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Where Y’Eat: Facing Floods, a Dining Legend Builds Up to Carry On

Middendorf's Restaurant has had a roost along the waterfront in Manchac since 1934.
Ian McNulty
Middendorf's Restaurant has had a roost along the waterfront in Manchac since 1934.

Fried catfish cut as thin as a dime, a view of the water that ends with the sky and a regular crowd coming from the north shore and the south shore to meet in the middle - these are hallmarks of a trip to Middendorf's, the vintage Louisiana seafood house just off the highway on the marshy edge of Manchac.

No one wants it to change, least not the people who now run Middendorf’s.

That’s why they don’t use the word change, even as they’ve progressively made their mark on practically every inch of the sprawling restaurant in the last few years. Just ask them about this or that project here and they don’t call them changes, they call them additions.

The distinction is perhaps a stretch of semantic, but the pains taken to frame things this way are understandable. Middendorf’s dates to 1934. It’s one of those places people count on being there, down the road and waiting for their next visit, and preferably precisely as they remember it from last time. 

The latest project just completed at Middendorf’s might be seen as an addition, but it’s also a transformation, and it’s one that shows the balancing act required to keep an old institution going while life in coastal Louisiana changes around it.

The main dining hall, the oldest structure among Middendorf’s campus of buildings, was torn down, redesigned and then rebuilt about five feet higher than before. The issue, of course is flooding as erosion and climate change play out along Louisiana’s delicate coastal areas.

A move like this probably wouldn’t matter at most other restaurants, and as renovations go this one is a beauty.  Middendorf’s new dining hall is a series of connecting rooms, all spacious and richly detailed with a mosaic of different woods, some new, most old, much reclaimed from the original building. An ancient slab as thick as a surfboard is now a bar top. Another forms a long table that can seat an extended family all at once. A huge beer vat barrelhead salvaged from the old Dixie brewery in New Orleans adorns one wall, coat racks made from knobby cypress knees jut from others.

But when something old is made new again, you start getting into the realm of traditions, expectations and memory, and Middendorf’s has long sat astride the intersection of all three.

Specifically, the restaurants sits about 40 miles from New Orleans, 50 from Baton Rouge and at road trip distance for just about anyone. Yet Middendorf’s has a following as loyal and regular as a neighborhood corner joint. Most of them know what they'll order before they even get in the car -- the signature thin fried catfish, the whole flounder stuffed with crab dressing, the soft shell crabs the size of catchers mitts, the frog legs and the fried chicken.

The restaurant’s identity is fixed to a sense of perennial tradition. But these days on the Louisiana coast, keeping things the same and keeping them around are not necessarily the same. Middendorf’s has been a test bed for this, building back stronger and higher, if a bit differently too. For this Louisiana dining institution, it now means taking a few steps up to carry on.

Middendorf’s Restaurant

30160 Hwy 51, Akers, 985-386-6666

Lunch and dinner Wed.-Sun.

Ian covers food culture and dining in New Orleans through his weekly commentary series Where Y’Eat.

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