The aroma of garlic, onions, and lemon wafts outside a grand building with pagoda eaves in Southeast Houston. It’s a Friday evening in April at the Vietnamese Martyrs Church, and more than a dozen people toil over large, bubbling boil pots at the church’s annual crawfish festival. A messy, wet nap-reliant tradition since 2002, the event has grown from a respectable 5,000-person crowd to this year’s massive gathering, where nearly 15,000 attendees will consume more than 22,000 pounds of crawfish over a span of three days.
Vietnamese Martyrs Church
10610 Kingspoint Road,
Houston. vietnammartrys.org
Digging into plastic bags dusky with seasoning, the crowd happily cracks and claws at Viet-Cajun crawfish, a style that combines Cajun spices with Southeast Asian flavors. “After we cook, we dump it out on a big pan,” says festival organizer Tinh Trinh, describing the difference between Cajun preparations of crawfish and those perfected by Houston’s Vietnamese community. “Then we mix with more ingredients: more salt, more pepper, more garlic, more onion, and butter. The Vietnamese like a lot of butter.”
A culinary phenomenon that originated in the Bayou City, Viet-Cajun crawfish is one of the cross-cultural dishes that helped raise Houston’s profile as one of America’s great food cities. When considering the history of Vietnamese migration to the Gulf Coast, it’s a marriage of ingredients that almost seems inevitable. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, an estimated 2 million refugees fled Vietnam, many settling along the Gulf Coast to work in the seafood industry. Today, Houston trails only Los Angeles for the largest Vietnamese population in the entire country.
In the early 2000s, Cajun Corner and Crawfish & Beignets were some of the first brick-and-mortar eateries to offer Viet-Cajun crawfish. But it wasn’t until after two disasters—Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010—that an influx of Louisiana-based Vietnamese relocated to Houston and the crustacean craze really took off. But years before national recognition for Viet-Cajun crawfish—not to mention acclaim for chef Trong Nguyen of Asiatown’s Crawfish & Noodles, who received a James Beard Award nod in 2020—the Vietnamese Martyrs Church was setting up folding tables for its festive boils.
Conceived by a priest at the Catholic church, the boil was a way to both create community and raise money to repair its on-site school. Held two weeks after Easter, the festival is a three-day affair of national musical acts, dance and martial arts performances, and an abundance of eats. In addition to crawfish, volunteers cook chicken wings, spring rolls, bánh xèo, thit nuong (barbecue pork), chè (soupy desserts), and much more at its 30,000 square-foot-shrine.
For many Vietnamese families in the South, backyard boils have long been a seasonal tradition. Venturing to the local church for a fete centered on the freshwater crustaceans was a logical next step. Crawfish, Trinh notes, is not something you eat by yourself for an everyday meal. It’s messy and requires effort to eat. It’s best for a party with friends.
“Crawfish is a thing we come together for,” he says.
