Lafayette
"The architecture was never the point. In Lafayette, the point is always the food and the music and the company."
Lafayette is the city that Cajun country built for itself when it got big enough to need one. It’s not pretty in the way that New Orleans is pretty — no wrought iron, no French Quarter fog. It’s flat and sprawling in the Gulf Coast way, with wide commercial strips and the kind of American roadscape that makes you wonder why you came. And then someone takes you to Prejean’s and you hear the live Cajun music and eat the crawfish bisque and understand that the architecture was never the point. In Lafayette, the point is always the food and the music and the company, and all three are extraordinary.
I spent three days there during a festival I’d stumbled into — the Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, which happens every October and takes over Girard Park with Cajun and zydeco stages and cooking competitions and a cultural weight that makes it feel unlike any food festival I’ve been to anywhere. The distinction between Cajun and Creole cultures gets explained clearly here: Cajun from the Acadian exiles who came to the swamps, Creole from the complex urban culture of New Orleans and the River Road. Both are Louisiana. Both are irreducible to each other and to anything else.
The restaurant culture in Lafayette punches above its weight class in ways that take you by surprise. Bread and Circus is doing things with local ingredients and Cajun technique that would get attention in any major food city. Café Vermilionville sits in a nineteenth-century Acadian cottage and serves a courtbouillon — a Cajun fish stew with tomatoes and roux — that I’ve tried to find anywhere else in the world and simply cannot. The Dwyer’s Café on Jefferson Street has been making red beans and rice every Monday since before I was born, and the regulars who fill its booths on a weekday lunch appear to have been doing so for most of their adult lives.
The University of Louisiana campus runs through the middle of the city and gives Lafayette a certain academic energy that Cajun country towns sometimes lack. The Hilliard University Art Museum holds a serious collection of Louisiana landscape painters. But what I keep returning to mentally is a late evening on Jefferson Street, the accordion drifting from somewhere I couldn’t see, a plate of fried catfish in front of me, and that particular Louisiana feeling that life is being conducted here at exactly the right temperature.
When to go: October for Festivals Acadiens et Créoles — the heat has broken, the crawfish season is in its second wind, and the city settles into a celebratory mode that lasts the whole month. Spring is equally good. Summers are hot and flat in the Cajun prairie way, though the food and music carry on regardless.