This New Orleans Sandwich Shop Is Turning the Po'boy Inside Out

There's no shortage of filling fare in New Orleans, especially when it comes to po'boys. As with pizza in New York, there are plenty of canonical examples—and plenty of inventive chefs who have little interest in simply aping the past.

Enter Killer Poboys. Chef Cam Boudreaux and his wife April Bellow opened the original location of this new-school sandwich shop in the spring of 2012, tucked into the back of an Irish pub called Erin Rose. There, they began serving inspired takes on classic po'boys, taking ingredients like rum-and-ginger-glazed pork belly and stuffing them into fresh, Vietnamese-style baguettes.

Some po'boy purists might balk at the idea of rejiggering the time-honored formula perfected at New Orleans institutions like Parkway Bakery and Domilise's, but Boudreaux and his team are hardly Guy Fierifying this New Orleans classic. Instead, he infuses his menu with a chef's understanding of balance and an insistence on quality ingredients, such as the pork he sources from Beeler's, a small ranch in Iowa. "They actually have the little pig family live in a little pig condo," he says.

That attention to detail led to incredible demand at Erin Rose. Boudreaux and Bellow followed up that success by opening a second, standalone location on Dauphine Street last fall, where its Jolly Roger-ish emblem—complete with skull and cross-baguettes—fits right in just a few doors down from the seriously gruesome Museum of Death. (Speaking from personal experience, however, a visit to the latter does not exactly encourage a visit to the former.)

I met up with Cam at his "mad po'boy laboratory" to talk about New Orleans sandwich culture and what makes his po'boys great.

MUNCHIES: Hi, Cam. Please enlighten me as an idiot Yankee: What makes a po'boy a po'boy? Cam Boudreaux: In modern-day New Orleans, a po'boy is pretty much our iconic big sandwich. New Orleanians have been eating big sandwiches longer than they were called po'boys. There were some transit workers in the 1930s who were on strike, and two brothers who were former streetcar operators owned a store with a deli. They started giving away free food to their striking brothers out of solidarity. In the weird vernacular of New Orleans, they called it the "poor boy," but it was pronounced "po'boy" and the name stuck. I think the first sandwich ever sold as a po'boy was basically leftovers: fried potatoes, beef scraps, and gravy.

Your quotidian po'boy place will have a big sandwich board offering fried seafood, hamburgers, hot sausage, roast beef; and then there's the cold side or the build-your-own. "Dressed" is often lettuce, tomato, and mayo, or sometimes just lettuce and tomato. A few places do cabbage, no lettuce.

So what's the Killer Poboys take on the po'boy? The mission of the business is to serve internationally inspired, chef-crafted, New Orleans-style sandwiches. I've seen the new-school po'boy thing on restaurant lunch menus, where chefs are like, "We need a sandwich on the menu." Kind of like the idea behind the burger at DB Bistro Moderne—"We're going to take this and chef it up a notch."

We've taken the idea of the big, messy sandwich and made it from scratch. It's this internationally inspired idea, where we take themes from different cuisines that we're into, and some stuff I grew up eating. I'm not a well-traveled dude, but I try to eat all kinds of shit. That's what the most interesting kinds of food is: a thing you eat with your hands that lets you learn about another culture through the mouth.

Does that mean you're responsive to food trends? Do you have vegan po'boys? We have always had a vegan offer on the menu. One of them is a roasted sweet potato with our braised greens. We do Southern-style greens with no meat, no bacon, no sausage, a lot of onions, a little bit of nice vinegar, some spices. The sauce is a black-eyed pea and pecan pureé. So it's kind of hummus-y.

We don't have the traditional dress, and we don't have fried seafood. I don't even have a fryer back there. Mostly because when I started this with my business partner—now my wife—we couldn't conceive of doing a small, food-based business where we were going to be working chef hours and unsealing a gallon jug of mayo and shredding a bunch of iceberg lettuce. It didn't appeal to us, and other people do it so well.

What about that classic po'boy bread? We've gone another route with the bread. We actually use a Vietnamese bakery that does New Orleans-style French bread, Dong Phuong. They're out in New Orleans East.

I tried using the big, long loaves when we started, but you have to have the right way to store them because they're 28 inches. Then we started working with Dong Phuong bakery and they come deliver for nothing—they're great. Their bread has much more staying power and can fit most ingredients, as opposed to some stuff that's not going to work in the New Orleans-style French bread.

A big part of being able to conceptualize this whole new-school po'boy idea was growing up eating Vietnamese food on the West Bank at various restaurants. Before any white dude ever uttered the words "banh mi," you'd look on the menu, it would have Vietnamese script, which I can't read, and then it'd say "Vietnamese po'boys" in English. That was their translation. That was a powerful moment. The idea of eating a Vietnamese sandwich in New Orleans and calling those "po'boys" goes beyond what's actually in the sandwich.

How did the idea for Killer Poboys come about? I was working at the Green Goddess in the French Quarter. It's a wine-focused, internationally inspired, small-plate bistro. I was working for this weird wine-poet dude. I had been in New York for a couple years after Katrina and then came back down here. All of my experience is in handmade food, and most of it is making food on plates to serve to people in a traditional full-service restaurant—some of it is fine-dining, some of it is a little more casual. I wanted to do my own thing, and doing a restaurant at the time didn't appeal to me. I was like, "Let me get into quick service, where we can just really control the food. We don't have to worry about all the rest of the trappings."

When we started four years ago, my wife had done a little taco adventure and some other stuff, and it was built on this relationship with the landlords, this wonderful couple that owned the bar. They had had chefs in their kitchen before, but there hadn't been a chef in the place in a while. The owner actually bought this artsy little R2D2 fryer—you put tater tots in his mouth and he would shit them out the back.

I'd been thinking about the new-school po'boy thing for a while. The bigger version of it was a place that did true-to-form and fantastic traditional po'boys, with other menu categories that had newer ingredients, different preparations. But in a 100-square-foot restaurant, we can't do a big a menu.

I drew the skull and crossbones logo—I felt like it played to this cool French Quarter aesthetic of privateers and pirates. I think this has traditionally been a hiding place for the freaks and the weird people. I grew up down here, and I would definitely count myself in that ilk. So I saw the do-your-own pirate ethic really fitting in with whatever we were going to do with sandwiches

Are po'boy purists pissed at you for messing with the old-school style? I expected a lot more blowback. I really haven't gotten it yet. I'm from New Orleans. I'm ready for anyone. "You call this a po'boy?" C'mon, I'll bleed on you.

What's your clientele like? I get everybody down here. I get long-term regulars, new people who become long-term regulars, tourists we'll never see again in our lives. You never know who you are going to be sitting next to in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Some Jimmy Buffett figure sitting with some dude with body modifications and devil horns next to a stripper that just got off work.

Tell me about these sandwiches—the seared shrimp one first. Without the simple joy of fried food, we go out of our way to put a little mystique and mystery in there. We sell more shrimp than anything else here. We peel, we devein, and we dress every single one of these shrimp. That's the litmus test for working for us—it's a very time-consuming process. We have a cast iron skillet back there. We sear all the shrimp, rolled in a little spice: coriander, salt, lime, black pepper.

The garlic mayonnaise is made with sriracha, fresh lime juice, and a secret ingredient: Louisiana shrimp that I have dried, turned into a powder, and mix in with the sauce. It's the hidden umami. The rest is a vegetable garnish and a big fistful of herbs.

And what about this little lamb sausage number? That's our local lamb. It has about 15 different spices and homemade tzatziki sauce with all-natural yogurt. The carrots are marinated in sumac, orange blossom water, vinegar, and honey. It started out with more of a merguez vibe, but I toned down the spice a little bit.

The lamb is one of the best we have ever done. It's just been harder and harder to keep on the menu these days. I know I'm on the higher end as far as pricing goes for a single sandwich in the area, but I've never broken the $14-after-tax barrier. It can be hard to think about the business shit versus what the chef wants to do. That's every chef's dilemma. There's what I want to do, what I know works, what I think might work, and then there's business—keeping the lights on, the water bills paid, keeping the staff happy and paid.

Any final po'boy thoughts? Sandwiches make people happy, man. It's not like you're working on a multi-course tasting menu or a bunch of smaller intricate plates. I don't even own a plate.

Everybody has an idea of what a good burger is, but with sandwiches, anything can go in one. A sandwich is kind of like the story of America.

Thanks for speaking with me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.