The Southwest Louisiana Boudin Trail doesn't begin at a restaurant. It begins at a counter — the kind where the person taking your order is the same person who made what's in the case. B&O Kitchen & Grocery has operated that way on Burton Street in Sulphur since 1983, three generations of the same family running a place that is exactly what it says: kitchen and grocery both, boudin and cracklins alongside whatever else you came in for. Twelve miles east, Hebert's Specialty Meats on Country Club Road built its name on boudin balls — breaded, fried, eaten in the parking lot. Steamboat Bill's started in 1982 as a roadside seafood operation on Broad Street; Katherine Vidrine, who came here from Chicago, moved it to the Calcasieu lakefront, where the menu still centers on crawfish boils, gumbo, and fried platters. The Lake Charles Convention & Visitors Bureau formalized this circuit as the Southwest Louisiana Boudin Trail. The food was already there.
