that.”
Take the gumbo. This one has a less-heavy roux: dark and wet, filled with sausage, chicken, shrimp, okra and all kinds of spices.
“There’s Cajun gumbo, which tends to have a really thick, chocolatey base to it, and then there’s Creole gumbo, which is a little soupier and comes out of the Black cooking tradition,” McNulty said. “This one’s a little closer to what you’d find in a Black restaurant in that it’s more slurpable. But really, this is a Liuzza’s gumbo. It’s its own thing.”
(A tip for aspiring gumbo-makers: The shrimp doesn’t stew in the pot all day. Liuzza’s sautees it to order and drops it into the gumbo right before the server brings it out to your table.)
On to the po’boys. I don’t remember much about my Garlic Oyster Poboy, which I inhaled in about 3 minutes. I ordered it “dressed” (lettuce, tomato, mayo), and it came on buttered garlic bread. The overall garlic-ness was powerful but not overpowering; the oysters were deep-fried and lush. It’s probably now in the top-five sandwiches I’ve ever had in my life.
The Barbecue Shrimp Poboy was a knife-and-fork endeavor. You get a loaf of hollowed-out New Orleans French bread overflowing with shrimp and sauce.
“If you went somewhere else and ordered this not as a po’boy, they might give you a bib to wear while you eat it,” McNulty said. “It’s almost like a po’boy in a Mardi Gras costume or something.”
The sauce?
“A lot of butter, a lot of pepper, a lot of rosemary, thyme,” McNulty said. “It’s heavily seasoned, and it’s sloppy.”
I took a couple of quick bites, savored them, and, being a polite Midwestern visitor, left McNulty to his plate. He was right, of course: It wasn’t barbecue. But I’d eat something like that once a month in KC if we had it.
Afterward, we hit up a neighborhood bar called Pal’s Lounge. But that conversation’s off the record.
This story was originally published February 5, 2025 at 1:59 PM.
