One culinary adventure I forgot to mention in my last post: Erfurt has a restaurant named Louisiana. Yes, like the state in which I was born and raised.
How funny, I thought, when I learned of this. I was also quite skeptical. It is very rare to find good, spicy, cajun cooking anywhere else than the place it was invented. My suspicions were accurate.
I went there on Wednesday night with two other PPPers. Turns out Louisiana is the weekly meeting spot of the German-American society, and a nice Erfurt student extended an invitation to us during orientation one day. The restaurant is a bit tackily decorated in everything American South. There is a mural on one of the back walls depicting riverboats on the Mississippi. The Louisiana state flag hangs in one corner of the restaurant. Etc. etc. etc.
The menu offered many of my favorites: jambalaya, etouffee, gumbo. But the offerings were suspiciously lacking of seafood, a staple in many dishes. A professor from the states sitting with us explained the menu had to be "Germanized" to suit the German palate. Case in point: the etouffee offered no shrimp, no spice, and almost no flavor. It was basically meat and some sparing vegetables served on top of rice. Hilarity. I'd say a step down from the "American-style" burgers we had at a restaurant here called "Texas."
But while the food was lacking as anticipated, I enjoyed my sojourn back to Louisiana. Now just gotta wait ten months to have the real stuff again :)
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