A Decadent Food Weekend: Part 3, Lunch at Drago's

After lunch at Café Degas and dinner at Brigsten’s on Friday, it is unfathomable that we would eat for the rest of the weekend, let alone that we stopped for lunch at Drago’s Seafood Restaurant on Saturday on the way out of town.  But we agreed to “go big AND go home!”

Our day-after-decadence plans originally called for brunch at Satsuma, one of my daughter’s favorite Uptown breakfast joints.  But stifling heat (at 10:00 a.m.), long lines, and a hardly-there appetite squelched those plans.

We packed up the car and abstemiously headed home.  But a few miles out of town, I started to feel “peckish,” no doubt because my stomach had been overstretched by the previous day’s indulgences.

So I contacted my BFF Siri, who speaks to me through my phone, about restaurants near us.  The list she provided included Drago’s Seafood Restaurant, a restaurant we had heard about for years but never tried, and we were less than a half of a mile from the exit that would take us there.

With Siri’s careful guidance (don’t try it on your own), we found our way to this Metarie establishment and were given a table immediately.  (Note: Drago’s does not take reservations, so a weekend night might result in a wait.)

Drago’s Restaurant, which opened in 1969, is famous for its charbroiled oysters, and as testament to their oysters’ deliciousness, the restaurant claims to serve 900 dozen a day.

In a final effort to reign in our appetites, my husband “only” ordered a dozen of them, while I ordered a simple bowl of their seafood gumbo.

The oysters were beyond compare—swimming in a garlicky and herby butter sauce and sprinkled with Parmesan.  And Drago’s redefines the term “lagniappe,” which down here in Louisiana means a little something extra.  We counted 17 oysters on this tray—woo, hoo!  Not dipping our crusty bread in the juice left in the shells would have been wasteful.

I have eaten many bowls of seafood gumbo in my 25-plus years here in Baton Rouge, and I have to rank Drago’s in my top five. The roux was rich, but not overly dark, and the soup was enriched by a nice mélange (I love that word!) of diced vegetables, instead of being sort of weirdly, to me, thickened by okra.  I would have liked a tad more seafood in the soup, but there was a decent amount of small shrimp.

We are aware that we only dipped our toes into the pool that is the menu of Drago’s. Many of the items read as standard but, no doubt, delicious fare on southern Louisiana seafood restaurants--fried seafood po-boys and seafood platters.

We will definitely return, but we will never return without ordering a dozen (ha, ha!) charbroiled oysters.