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The Chip Of The Gods

I’m going to tell you something that you already know if you’re from Louisiana, and that you should know if you aren’t. The best potato chip in the world is made by Zapp’s, a small south Louisiana chippery. I would say it’s the same one that repatriated New Orleans Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson loves: […]

I’m going to tell you something that you already know if you’re from Louisiana, and that you should know if you aren’t. The best potato chip in the world is made by Zapp’s, a small south Louisiana chippery. I would say it’s the same one that repatriated New Orleans Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson loves: the Spicy Cajun Crawtator, which is what you would get if you doused a chip with crawfish boil. But it could be almost any flavor Zapp’s produces. They really are that dang good. Try a Zapp’s — any Zapp’s — and you will not condescend to eat Lay’s or Ruffles again. Here is Anderson, on what it means to miss Crawtators when you live in Boston:

 There is nothing prudent about them. They taste like salt engineered to trick your mouth into thinking you’re eating something other than a snack chip – and, somehow, imgres-1taste more emphatically like crawfish boils than a lot of crawfish boils do. I was reminded as much as I tore through the bag I ordered with my Central Grocery muffuletta early this month. It was my first lunch back in New Orleans. My pleasure gasps caused a thought bubble to form over my wife’s head. It said, “Dude, get a room.”

This isn’t to say I missed Spicy Cajun Crawtator Potato Chips above all else. It’s to say that the chips unleashed a longing I must have suppressed as a matter of survival while immersed in a culture where work trumps pleasure. It was a longing for flavor: unabashed, full-frontal, New Orleans flavor – flavor that pertains to more than just food but is expressed most vividly on the plate.

If you don’t watch yourself, you’ll find yourself standing at the kitchen counter shoving Crawtator crumbs into your maw with the palm of your hand like Virgil feeding Cerberus in Dante’s hell, and hoping nobody in your family sees you reduced to that. At least, um, that’s what I hear. Order your Zapp’s here. Only flavor I’m not wild about is Voodoo, which is a little on the sweet side.

[H/T: Reader JB, a Louisiana expat]

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