![]() Deanie’s serves them raw, fried and charbroiled. In the spring, it hosts Pinchapalooza, a crawfish festival that not only fills stomachs but also benefits charities. The restaurant’s walls are filled with photographs from Bucktown’s past: Canal and lake houses that locals call camps, the annual blessing of the fleet, children pulling on fishing nets or jumping from a pier into the water.įrom local fishers and seafood supply houses, Deanie’s serves up shrimp, crab, catfish, redfish, red drum, flounder, sheepshead and speckled trout. “All the recipes we have now are original from my parents’ time,” co-owner Chandra Chifici said. The Chifici family bought it in 1982, expanded the dining room and revamped the menu. The lake is a short stroll up the street and over the levee.Īlma “Deanie” Livaccari opened the place in the 1960s. Just out back is the canal that once was h ome to dozens of commercial fishing boats and houses built on stilts over the water. So popular that it keeps an overflow parking lot across Plaquemine Street, Deanie’s occupies a building at 1713 Lake with a seafood market on one side and a restaurant on the other. “It’s got first-class restaurants, and if you want something to go or something fresh to ship back home overnight, you’ve got seafood markets, too,” Boudreaux said. Boudreaux’s catch, and that of his fellow fishers, can easily end up fried, broiled or grilled on the plates of Bucktown diners. Instead, character, color and seafood animate Bucktown, says Russell Boudreaux, who has lived here all his life and has been crabbing and shrimping for a half-century, since he was 10. But don’t come looking for guided tours, souvenir shops, plastic trinkets or blinding neon. It’s so accessible.”įor visitors, the lure is the last two blocks of Lake Avenue and the two flanking blocks of Old Hammond Highway. “Being a lover of New Orleans and a fifth-generation New Orleanian,” she said, “I thought being right next to the city and so close to the lake that you can smell it was perfect. “It’s a little fishing community that now has more houses and paved streets,” she said. ![]() Most of it consists of tidy middle-class houses, apartment complexes, tasteful condominium buildings, churches and schools for its people, some of them retirees, some young families, some residents with deep ties to the fishing industry.īetty Bonura, whose family moved to Bucktown in 1958 when she was a young teenager and who returned on her own in 2017, recalls from childhood the pirogue races in the 17th Street Canal, a shrimp processing plant where a major philanthropic organization is now headquartered on the lakefront and neighbors who made their own fishing nets. Just minutes by car from the New Orleans Central Business District, Bucktown today is a flat three-by-20-block enclave at the northeast tip of Jefferson Parish. And with good reason, for this little gem is home to not only some of the finest seafood on the Gulf Coast but also a rich history of family, community and entertainment, a place destroyed and rebuilt by periodic hurricanes yet always married to the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the 17th Street Canal. When the sun melts into the horizon and the seagulls squawk over the gentle waves, Bucktown’s restaurants swell with diners arriving from the neighborhood, the region and the hotels through the New Orleans area.
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