MOBILE — Tucked onto Royal Street near Government, in the heart of the old downtown business district, a small restaurant called The Royal Scam was quietly building a reputation in the spring of 2008 as a place where the kitchen took Gulf Coast cooking seriously.
Despite the name, there was nothing fraudulent about it. The room was modest, the lunch menu deliberately short, and the evening card considerably broader. What a first-time visitor noticed immediately was the welcome: guests were greeted and served promptly, and the staff gave every appearance of believing that customers mattered.
A salad worth writing about
The decision about lunch was settled the moment a server mentioned the day’s special: shrimp etouffee. What arrived first, though, was a starter that outshone almost anything else being served at midday in Mobile at the time. This was not the perfunctory wedge of iceberg lettuce that so often passed for a lunch salad. It was a generous plate of good greens, garnished with onion, sliced almonds and what appeared to be dried tomatoes, dressed with just the right measure of a light citrus vinaigrette.
It was, by one careful account of the meal, the best lunch salad to be had in the city.
The etouffee: good, and good for Mobile
The etouffee followed almost immediately, steaming in its bowl. It looked right and it smelled right, but the verdict on any dish rests on the tasting, and here the kitchen delivered. The gravy was thick, and it carried an abundance of good-sized shrimp rather than the stingy scattering that often turns up in a lunch portion.
It was not the finest etouffee anyone had ever eaten — the standard on the northern Gulf Coast has always been set by kitchens across the Mississippi line and beyond — but it was, without much argument, the best in Mobile.
The one reservation concerned the roux. It ran too dark, and it carried a faint suggestion of tomato. Etouffee can properly be built on either a mahogany roux or a blonde one, but for this diner the blonde was the only correct answer, both for its color and for the flavor it lends the dish.
A short course in roux
The distinction is worth spelling out, because it is the sort of thing Gulf Coast cooks argue about with real feeling.
- A dark roux is made from flour and oil, cooked down until it takes on a deep mahogany color. It is the foundation of gumbo.
- A blonde roux is the etouffee roux. It is made from flour and butter, worked together with onion, bell pepper and celery — the holy trinity of Louisiana cooking — along with garlic and salt, with cayenne pepper added to taste.
- Crawfish versus shrimp: a blonde crawfish etouffee runs slightly redder than a shrimp version, a difference owed to the color of the crawfish fat, which is one of the essential ingredients in the crawfish dish.
Two further rules were offered for anyone attempting either dish at home. If a gumbo or an etouffee arrives with a faintly burned taste, the culprit is almost always heat: the flame was turned too high while the roux was being made. A roux wants low, even heat and patience, and it should never be hurried.
And under no circumstances, the argument went, should tomato or tomato paste find its way into an etouffee roux. That is simply not done. Add tomatoes and what you have produced is a stew, whatever the menu calls it.
The verdict
Was the Royal Scam a good restaurant? Yes. Would it earn return visits? Also yes — there were other dishes on that expanded dinner menu still to be tried.
The single complaint had nothing to do with the food. The chairs were high and uncomfortable, with no standard-height option available to a diner who wanted one. In a room that otherwise got the fundamentals right, it was an odd omission, and an easy one to fix.
For readers coming to this account years later, the piece is a snapshot of downtown Mobile’s dining scene in 2008, a period when Royal and Dauphin streets were slowly filling in with independent kitchens and the argument over what constituted a proper etouffee was very much a live one. The reviewer’s closing hope was a simple one: a blonde roux waiting on the next visit.