We talked about fried chicken recently on The Food Show (airs 2-4pm weekdays on WGSO 990 AM) and I remembered that Fury’s fried chicken was a favorite of the show’s listeners. So when Mary Leigh came over to let me run across the lake to get food, Fury’s was fresh on my mind. I have been curious about the place since it changed hands earlier this year.
The Fury’s that Tom loved was too dark for my sensibilities, so I went only once or twice. I don’t even remember the food. The original owner of the eponymous restaurant was John Fury, who ran the Bounty Restaurant in the heyday of the West End, bringing a lot of the recipes from there to his own place.
The aforementioned fried chicken was just one of the things people talked about. There were apparently a lot of fan favorites on the menu, keeping Fury’s bustling all the time.
Then John Sr. passed away a mere few years ago, leaving the restaurant to his sons John and Manny, who assumed the mantle more out of obligation than enthusiasm. They kept the torch burning for a few years until an offer came that suited them.
Over the weekend Fury’s was the last on the list of stops for me to pick up food, like the late and not-so-great days of COVID. Dining in is not an option for us these days.
I ordered Crawfish Bread, a single stuffed crab, a half fried chicken, Trout Amandine, and a kid’s meatballs and spaghetti. Ordering was complicated because I didn’t want the “vegetable of the day” (peas.) I did want to try them, but swapping most of the side of the day and ordering salad dressings from a long list of choices took up all the time.
Between ordering and picking up this food the sky broke, releasing torrents of rain. I called to see if the food was packed, thinking I would just eat some of it there until the rain let up. The owner told me it was already waiting, and offered to run it out in the rain. But I wanted to see what they did to the place, so I went in anyway. I thought it was a gracious offer.
It turned out that getting into the tiny parking lot for Fury’s was the most challenging part of this adventure. I needed a Hummer to traverse the tiny white caps in the street out front. (That section of Metairie has a real flooding problem with a hard rain.)
The amount of bags stuffed with white boxes waiting for me was borderline embarrassing. I was a little surprised at the $105 bill until I went over it in my mind and realized how much we got, and how much of it was expensive seafood.
Wrestling all those bags into and out of the car in the rain had them tip over a few times, so when it was time to plate things, some sauces were missing. The red sauce was all over other containers, and the brown butter for the Amandine was gone.
The first thing that hit me about all of this was the smell of the crawfish bread. It smelled right. And it tasted exactly as it should have. That familiar New Orleans taste. It didn’t look so good because it didn’t travel well. The crawfish bread was packaged like a poor boy. It was a substantial serving on two sides of a loaf of bread, with copious amounts of crawfish and trinity covered in cheese.
The bread had a nice crunch to it and the whole package melded together into a tasty bite. This was very cheesy with a lot of that “real” New Orleans flavor. I can see why crawfish bread is a sensation at the Jazz Fest. The new owner told me that the crawfish bread was added to Fury’s menu when they read that there would be no crawfish bread at this year’s Jazz Fest. They wanted people to get their fix at the restaurant.
Everything else we ordered that day were tried and true Fury’s favorites. If there is a stuffed crab on a menu, I have to get it. The fried chicken was a given, of course, and we got Trout Amandine for Tom. And they are proud of their Italian food so we added a meatball and spaghetti.
The single stuffed crab was $22.95, including “vegetable of the day” and a side salad. Somehow we wound up with fries for all entrees, and they were miserable fries. I did manage to get a potato salad swapped for the peas. My eyes bugged out when I saw the little stuffed crab for that price. It was served in one of those flimsy aluminum foil fake crab shells and was definitely not a hardball of breading. It didn’t hold together that well, and it didn’t break apart to reveal lump crabmeat spilling out.
What it did, with a single bite, was transport me back to the stuffed crab of my youth, a unique taste I’m not sure I have experienced since then. Just like the crawfish bread, it tasted like…New Orleans. I wanted so much more of this, but at that price, one would have to do. The fries I ate with it were so beneath this delicate deliciousness I was annoyed by them. And then I noticed the potato salad that I got as an afterthought. It was the exact right accompaniment to this sublime stuffed crab. I closed my eyes and remembered this familiar meal so tied to a very particular place.
Over on the other side of the kitchen, my daughter was devouring the meatball and spaghetti. It was a rather large meatball with the right consistency. It did not disintegrate when touched (my personal preference) but it was just this side of that. There was very little sauce because it was all over the other containers from having tipped over too many times, so we didn’t get to assess it too well. What was there was very tasty, and we ate every scrap of the meatball and angel hair pasta.
Tom’s Trout Amandine was a little light on the almonds and completely devoid of brown butter sauce. The remainder of it was all over all the other containers as well. It was a nice piece of fish and Tom just about inhaled it.
The last thing we had to try was the famous Fury’s fried chicken. It didn’t travel well, but I can see why it’s a big seller. It’s fried chicken the way your mom would have done it. It’s even cut the way Mom would have - not the uniformed pieces we’re used to seeing from the mass-produced places. More terrible fries we didn’t bother to eat.
The accompanying salads were extremely ordinary. These too were old-fashioned, with pieces of iceberg lettuce and whispers of carrot. The dressings are homemade and these were good. I wish everything had been wrapped as well as the dressings!
I was glad I got out to see what the new owners did with the place. Anything would be an improvement, and this certainly is. All the walls are white, the tables have white tablecloths, obstructions to the flow have been removed, and the bar was redone.
I’m so glad of this, because I want to go back there and dine properly. Quintessentially New Orleans deliciousness like this deserves nothing less.
