What Lafayette eats
Lafayette started out as Vermilionville, on the banks of the Vermilion River, and took its current name in 1884. It sits where I-10 meets I-49, about 35 miles from the Gulf, and it is the center of Acadiana, a region of about half a million people.
The city's tourism office runs two food trails, each with more than 50 stops. The Cajun Boudin Trail covers boudin, cracklins, smoked meats, pork chop sandwiches and stuffed chickens. The Plate Lunch Trail covers the meal that keeps the region running: one meat, a starch under gravy, two vegetables and bread.
The plate lunch has a practical history. As Lafayette Travel tells it, rural meat markets likely sold the first ones, smothering the cuts they had not sold in a roux based gravy and serving them over rice for the next day's lunch. Smothering, cooking low and covered in its own gravy, is still the technique behind half the plates in town.
Lafayette's boudin goes back a long way too. Johnson's Boucanière, whose family recipe started in a Eunice grocery in the late 1930s, is described as one of the first commercial boudin sellers, and boucanière is Cajun French for smokehouse. In 2012 Southern Living readers voted Lafayette the Tastiest Town in the South.
The black pot
If one piece of equipment sums up the city's cooking it is cast iron. The Blackpot Festival and Cookoff at Vermilionville, the living history village on the Vermilion, is a whole competition built around it, with music and camping alongside.
One change worth knowing if you plan with an older guide: the Boudin Cook-Off and Bacon Festival was canceled for good in 2025 after 16 years. For a boudin weekend now, the Scott Boudin Festival runs every April just west of town.
