Louisiana Crawfish Shortage Impacting Tulsa Restaurants

The country is dealing with a shortage of crawfish because of the bad weather this year.

That’s causing some issues with big events coming up, like the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras.

The owner of Cajun Ed’s at 71st and Lewis says they hope they’ll get some Crawfish in before Mardi Gras- but with Mardi Gras being early this year, it’ll be close.

Cajun Ed’s serves both live and boiled Crawfish that they get from farmers in Louisiana.

Ed Richard has owned the restaurant for more than 20 years.

"Everybody wants them,” said Richard. “We're getting hundreds of phone calls, wanting to know if we have live Crawfish yet because everyone wants to eat them or cook them. This year, they're running a little bit late."

That’s because of a year of bad weather in Louisiana, the biggest supplier of Crawfish in the country.

"This past Summer, there was a drought, so they didn't have a lot of water,” said Richard. “They had to artificially fill the ponds, and it's super expensive to do that. So therefore, because there's a drought, the brood Crawfish that they use, they're saying were not plentiful.”

Richard and the fishermen hope that with warm weather in the forecast, the Crawfish will still come, just a little later than normal.

"The weather always has a big play in what time of year we get Crawfish, whether they're in December or February,” said Richard. “Usually, once it starts kicking off, we get plenty of Crawfish. They are a little concerned because it was such a big drought this summer, but we're still confident we are going to get plenty of Crawfish."

He says whatever happens, they will do the best they can to get Crawfish to all the people they can.

"We're going to work with it, we're going to do whatever we can do to try and get plenty of live Crawfish,” said Richard. “We sell them live and we sell them boiled. We're going to do our best to do all of that.”

Richard says once they get the Crawfish in, prices usually drop until Easter, when prices go back up again because of higher demand.