Vautrot’s Cajun Goods

It’s hard to question Vautrot’s authenticity. If the name wasn’t enough of a giveaway, you can do the legwork to trace the food truck’s beginnings to a restaurant of a similar name and a twenty year legacy in Beaumont, Texas. Looking at that restaurant’s menu, however, reveals a little trouble trying to restrict themselves to just Cajun foods, offering all sorts of Southern-​y things like chicken fried steak, beef tips, and steak fingers I’m glad the mobile version of the restaurant restricts themselves to the mostly Cajun, though they do so in a way that is in itself a little frustrating.
Here’s the template: you have the gumbo, étouffée, and maybe a creole — all the soupy stuff, and all of which are reason enough for visiting the truck. But then you have everything else, and it all ends up in the fryer. A disproportionate amount of items are fried, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because the truck is exceedingly good as frying stuff, but it can get a little heavy-​handed to build an entire menu around it.
There’s a few unique offerings, beginning with the boudin balls. Really more similar to an arancini than they would have you believe, but fried well enough to be tasty in its own right. Not sampled were the alligator bites, because there’s a reason most people don’t eat that lean meat. I did try the catfish, though, and it had a killer crunch due to the excellent frying (again), though the small curled fillets were a little sad-​looking. The hush puppies (also fried) didn’t fare so well — they were long and finger-​shaped and had been sitting around for a while. The coleslaw got the job done.
Vautrot’s succeeds on a few levels — it’s a Cajun restaurant in a town that doesn’t have many of them; it’s a food truck that’s providing something unique; it can fry foods exceptionally well. It’s a food truck that’s worth seeking out.