16
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
JULY | AUGUST 2014
S
even years ago, wearied from the post-Katrina bureaucracy
that kept him from reopening Bella Luna, the fine dining
restaurant that he and his wife Karen had operated for 14
years in the French Quarter, European Master Chef Horst Pfeifer
took a chance on catfish. Specifically, he took a chance on thin-cut,
Mississippi farm-raised catfish dredged in a corn flour mixture and
fried to what always seems like an impossible crisp.
If that rings a bell, it’s because the Pfeifers purchased Middendorf ’s,
the then-seventy-three-year-old catfish house whose reputation is
synonymous with the small fishing village of Manchac, LA, where
it operates five days a week. (According
to the U.S. Postal Service, the village is
actually called Akers, but colloquially it
shares a name with Pass Manchac, the belt
of water connecting Lakes Pontchartrain
and Maurepas along which it was settled.)
If there’s any doubt about this region’s
appetite for catfish, you need only to visit
Middendorf ’s on a typical Sunday, over the
course of which roughly 2,500 diners sit down
for sustenance. “When we open the door on
a Sunday morning, I tell everybody it’s like
jumping on a freight train going 150 miles
an hour. You better hold onto it, since it’s like
you’re steering a big tanker,” Horst says.
Due to its location — visible from I-55,
which travels between LaPlace, LA and
Chicago, IL — Middendorf ’s regular
customer base is geographically broad. “We
get older people from Jackson, Mississippi
after church. They go on their Sunday
drive and end up eating a late lunch or
early supper here,” Horst says. “People from
Houston going to Gulf Shores, Alabama.
It’s a destination point for people driving
through.”
Despite the relatively extensive menu —
which also offers catfish cut to a more
standard thickness and fried, as well as
whole fried catfish — 85 to 90% of those
customers order the restaurant’s iconic
thin-cut fried catfish, which originated
with its founding proprietors, Louis and
Josie Middendorf.
That kind of volume demands that roughly
2,000 pounds of Mississippi catfish pass
through Middendorf ’s kitchen per week.
Rouses sells over 30,000 pounds of farm-
raised Mississippi catfish every month.
—James – Rouses Meat & Seafood
Director
The crew doesn’t wait for
catfish orders to roll
in for permission to
begin frying. In fact
on the busiest days, two cooks fry catfish
simultaneously and continuously. One of
them is usually Elaine Carter, who began
working at Middendorf ’s 35 years ago
when she was just a teenager.
Middendorf ’s catfish supply used to come
exclusively from local waters and the hundreds
of fishermen who raised families in Manchac
and drew respectable paychecks from commercial
fishing. The Pfeifers do purchase wild-caught catfish
Mississippi
CATFISH
by
Sara Roahen
the
Gulf Coast
issue
