The ninth season of Emmy Award-winning TrueSouth Presented by YellaWood continues with an episode focused on the Cajun Country town of Rayne, Louisiana. Once famous for shipping frog legs to restaurants in New Orleans and beyond, Rayne is now the center of crawfish farming (and eating). Episode 4 is set to debut on Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 8 p.m. ET on SEC Network.
All episodes of TrueSouth are available on demand on the ESPN App via an applicable subscription immediately after airing. Visit the TrueSouth website to follow the crew throughout the year.
Episode Summary
Two restaurants anchor our story. Hawk’s Crawfish Restaurant, a country roadhouse on a gravel and dirt road north of Rayne in Acadia Parish, beloved by regulars in search of the biggest and cleanest crawfish. Founded in 1982 by Hawk Arcenaux, made famous by his son Anthony, the restaurant was recently purchased by another father-son duo: Bryant Gielen and his son JB. Hawk’s built its reputation by paying a premium to farmers for larger crawfish. And by purging those crawfish, cleaning mud and gunk from their exteriors and flushing their digestive tracts. Today, Hawk’s opens when crawfish get big enough to meet their standard, usually in March, and closes about three months later in June.
Jett’s Crawfish Drive-Thru, just off I-1o at exit 87, is also a seasonal operation. Owners Hannah Petitjean and her husband Beau run the business, named for their son. To raise their four children, the Petitjeans work multiple jobs. Both are registered nurses and Beau also serves Acadia parish as president of the police jury, the Louisiana equivalent of the county commission. Drive-thrus, like the one they run in an old storage building, behind a filling station that doubles as a boudin shop, are a recent development, now rapidly spreading across Cajun Country. In Rayne alone, five drive-thrus operate.
Many of our TrueSouth episodes focus on how economic change shapes the culture of towns and cities across the South. Here in Rayne, the big crop has long been rice. Over the last generation, crawfish has challenged rice as the primary crop. To understand why and how, the team talks to experts including Todd Fontenot, crawfish extension agent with the LSU Ag Center; Jim Gossen, a retired seafood and crawfish wholesaler, and Kurt Venable, a principle in Venable Fabricators, a leading maker of amphibious crawfish boats. One of the themes to emerge from those conversations is that crawfish, once a weekend indulgence, has become a weeknight dinner, purchased at drive-thrus like Jett’s. That transformation has driven the growth of the business. So has the emergence of processors that ship live crawfish as well as boiled and peeled crawfish tails across the South and beyond.
Live music is one of great pleasures of life in Cajun Country. Chère Élise from Lafayette performs two songs for us at a bar on the outskirts of Rayne. Led by drummer and singer Elise Riley, backed by an all-star lineup that includes her father, Grammy-nominated accordion player Steve Riley, the band is quickly becoming a fixture on the Cajun Country circuit.
Advance press screeners of TrueSouth: Season Nine, Episode Four are available upon request: katie.callahan@espn.com.