After what seemed like a very long wait, Bud’s Louisiana Food Shoppe has reopened in, of all places, Tierrasanta. You may have to look carefully, but you’ll find it, right there past the Roundtable Pizza.
Like the previous incarnation of Bud’s, this is a fairly tiny restaurant, and even though the tables are crammed in fairly close together, I think this location is much more relaxed.
The menu is pretty much the same, from the Cup’a-Cup’a-Cup’a (a cup each of Gumbo, Red Beans & Rice, and Jambalaya) to the various Po Boy sandwiches. The prices for the sandwiches are about a buck more, but the entree prices have remained the same.
Since I just finished watching Memento for umpteenth time, I think we’ll work a little reverse chronological thing here, and start with my latest meal. It was a Fried Oyster Po Boy($9.95):
A good amount of cornflour battered oysters, fried to perfection, crisp, and mildly "gritty", with a nice soft, molten center. The baguette was good, crusty with a bit of "chew". I’m not a big fan of the "Jalapeno tartar sauce" at Bud’s, I find it a bit too runny, but in this case it did no harm. This is probably my favorite sandwich at Bud’s.
Man, did I enjoy this, even at close to ten bucks. And I was glad to have eaten at Bud’s on that particular day. Why? Well, because the Missus And I had lunch at Bud’s a week earlier……
On that day, I started with a cup of the Seafood Gumbo ($4.95):
There was a good amount of seafood in the gumbo, though the flavor was a bit "flat"…..I added a bit of Crystal Hot Sauce, which pumped up the flavor a bit. All good except the okra which was too slimy.
I had thought about the Oyster Po Boy, but with the Missus’s "encouragement" went with the Fried Catfish Po Boy ($9.95):
The perfectly fried catfish was quite good, moist, with a nice, crisp crust. And with none of that muddy flavor which I’m not fond of. Everything else was not so good. There was too much of the runny tartar sauce, which ran out of the sandwich creating a little pool in the bottom of the paper liner. The bread was hard, and, well, hard….it seemed to be a bit past its "due date".
The Missus went with the Crawfish Etouffe ($11.95), which looked marvelous:
The dish had a ton of crawfish tails, and was quite rich. In fact, I’m sure that this version used a good amount of butter. It would have been a wonderful dish except for the disturbing starchy flavor that left a rather unpleasant aftertaste.
If this had been our first visit I may have never returned. But we’d been to Bud’s several times at their old location, and I thought I’d give it another go. Or maybe, like the main character in Memento, I suffered from a case of Anterograde Amnesia? If that was the case, I’m glad I did.
Bud’s Louisiana Cafe
10425 Tierrasanta Blvd
San Diego, CA 92124
Lunch: Tues, Wed, Thurs – 11am – 3pm
Dinner: Thurs, Fri, Sat – 5pm – 9pm