When customers placed an order at Barrow’s, all they needed to say was “small, medium or large.” With no menu, the restaurant sold one thing: catfish with a side of potato salad.
Photographer Alysha Jordan’s description of the fish makes the mouth water.
“A light, impossibly grease-free cornmeal batter covers each slender filet,” she wrote on her Flickr page. “And the catfish are wild, not farm-raised, which accounts for its full flavor and firm but moist flesh.”
Food historian Lolis Eric Elie said one large catfish plate was enough for his mother, sister and him to have dinner. “The catfish was just really good,” he said.
William “Cap” Barrow and his wife Mary opened Barrow’s Shady Inn in 1943 at 2714 Mistletoe St. in Hollygrove. As posted on New Orleans Menu, food critic Tom Fitzmorris said Barrow knew two things: “First, that he could make his place a center of social life in his neighborhood by making it attractive and classy. Second, he knew how to fry catfish.”
According to The New Orleans Tribune, the Shady Inn was basically a bar that “sold hot fried catfish with bread and potato salad out of the back door for 50 cents.” In a 2020 WWNO report, Ian McNulty said “Barrow’s Shady Inn was known for old school simplicity. There was a jukebox with Al Greene’s ‘Love and Happiness’ on heavy rotation.”
The secret to Barrow’s famous fried catfish, according to Fitzmorris, was a reddish marinade. Billy Barrow Jr. declined to reveal its ingredients during a 1980s interview. The family recipe is still a well-kept secret.
Barrow Jr. ran the restaurant until 1999 when at 59 he was struck by a car and killed. His daughter Deirdre and her husband, Kenneth Johnson Jr. took over. The original Barrow’s closed after taking heavy damage during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The couple currently run a Wesbank location.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.