Crawfish season is here, and Cocodrie’s Bayou Kitchen in North Richland Hills is doing something about it. Starting today, April 20, the restaurant is running a 4/20 crawfish special — four pounds for $20 — plus buckets of beer for $17. That’s a hard combination to pass up on a Sunday.
Cocodrie’s is the project of Jesse Gibson, a Louisiana native from Dulac, a small fishing community outside Houma. Gibson spent years running The Wild Cajun, a mobile seafood operation in the area, before opening a brick-and-mortar last fall at 5209 Rufe Snow Drive in the space that used to be Rock & Tacos. The name comes from Cocodrie, a fishing village at the southern edge of Louisiana — past the marshes, close to the gulf — where Gibson’s family kept a dock.
The menu is the real thing. Gumbo made from scratch daily, po’boys on Gambino’s French bread, crawfish étouffée, boudin from Best Stop, Natchitoches meat pies, and a dish called the Kitchen Sink — jambalaya with a blackened redfish fillet, étouffée on top, four fried shrimp, and a boudin ball, all for $25. Gator shows up in multiple forms, from po’boys to baskets, and a retail section stocks Louisiana pantry products you won’t find at a regular grocery store.
Gibson built the whole thing from the ground up — he started by selling his family’s Gulf shrimp out of a cooler, moved to farmers markets and crawfish boils, then ran a food truck before the restaurant gave him a permanent home for it all.
Cocodrie’s is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Mondays. Call (817) 393-3155 to confirm special availability.
