The first time we heard about the Poorboy Passport we both thought it a great idea. And we wanted to do it. The Poorboy Passport is offered by Creole Cuisines Restaurant Concepts, a local restaurant group with about 30 restaurants, most of which are in the French Quarter.
Creole Cuisine partnered with Leidenheimer Bakery and Tabasco to give money to Second Harvest, which has been especially hard hit by the pandemic.What’s unique about this way to help Second Harvest is that it gives back to you too.
The idea is simple: Visit five of the Creole Cuisine restaurants.
For $6 you purchase a 6 inch poor boy and get a stamp in the passport, which is a card you can get at any of the five restaurants.
Broussard’s is serving a shrimp remoulade poor boy. Cafe Maspero has a fried fish sandwich, Royal House offers a Peacemaker with fried oysters and shrimp. A roast beef poor boy is offered at Ernst Cafe, and a meatball poor boy at Tommy’s
When the passport is filled, you take a pic of the stamps and send it to the website on the passport, and they will send you a $100 gift card to use at any of their restaurants.. This is so extraordinarily sensible I had to see how it’s working.
On Saturday Tom and I set out to purchase them all. We started at Broussard’s where I wish we could have stayed and enjoyed the weather and evening. The weather was warm but still breezy outside on the gorgeous patio. The manager told me they had sold over 8,000 of these. After my passport was stamped I dashed off.
Our next stop was Royal House, where it took a minute to get someone to see me. They were busy. The bartender picked up the waiting bag, stamped my passport and I was back in the car. On to Cafe Maspero, where my fried fish poorboy was also waiting for me. It had two crispy long pieces of fried fish and was dressed nicely. We rushed over to Ernst Cafe, where my roast beef poorboy had been waiting a while. Our last stop was Tommy’s for the meatball poorboy.
The light was still good so I opened all the bags and placed them on one of the outside tables there. The shrimp remoulade had a dressed poorboy with large shrimp in a good remoulade sauce. There weren’t a lot of shrimp, but there were enough. The Peacemaker of shrimp and oysters was quite plentiful. At Ernst Cafe, the sandwich had been waiting too long for me. It was a roast beef debris poorboy, and it had that authentic roast beef gravy taste. But the star of the evening was the meatball poorboy from Tommy’s. This was a toasty, crunchy hoagie roll with sesame seeds and kosher salt dusting it. Inside the meatballs were large and soft but not crumbly. They were perfect meatball texture. The light coating of parmesan cut down on the hint of sweetness to that smooth thick red sauce cooked all day. This was a really delicious sandwich, and by far the best to us. Each of the sandwiches came with a tiny Tabasco bottle. They matched whatever monies were made.
It’s such a good promotion with such an enticement for you, it’s hard to remember this is really for someone else. So today we had Jay Vice of Second Harvest to talk to us with an update on this promotion. He said it’s going fantastically well, as I would expect.
You have a week to get into the fun. It ends the last day of June.
