Vautrot’s brings Cajun cooking to Mulvane

Lunch at Vautrot’s Cajun Goods comes with a lesson in Louisiana folkways.

Cracklings? Those are chunks of fatback – actually cross-sections of pork meat, fat and skin – fried crisp in a cast-iron pot.

Boudin? That’s a pork-and-rice sausage from Louisiana.

And a dish of “fried backward” crawfish?

“When you touch a crawfish, what does it do?” said Martha Vautrot, who’s chief cook and the owner’s mother. “It goes backward.”

Martha, her husband, Louis, and daughter, Sherri Walker, are happy to make translations for customers at the restaurant they opened this spring. They say a lot of their customers are actually former Southerners, or people with relatives from that area, drawn to a style of cooking in short supply in these parts.

Walker opened the restaurant after first testing the market with a food truck that she parked at festivals and other events.

“We sold out every time,” Walker said.

The Mulvane location is the second sit-down Vautrot’s. Her parents opened the first, called Vautrot’s Cajun Cuisine, in Beaumont, Texas, 23 years ago, turning that one over to their son and youngest daughter a couple of years ago.

The two locations led to bit of confusion recently when a customer in Kansas called in an order to the Texas restaurant.

“I called down there and said it might take a little while for her to get … over here to pick it up,” Louis Vautrot said.

Walker had worked for the Texas Vautrot’s before her husband’s job transfer brought them here.

Martha and Louis grew up in southern Louisiana’s Cajun region. The menu is based around specialties from the region, including jambalaya and etouffee, fried oysters and catfish, alligator bites, frog legs, Natchitoches meat pies and bread pudding.

Just about every dish carries a family name or nickname, from “Uncle Frank’s Food with Whiskers” (fried catfish) to “Maw-Maw Marie’s Fried Chicken Toes” (don’t worry, they’re actually chicken tenders). The family tries to use as many products from that region as possible, including shrimp that Louis Vautrot insists must come from the Gulf of Mexico. He peels and butterflies each one himself.

Martha Vautrot is in charge of most of the “black pot” cooking, nursing along the fat-and-flour mixture known as a “roux” in cast-iron pots until it has reached that perfect stage.

“Those old black pots, you can’t beat those,” Louis Vautrot said.

There’s a brand of soda called “Swamp Pop” in the cooler, and a small line of seasoning blends that the family produces itself.

With 48 seats, the Vautrot’s here is about a third of the size of its Texas cousin. Martha Vautrot says they chose Mulvane for a location because it’s a “close-knit community” that reminds them of the South.

“People have been good to us, I can’t complain,” she said. “We wanted somewhere we can sit down with the people and talk.”

She just wishes she could find another cook to teach some of her Cajun secrets.

“If I could find a cook, I could take a vacation,” she said.

This story was originally published July 29, 2015 at 5:14 PM with the headline "Vautrot’s brings Cajun cooking to Mulvane."