A barbecue and crab-shack named for ‘the Big Easy’ – New Orleans, home of good food, good music and the easy-living spirit of the South
Big Easy Bar.B.Q & Crabshack at Canary Wharf holds an astonishing fifteen thousand two hundred and four reviews and a 4.4 – a strong score on one of the very largest samples in this entire survey – and it carries a wonderfully evocative name from the American South: “the Big Easy,” New Orleans, home of good food, good music, and the easy-living spirit of the Deep South.
The Big Easy
“The Big Easy” is the famous and beloved nickname of the city of New Orleans, Louisiana – and it captures perfectly the spirit of that unique and wonderful city. The name evokes New Orleans’s celebrated easy-going, pleasure-loving, good-time spirit – the “easy” pace and warmth of the Deep South, the city’s devotion to good food, good music, and letting the good times roll (“laissez les bons temps rouler,” as they say there). New Orleans is a city like no other in America – a place of jazz and blues, of magnificent Creole and Cajun cooking, of Mardi Gras carnival, of warm Southern hospitality and easy-living charm. “The Big Easy” is the name that captures all of this – the good times, the great food, the wonderful music, the warm and easy spirit of the most soulful city in America.
The food of the South
The “Bar.B.Q & Crabshack” of the name tells you exactly what Big Easy offers – the magnificent food of the American South, and especially its barbecue and seafood. American Southern barbecue is one of the world’s great food traditions – meat slow-cooked over wood and smoke for many hours until meltingly tender, in the great barbecue traditions of the South, served with all the classic sides and sauces. And the “crab shack” evokes the wonderful seafood of the Gulf Coast and the South – the crab, the shrimp, the lobster, the seafood boils and shacks of the coast, where fresh seafood is served in generous, messy, hands-on, unpretentious abundance. Together, barbecue and seafood represent the hearty, generous, soulful, delicious food of the American South – the smoky meats, the fresh shellfish, the generous portions, the finger-licking, unpretentious, joyful eating. It is food of genuine pleasure and abundance, exactly matched to the good-time spirit of “the Big Easy.”
The astonishing following
What stands out most, in the numbers, is Big Easy’s truly astonishing following – over fifteen thousand reviews, one of the very largest samples in this entire survey of hundreds of London venues. To attract such an enormous number of reviews is a mark of genuinely huge popularity and success – a hugely busy, hugely popular, destination venue, drawing vast crowds to its barbecue, seafood and good-time atmosphere. And to maintain a strong 4.4 score across such an enormous sample is genuinely impressive – it is easy to please a few hundred, far harder to please fifteen thousand, and a strong score on so vast a sample reflects a genuinely well-run, consistently enjoyable, hugely successful venue. Big Easy is clearly doing something very right, on a very large scale – the good food, the good times, the generous abundance, delivered consistently to enormous crowds.
There is genuine appeal in the whole thing – the wonderful New Orleans name and spirit, the magnificent Southern barbecue and seafood, the generous, joyful, good-time atmosphere, and the astonishing scale of its popularity. It brings the warmth, flavour and easy-living spirit of the Deep South to Canary Wharf, and does so, the enormous following shows, with genuine and consistent success. The Prat’s desk rolls up its sleeves, orders the barbecue and a crab boil, and lets the good times roll. Laissez les bons temps rouler.
The bar
A strong, astonishingly popular barbecue and seafood venue doing a good 4.4 across a colossal fifteen thousand reviews, evocatively named “Big Easy” – after New Orleans, home of good food, good music and the easy-living spirit of the South.
Verdict
Strong, and astonishingly popular on one of the survey’s largest samples – Big Easy, bringing the barbecue, seafood and good-time spirit of New Orleans and the Deep South to Canary Wharf.
Go to Big Easy for barbecue and a crab boil, and enjoy the wonderful name – “the Big Easy,” New Orleans, home of good food, great music, and the warm, easy-living, good-time spirit of the American South.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
