This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.

As the poet Robert Burns said: “The best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry.” This is never more obvious to me than when I’m elbow-deep into a Vietnamese-Cajun seafood boil, past the point of no return.

The table looks like a Finding Nemo crime scene—shells and guts strewn about with splatters of peppery garlic butter everywhere. You, guilty as charged, have your hands soaked red with the stuff, unable to navigate the straw to your drink, let alone the solace promised by the Wet-Naps laughing and mocking you next to your unused utensils. You’re in it now.

Vietnamese-Cajun seafood boils are not meals you ease into. There is no etiquette. There are no niceties. You commit. And as you sit there, tearing through shellfish drenched in a sauce so rich, it could buy a house in Madrona, a thought creeps in: How did Vietnamese immigrants end up making the best seafood boils in America?

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In 1975, after the fall of Saigon, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in the US, with no option other than to make it happen. Many landed along the Gulf Coast—Louisiana, Texas, places where the seafood industry was booming but backbreaking. But for many Vietnamese immigrants, the sea offered familiar work. They worked boats—not just as laborers, but as apprentices in survival. Watching, learning, and adapting with the quiet intensity that comes from starting from nothing.

Today, their footprint is undeniable: Vietnamese people make up about one-third of Gulf Coast fishermen, and around 80 percent of the Vietnamese population there is tied to the seafood industry.

There’s an irony here: Both Vietnam and much of the Gulf were once French colonies. Colonization is never pretty, but sometimes, its leftovers are worth savoring. And the French left behind culinary traditions rooted in butter, garlic, and slow, deliberate cooking. The backbone of Cajun food is built on these ideas. And if you know anything about Vietnamese food, you know that they, too, love a long cook. Gumbo doesn’t happen in an hour, and neither does pho.

So when Vietnamese immigrants landed in Louisiana and Texas, they weren’t starting from scratch. Seafood, rice, spice, and French influence all combined to provide Vietnamese Americans with everything they needed to completely reinvent the Cajun seafood boil.

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Why does the common Cajun seafood boil feel like a promise half-kept? In the Southeastern tradition, it’s canon to boil your seafood in a deeply seasoned broth, but the fatal flaw is that the broth is as effective as a Cheeto lock in terms of imbuing flavor. Once determined ready, probably by a man in jean shorts, the boil is ceremoniously dumped onto a table. Memorable? Maybe. Flavorful? Barely. After all, nothing sets the stage like a piping hot potato doused in what’s essentially Old Bay La Croix.

In the Viet-Cajun tradition, the magic isn’t in the boil—it’s in the sauce. A way for the seasoning to actually stick to the seafood. A rich, complicated gravy is prepared in a pot; the chilis, garlic, butter, and citrus steeped until perfectly pungent and balanced. The seafood is boiled in a broth similar to the traditional, but the important bit comes near the end: Ladles of sauce and pounds of seafood are combined into a plastic bag and shaken to ensure every crevice of every shell is drenched.

This isn’t fusion. This isn’t some banh mi taco that moment no one asked for. This is evolution. A small, obvious tweak that made all the difference.

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Seattle is a long way from the Gulf, but Viet-Cajun has traveled well. Houston made it a staple, Boiling Crab put it on the map in California, and now, even in the Pacific Northwest, you can throw a dart and find a spot that will get you right.

Crawfish King in Seattle’s Chinatown–International District is my spot. Not because it’s the first, not because it’s famous, not even because they offer Groupons. But because every time I step inside, I know I’m gonna leave happy. Sticky and stinking of garlic, but happy.

Torrey Le bought Crawfish King in 2015, and once at the helm, he was committed to learning the best of the Viet-Cajun boil. He essentially hit the pioneering trail: NOLA, Houston, Santa Ana, Las Vegas. He returned with his tummy full, fingers stained, and with a playbook on how to make the best Cajun seafood in Seattle. 

Your order can go many directions. You’ll find that crawfish tends to be the most affordable and the most popular. If you’re new to crawfish, just know that it’s a lot of work for what often amounts to a pencil eraser’s worth of meat. If you prefer more bang for your buck, consider going for shrimp, mussels, or clams. Or, if you cooked on your taxes this year, go ahead and get the king crab legs.

However, the most important part of ordering is not the seafood selection, it’s once again the sauce. While many Viet-Cajun spots premake their sauces for the sake of efficiency, Crawfish King makes each batch fresh to order. Don’t be a hero. Go for the tried-and-true House Special: Big Easy sauce. It’s the amalgamation of everything Le has learned about this evolving tradition. It would make his ancestors proud.

When it all finally comes to your table, replete with metal buckets for your discards, it’s go time. Remember, you don’t eat this meal. You submit to it. There’s no way to look cool cracking open crawfish with your bare hands while wearing a bib with an anthropomorphic lobster who is also wearing a bib. So just lock in and tune everything else out. Appreciate the flavors, let them punch. Savor the sauce, find any and every way to get it in your mouth.

Your phone stays face down, not just because you’re present in the moment, but because you can’t touch it without permanently altering its resale value. You could single-handedly defeat Nosferatu with one hot breath. That’s when you know you’re doing it right.

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What started as a small “fusion” trend in Houston and Orange County has become a nationwide frenzy. And like all great immigrant food, it has a fight for legitimacy.

Some say, “That’s not a real seafood boil.” But what is? Cajun food itself is a blend of French, Spanish, African, and Indigenous influences. Like Asian American cuisine at large, it’s always been an evolving, adapting cuisine, never meant to stay frozen in time.

This is the through line in all of our food stories. It’s how Chinese takeout became an American staple, how sushi went from mocked to chic and now in every grocery store. It feels like the most Asian American thing to do: To take what’s already there, put your head down, work harder, hustle smarter, season better, and come out on top.

So the next time you’re enjoying a Viet-Cajun seafood boil, negotiating with the crawfish to eek out a morsel of meat and slathering it in the Big Easy sauce, take a moment. This is the best version of the seafood boil. No debate. No disclaimers. And you can thank Vietnamese Americans for it.

Michael Wong is the creator of Asian Verified, a video series examining the rubrics that make up the Asian American experience.