Consider this a public service announcement: you’ve got two or three more weekends to try the Sunday crawfish boil at Catfish in Crown Heights. After that, the season ends and those wily Southern specialties will be largely unavailable.
The weekly boil has been going on for about six years, the passion project of Angelin and Brian Borsics. It started at a Williamsburg bar, then transported to Crown Heights a few years back. Angelin, a cookbook editor/Louisiana transplant, bemoaned the lack of a good crawfish boil in Brooklyn. And like so many of life’s challenges, the best solution seemed to be “do it yourself.”
Initially they used a major crawfish distributor before switching to a tiny operation named Kyle LeBlanc Crawfish Farms. The Boursins say LeBlanc’s product is unmatched—Brian drives to JFK Airport once a week to pick up 100 pounds (or more) of live product.
For $35, you get about 3 and half pounds of corn, potatoes, and crawfish. You can handle the size of this feast, though—any crawfish connoisseur knows there are a lot of throwaway parts. The fish is somewhat spicy, the product of a family recipe from Angelin. In fact, the wussy spice level of other local crawfish boils was a big part of the inspiration for this one.
Be warned—this is not delicate eating. Your hands will be wholly coated in spice slurry by meal’s end. Weather permitting, I recommend scoring seats on the back patio, where you can see the Borsics hard at work. Bonus is, you’ll feel more free to be a fish-covered slob when you’re posted up outside.
The boils happen from 4:00-8:00 p.m. on Sundays. Don’t come until 4:30 p.m., though, if you want happy hour prices from the bar. Oh, and just in case you missed the urgency at the top of this story, here it is again: Go soon!
