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Buckets of NOLA-Style Seafood Right Here In RVA

Haley Zhao | December 18, 2019

Topics: Angie Le, crawfish, Live Crawfish & Seafood RVA, Nathan Ngo, New Orleans, New Orleans Mix, sauces, seafood, seafood buckets

Live Crawfish & Seafood brings a delicious taste of New Orleans boiled seafood to Richmond’s West End — and you can order it by the bucketful.

Walking into Live Crawfish & Seafood RVA at Tuckernuck Square on West Broad Street, customers will find themselves surrounded by beach themed décor and pop music. Nathan Ngo and his girlfriend Angie Le opened this New Orleans boiled seafood restaurant after they moved to Richmond in 2018.

Ngo was from Boston, Massachusetts and Le was from Atlanta, Georgia. They met each other in 2016 through a friend, and Ngo used to drive to Atlanta each week to visit Le. Because Le loves seafood, the couple got to visit numerous seafood restaurants during their time together in Atlanta. Ngo said he was inspired by the seafood restaurants they visited, and he and Le decided to open one themselves.

“We struggled a lot in the beginning when we first moved here,” Ngo said. “We dealt with a lot of delays. Before this, I worked in retail and Angie did nails, so we also had to go through training and get licensed.” But with family support, they were eventually able to open Live Crawfish & Seafood in late August 2018.

Photo by Haley Zhao

Ngo said the most popular dish at Live Crawfish & Seafood is the seafood bucket. Customers can enjoy a variety of seafood, from the crawfish and shrimp to the snow crabs and lobsters. Customers can also build their own bucket, by first choosing the seafood, then the sauce, and lastly the sides.

“I’m really confident in the type of food we do,” Ngo said. “We source ourselves with the best-quality seafood.”

Ngo and Le gets their seafood from Maryland, Alaska, Louisiana, California, and sometimes Canada. Crawfish is a popular item on the menu. During live crawfish season from March to late July, Ngo and Le buy live crawfish from Louisiana. The restaurant still offers crawfish when crawfish are not in season; Ngo said he imports frozen crawfish from Spain and Egypt from late September to February.

Ngo and Le believe their signature sauce is what made them stand out from other similar seafood restaurants.

“New Orleans Mix is our house sauce,” Ngo said. “Our sauces are more liquid-based, while other places rely too much on dry seasoning.”

Photo by Haley Zhao

Le, who came up with the recipe for the sauces, said she tested multiple formulas when making the New Orleans Mix. Although she wanted to keep the recipe a secret, Le shared that she marinates all of the seafood several times in the liquid sauce before boiling.

“We want to reach the perfect balance between the sauce itself, butter and garlic,” Le said. “So it was not too oily or bitter, which would make our customers uncomfortable.”

“Our business is going well,” Ngo said. “Some people drive from North Carolina and Virginia Beach to eat here, and they believe it was worth the drive.” Ngo said he and Le constantly improve their services by looking at the reviews and feedback on Google, Yelp, and Facebook.

Although Live Crawfish & Seafood shares the same name with two other restaurants in Maryland and northern Virginia. Ngo made clear that despite the connection, these restaurants are independent in pricing and menu.

Ngo is hopeful about the future of the restaurant. He studied for three years as a business and psychology major at VCU. And Le was an engineering student at the University of Georgia. He looks forward to finishing his degree as the restaurant business become more stable.

Photo by Haley Zhao

Kimberly Ma, who lives in Richmond and is a frequent visitor to Live Crawfish & Seafood, said New Orleans Mix is her favorite sauce. She used to visit the restaurant four days a week when she lived close by. Ma also brought her boyfriend to the restaurant.

“After the first time we came here,” Ma said, “he told me that we should come here each weekend, and we did!”

Top Photo via Live Crawfish & Seafood RVA/Facebook

Landrieu Urges Reflection On Monuments In Meeting With Stoney

Madelyne Ashworth | March 22, 2019

Topics: Confederate monuments, Jefferson Davis Monument, Mayor Levar Stoney, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, racial reconciliation, robert e lee, Virginia Museum Of History & Culture

In his meeting with Mayor Levar Stoney this week, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu challenged Richmonders to consider the continued impact of Confederate monuments on our city’s image and reputation.

It was a meeting of the Mayoral minds on Tuesday, as Richmond’s Mayor Levar Stoney and New Orleans’ former mayor Mitch Landrieu engaged in thoughtful discussion at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

About 100 people listened as Mayor Stoney recounted Richmond’s struggle with Confederate iconography and race relations in Richmond, while Landrieu recalled his experience presiding over the removal of his city’s Confederate monuments.

“We created things with regard to race, and we can’t fix things without regard to race,” Landrieu said. “Our public spaces speak to who you are. It’s intended to say something, especially monuments and statues.”

At the crux of this discussion, Landrieu asked of Richmond: What do we want to be known for?

Overhead view of New Orleans’ Battle Of Liberty Place Monument in 2006. The monument was erected in 1891 to commemorate an 1874 riot against New Orleans’ Reconstruction-era government by the White League, a white supremacist group. It was taken down by Landrieu’s administration in 2017. Photo by Infrogmation, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia

In 2015, Landrieu called for the removal from prominent public display of four monuments in New Orleans, three of Confederate generals and one memorializing a violent coup of the state government by the Crescent City White League. All the monuments in question were removed by May 2017, although not without two years of legal battles, public criticism, and even threats against Landrieu’s life. His opponents criticized him for a lack of transparency during the process.

In a discussion moderated by Julian Hayter, an associate professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond and member of Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission, Stoney and Landrieu discussed racism in the South, and how to reconcile its history with its people.

“We can’t ignore the fact that we’ve had an ugly history,” Stoney said.

Last year, Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission recommended removing the Jefferson Davis monument, while adding context to the other four Confederate statues.

Jefferson Davis monument on Monument Avenue. Public Domain, via Wikimedia

Landrieu’s charismatic, animated oration offered blunt, third-party observations about Richmond’s race relations and Confederate iconography. Ultimately, he posited Richmond must find a solution that is right for Richmond, regardless of any other city’s actions.

“There is a difference between remembrance and reverence,” Landrieu said. “Remembrance is what you always want to do, so you don’t let it happen again. Reverence is honoring something, so you might be able to do it again.”

Stoney stated that if it were in his legal power to remove them, the statues would be gone. He also said that while removing the statues were important to many Richmonders, his real concern was providing reparations to deprived communities negatively affected by past racial injustices.

In this context, reparations are not about putting cash directly in the hands of disenfranchised people; they are about funding schools that never get funded, putting money in parks and community spaces, and reforming previously exclusive places into safe, inclusive space. They are about allowing a city’s architecture, aesthetic, art, and monuments to reflect the citizens it houses.

“Does that man standing on top of that thing send a message that you are welcome here, and that we want you to be here?” Landrieu said. “I was the mayor of a majority African American city, and I was the mayor of a city that has a monument that doesn’t represent our city. We decided in our specific circumstance, it was the best thing to do. What you cannot do is forget who put it up and why they put it up.”

Landrieu urged Richmonders to consider that a single plaque is not contextualization. To provide an adequate frame of reference would require the statue of a “lynched man” to reside next to Jackson and Lee.

Hayter, Stoney, and Landrieu. Photo by John Donegan

It may be prudent to point out that by erecting those statues, we are actually disobeying the wishes of a dead man, one who is at the epicenter of this entire debate: Robert E. Lee.

“I think it wiser,” the retired Lee once wrote of a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

After the Civil War, Lee swore allegiance to the Union, publicly denounced any sentiment toward Southern separatism, affirmed the need to move on, and believed that by keeping those images alive, so would the sentiments of division live on and thrive.

Mayor Landrieu asserted similar sentiments in asking us to question that reverence associated with Confederate iconography. We have an entire avenue on which we all but worship the leaders of a failed nation, then act as if this is a presentation of historical events rather than a deep respect and longing for that failed nation.

“People are watching y’all,” Landrieu said. “I want to ask, do y’all want to be known for that?”

America has a history of building grandiose, reverent monuments to what Lee described as “civil strife,” and compared to those left by other countries throughout the 20th century after their own national conflicts, it calls us to examine how Americans display memorials to bloodshed.

The American cemetery at Normandy. Photo by Leon Petrosyan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia

Our memorial to the lives lost in the 9/11 attacks has turned into a multibillion dollar shopping mall, the Westfield World Trade Center. The American cemetery in Normandy, France, honoring those soldiers lost to WWII, boasts a $30 million welcome center, a chapel, and a 22-foot statue. Compared to the somber, understated French, German, and Canadian cemeteries in the same area, America’s message is clear: We are dominant, we are proud, we are strong, we are to be seen.

And while direct, this isn’t entirely inappropriate. Our culture differs from European countries in that we are opportunistic, and have a free-market capitalist economy. We honor our tragedies, but we simultaneously find a way to make money from them. We are clever, competitive, and fierce. Albeit occasionally sporting a tone-deaf quality, it is true to our nature. For better or worse, it is what we are known for. And, ultimately, even the aforementioned monuments honor soldiers and innocent lives lost to tragedy and terror, rather than the lost cause for continued human oppression that the figures on Monument Avenue commemorate.

And so, Mayor Landrieu’s challenge to Richmond resonates. In the wake of his visit, we must ask ourselves the same question he asked of us: What do you want to be known for? And how will you display it?

Top photo by John Donegan

Photos: The One and Only Queen of Bounce

Tim Wellington | August 22, 2018

Topics: Big Freedia, bounce music, New Orleans, New Orleans bounce, rva music, The Broadberry

The always incredible Big Freedia returned to Richmond for a show at The Broadberry last Thursday night, with her latest EP release, “3rd Ward Bounce,” in tow. The five-track EP dropped back in June, a follow-up that was highly anticipated by fans who had been waiting for new bangers to bounce to since Big Freedia’s 2014 LP, “Just Be Free.” The venue was packed and the night was full of beautiful people and plenty of ass shaking as the New Orleans Bounce queen turned the bass up.

The talented and lovely Sophia Latkis and Jafar Flowers of Ice Cream Support Group helped open the night as folks danced until late in the evening.

Check out some of the best photos from the show below:

 

 

 

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

A Taste of New Orleans Rolls Into Northside

Amy David | August 6, 2018

Topics: banh mi, Big Easy, Cajun food, chicken wings, food truck, fried chicken, fried rice, Good Eats, gumbo, Manchu, New Orleans, Northside, RVA dine, rva food, shrimp po boys, Vietnamese, yakamein

If you frequent any of the breweries in town, it’s likely you’ve seen a royal purple truck with a feisty chicken emblazoned on the side serving wings and other Cajun-inspired dishes. And this summer, that truck will settle in with a place of its own in Northside.  

Manchu has only been slinging wings, fried rice, fries, shrimp po’ boys, banh mi, and gumbo in Richmond for a year, but its history goes back more than three decades with a family business that originated in New Orleans.

This article originally appeared in RVA #33 Summer 2018, you can check out the issue here, or pick it up around Richmond now. 

Although a staple in the Big Easy and highly popular with the locals, there are no frills about Manchu, just a simple corner store near the French Quarter that has served up wings, po’ boys, fried fish, and yakamein for 35 years.

“We’re one of the few corner stores that’s still around,” said Manchu food truck owner Marvin Nguyen, of his family’s business.  

Nguyen’s cousin Tommy and his wife Yen Pham, along with his father Kevin, founded the original Manchu, and while Nguyen moved out of New Orleans when he was 10, he returns every year to visit the store and family. His passion for cooking, however, wouldn’t come until years later.  

His parents, originally from Vietnam, moved them to North Carolina, then Martinsville, Va. where he grew up. The food truck operator finally planted roots in Richmond in 2005 after transferring from UVA to J. Sarge in 2005 to study biology of all things.

When not in school, Nguyen spent his time working odd office jobs before realizing that wasn’t his true calling.

“I was like, ‘this is not me,’” he said. “All these office jobs I’m getting, I’m helping a lot of people, but I’m not helping myself, it’s not that fun,” he said. After that, he left school and tried out a career as a DJ in Richmond and Washington, DC for 10 years before finally deciding to take up the family business.

“I’ve always liked to cook at home or for my friends, so I thought why not open a food truck. I’ve always talked about it, but never pulled through.”

Nguyen often urged his family during his yearly trips to visit to expand the restaurant up north, and while they were content where they were, Nguyen took the leap to take on the venture himself.

From January to April 2017, he studied under the tutelage of his cousin and dad learning the inner-workings of Manchu. And his time may have been brief, but it was no easy task.

“I went down there and studied for like four months and did everything from the kitchen work, the recipes, the cooking of the fried rice, the chicken, and marinating,” he said.

In 2016, he bought his food truck and the following year, Manchu was up and running in Richmond, starting out in Ashland serving employees at Owens & Minor and Amazon, followed by weekly trips to SunTrust, and growing to regular gigs at local breweries like Ardent Craft Ales, The Veil Brewing Co., Hardywood, and Isley.

Richmond’s Manchu food truck is similar to the NOLA corner store, but with Nguyen ‘s spin on it. The truck sells traditional BBQ, sticky garlic, and ghost pepper wings, which he uses ghost pepper powder to make. “It’s not one of those that things really spicy, but you can taste the ghost pepper.”

As for the recipe for the wings, Nguyen is keeping most of that under his hat, only divulging that it is dry-rubbed and brined for 24 hours. And while the success this year-old food truck has received from the locals has been great for Nguyen, he said expanding with a store of his own was always in the cards.

“The plan was to get people to know who Manchu is, and why we’re here. I wanted to open a store in the first place, but we wanted something that was mobile,” he said.

Image may contain: food

His new North Avenue restaurant, which he leased in January, will be takeout only, and while he eyed bustling neighborhoods like Scott’s Addition, he said after serving the Northside community, he knew it was the perfect place to set up shop.

“I felt like to be at home, just like our store down in New Orleans, we wanted to find a spot that caters mostly to the kind of people that fit our demographic, and Northside has been such a blast for us,” he said. “We park our food truck out there every now and then, its right next to a library, we made a huge impact in that area.”

All the residents that live there and the heavy foot traffic were another reason he wanted to open his takeout restaurant there.

“I like how people just walk around, that reminds me of home in New Orleans,” he said. “Just outside hanging out. We want to make that impact in that community.”

Since opening the food truck, Nguyen has used a commercial kitchen on West Broad Street, but will move operations to the new shop when it opens. And with only four employees, the roving truck will come home to roost for a bit while the takeout spot gets off the ground, but keep an eye out, as it could pop up at an event here and there.

Image may contain: food

With the new takeout spot, Manchu will still serve up its signature wings and po’ boys, but Nguyen also plans to experiment with some new recipes and expand the menu.

“We’re going to have some specials too. We have a recipe for crawfish boils and daily specials such as Pho Boys, so basically all the ingredients of Pho, but you eat it like a French dip,” he said. “We do want to create a Mambo sauce, we’ve made it before, but we still want to play with it, it goes on the wings and the rice.”

Image may contain: food
Manchu Pho Boy

His mother, who also worked on the food truck, has come aboard to be the chef for the restaurant. Nguyen handles all the seasonings and prep for the wings, and his mother makes the gumbo and roasted chicken for the business.

The New Orleans Manchu, which was once a Chinese restaurant, doesn’t have a logo, and is just labeled as Manchu Food Store. Nguyen plans to model his Richmond takeout restaurant after the flagship store with a mural of the NOLA sign, along with his unmistakable chicken logo, of course.

“I just want to make sure we are the staple wing place to go to in Richmond, that’s my goal, I’m just going to work my butt off to make that happen.” Manchu will be open sometime in August six days a week from 10 am to 8 pm.

OpEd: With white nationalists gathering in Charlottesville, how long before RVA is next?

Landon Shroder | May 16, 2017

Topics: Bryce Reeve, Confederate symbols, Corey Stewart, New Orleans, Progressive South, Ralph Northam, richard spencer, Tom Perriello, trump, white nationalists

How much longer does Richmond think it can get away with not addressing the myriad of complex issues surrounding the city’s Confederate symbols? While the city conveniently ignores this ticking time-bomb, in the past week, we have seen protests and arrests in New Orleans during the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. And in Charlottesville on Saturday night a rabble of torch bearing white nationalists, led by none other than “alt-right” poster child Richard Spencer, surrounded the statue of Robert E. Lee in Lee Park – also scheduled for removal.

The Charlottesville story has now broken in multiple national and international news outlets.

But before we move forward, let’s take a moment to acknowledge just how threatening a rabble of torch bearing white nationalists is and the historical message that this conveys to communities of color. The fact that this kind of demonstration can even be planned should provide a barometer on just how emboldened the forces of white nationalism have become.

This cannot be overstated as we brace ourselves for the continued fight over our city’s own Confederate symbols, no matter how hard certain elements within the city want to maintain the status quo.

These tensions do not exist in a vacuum, however. What the Mayor and Richmond’s City Council needs to consider is that baseless claims of ‘preserving heritage’ continue to be a red herring that masks something much more insidious. Such claims are now being compelled by a re-energized brand of extremist politics, which is fusing old hatreds with populist resentments in what has become the modern Republican Party.

As an example, look no further than the campaign advertisements by leading Republican Candidates in Virginia, whether or not it is the second place GOP gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart (see above) and his very public obsession with Confederate symbols or Lt. Gov. candidate Bryce Reeve’s fear mongering against our Muslim neighbors (see below).

This is the backdrop and political climate which our elected officials now have to make the determination against, as they decide what to do about our own Confederate symbols. Because the time for having it both ways is over, not when emboldened white nationalists’ can engineer a public show of force like they did in Charlottesville on Saturday. This incident should give the city a renewed focus to resolve this issue before something similar happens in our own streets.

The city must also understand that as political and social entrenchment continues to grow and Confederate symbols start to be used more regularly by emerging “alt-right” and white nationalist groups, Richmond will inevitably become the front line of this debate: based on our history, the context in which it still exists and our vast store of available symbols. Knowing this, the city’s leaders need to start providing detailed guidance on how this complex history should be reconciled and the contemporary connection we want associated with it.

Democratic candidate for Governor, Tom Perriello, in light of this incident, has renewed his calls for a statewide commission on racial healing and transformation. City leaders in Richmond should be taking this que and leading this dialogue statewide.

Because no amount of craft brewery openings, beer launches or farm to table restaurants is going to counterbalance the reality of how significant our city is to this debate. Certainly not when the most visible aspects of this conversation remain enshrined in all aspects of the city’s dominant landmarks.

Additionally, given the incident in Charlottesville, now is the time for the city to make a bold statement and actively disengage from any conversation on the issue that might include “preservation of heritage”

This does not mean there is no place for valuable historical insight, very much to the contrary. But we need to recognize these coded terms for what they really represent, which is a communication tactic for “alt-right” groups and white nationalists to further their own supremacist agenda. And until the city elevates all aspects of historical preservation, specifically African American history, to the same status, this line of reasoning remains hypocritical at best and morally corrupt at worst.

Furthermore, we should not be doing the work of these groups for them by engaging in these kinds of maligned conversations. Both Democratic candidates for Governor: Ralph Northam and Tom Perriello, have already strongly condemned what happened in Charlottesville. Yet absent from this conversation is any real position from our own city officials, which seems strange given our relative proximity to Charlottesville and the fact that Richmond is ground zero for this debate.

Given the historical relevance of this city, our role needs to be both symbolic and preeminent in determining the place these symbols should have in public spaces. We need to be setting the example for other southern states and the entire county in how to reconcile past and present, which starts with reducing the role of all Confederate symbols in our city.

This is how Richmond can claim the moniker of the Progressive South.

Anything short of this is just a continuation of the status-quo and setting the stage for a showdown this city is uniquely unprepared for.

Words by Landon Shroder

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