Tag: Cocodrie's Bayou Kitchen

The newest Cajun restaurant in town looks and tastes like it’s been a local favorite for years.

Cocodrie’s Bayou Kitchen, in a timeworn cafe at 5209 Rufe Snow Drive, serves well-spiced and near-perfect Cajun dishes and feels as comfortable as a coastal bait shack.

Owner Jesse Gibson, a Cajun food and seafood vendor for years as the “Wild Cajun,” brought his know-how to a restaurant that combines blackened, grilled and fried fish with gumbos, étouffées, boudin, crab boils and poboys.

Unlike many Cajun restaurants with good platters but weak gumbos and sides, Cocodrie’s excels at everything.

On a lunch visit the other day, the blackened redfish platter with étouffée and a shrimp-boudin ball ($25) was one of the best Cajun dishes here since Louisiana’s sainted Ralph & Kacoo’s moved out of North Texas.

A poboy combo with a catfish half-poboy was made on perfect, pillowy Gambino’s bread and paired with a rich seafood gumbo. It was a solid value at $15.

Poboys start at $8. Catfish baskets cost $15; a fried seafood combo is $20.

Cocdrie’s offers three gumbos — seafood, chicken-sausage or shrimp-okra, along with jambalaya and crawfish étouffée.

The bar includes Abita beers on tap.

It you like it, you can buy more frozen to take home. Cocodrie’s offers everything for a Cajun feast at home, including hot sauces unheard of this side of the Pontchartrain.

Even the Nachitoches meat pie — a Cajun version of an empanada, filled with either crawfish or beef — excelled.

The only drawback at Cocodrie’s is the wait.

You order at the counter and then take a table or booth. The kitchen is doing a lot of great work. But it’s also doing a lot of work, particularly with Cocodrie’s drawing crowds from all over Tarrant County on Loop 820.

Cocodrie’s is in a 40-year-old restaurant location on Rufe Snow Drive just north of Loop 820, across the freeway from Babe’s Chicken Dinner House.

If you ever went to Tippin’s Pie Pantry, or Sparks Cafe, or that location of Chef Point Cafe, or Christie’s Extreme Burgers (today’s Beacon Cafe), you know the place.

It hasn’t changed. It has old booths, a junky patio and a shop that still sells a few “Sparks Cafe” caps.

Just say it has character.

Cocodrie’s is open for lunch and dinner daily; 817-393-3155, cocodriesbayoukitchen.com.