If you drive through the Delta, every 20 miles or so you're bound to run into a place that serves catfish.
At first glance, these fish houses bear a remarkable resemblance. They are generally housed in a small and rectangular building lined with wood paneling and packed with rows and rows of square tables. The fare on the buffet is fairly standard, mostly fried foods - hushpuppies, French fries, okra - along with a section of turnip greens or cole slaw or salad, all of it homemade.
Even the catfish, dredged in a cornmeal batter and deep fried in peanut oil, doesn't seem all that different. Of course, Larry Kelly, the owner and chief fryer at Larry's Fish House in Itta Bena, might argue with that assessment.
When he opened Larry's seven years ago with about six years of catering experience under his belt, he knew how he liked his catfish cooked.
"Too many people leave it soft," Kelly explains. "A lot of places you go, if there's a long line, the cook will start putting fish out too early so people won't get mad. I'd rather a guy be mad and like the food. I'd rather him be mad and have to wait than to have bad catfish."
With his five fryers, Kelly can dish out about 100 filets every eight minutes, enough to feed about 20 people.
There's a good chance that much of that fish was harvested by Kelly himself. He cooks about 450 pounds of fish each Thursday through Saturday night, and during the week he and his crew seine about 40,000 pounds - and that's just from one of the farms they harvest.
America's Catch, where he sells the raw product and buys it back cleaned and fileted, processes about 230,000 pounds a day. Kelly estimates he and his crew handle about 8 million pounds of catfish a year. They set aside a few fingerlings, especially the albino ones, for the fish tanks customers see when they walk into Larry's.
To satisfy everyone who comes through the line there, Kelly goes easy on the salt. "Some don't like salt, so you salt it lightly, and then they can add it later," he says.
Not everyone agrees with that as a rule of thumb. Kelly's own father, to his dying day, preferred a saltier batter.
"When my dad was in the nursing home, we salted some fish lightly, and he took a bite and said, 'You got any more salt?'" said Kelly. "That was one of the last things I heard him say."
The meal at Rosemary's Catfish contains a bit more salt than Larry's version, but it fries to the same golden brown and draws a full house every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. The restaurant is open also on weekdays for lunch.
Rosemary Hooks, who owns the North Carrollton restaurant, with her husband, Charles, says the secret to her catfish is the assortment of spices she adds to the meal.
Her catfish expertise dates back to childhood. With her mother crippled for life by multiple sclerosis, Hooks often cooked for her family of 11. And supper was often the daily catch her father would come home with.
"My daddy was a tremendous fisherman. He cooked a lot of fish," Hooks said. "We were country folks. We raised everything we ate. Daddy killed hogs, and we raised a big garden."
The Hooks took over the fish house about 13 years ago, when it was called Country Catfish, and renamed it Rosemary's. The restuarant has been through three incarnations.
During the weekend, Rosemary's might sell about as much steak and seafood as catfish, and quail is served the first Tuesday of every month in winter. Pies, though, are Hooks' specialty. Her caramel pies almost went nationwide when Sysco Foods Inc. caught on to them a few years ago.
The company even tested their durability in the freezer at Mississippi State University, but Hooks couldn't turn them out fast enough. She could bake only about, well, 200 a week.
"If I were 30 years old, I would get in there knee deep," she said.
The relative equidistance between fish houses in and around the Delta doesn't necessarily determine where people go to eat. Ralph Smith is a barber from Cleveland, but when he wants catfish, he heads to Larry's Fish House in Itta Bena, bypassing fish houses closer to home.
"It's the best eating anywhere in the Delta," said Smith, who has been coming to Larry's almost every Friday night for the past two years.
Many catfish lovers are loyal to a particular fish house. Some hop from house to house each time they go out.
State Sen. Bunky Huggins was at Guy's Catfish and Steak Cafe in Vaiden on a recent Friday night. He also frequents Larry's, Rosemary's Catfish in North Carrollton and, farther afield - in Carmac. The length of the drive isn't a determining factor of where he eats on any given night, Huggins says.
"I think the drive adds a lot to it. You're hungry when you get there," he said. Besides, he added, variety is important when you crave catfish. "I could eat fish seven days a week if you let me."
Guy's is one of the oldest fish houses in the Greenwood area. It's where people from Greenwood went to eat catfish before the other places opened.
"It was the only one around, and it seemed to be only place everyone went," says Chuck Fisher, who bought Guy's in September 2002.
Fisher, 48, has eaten at Guy's since he was a teenager, when then-owner Guy Trotter was behind the fryer. The extra competition these days doesn't seem to be hurting Guy's business.
On the Friday night Huggins ate there, finding a place to park was difficult. The lot had been full since a funeral procession stopped there around 3:30 that afternoon, and Fisher was exhausted from cooking so long.
"We ran pretty hard all the way up to about 8:30 p.m., and it was probably 9:15 before most of our people got the chance to sit down and say, 'I'm going to breathe a minute,'" Fisher said.
And how does he sleep after a night like that?
"Very sound," he said.
Other fish houses in the area include Johnson Street Fish House in Greenwood and Annie's Fish House in Ruleville.
