Every Friday, Anthony Cosme pours a secret blend of Cajun spices into a vat of boiling water and cooks up a batch of crawfish shipped live from the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes the air inside his New Orleans Fish Market in South Los Angeles gets so thick with spices that it's hard to breathe.
"That cayenne can have you coughing and your nose running," he says, revealing one ingredient. "When we cook them up outside, you can smell the crawfish around the corner."
Customers drawn to the market each week for a taste of the succulent crustaceans take a number at the counter and wait for their takeout orders, along with those seeking the traditional Roman Catholic fish-on-Friday meal.
"Friday pays the payroll," says Nicole Ganier-Cosme, who co-owns the market with her husband, Anthony. "Thank God for Fridays."
And today is Good Friday -- usually one of the biggest paydays of the year at the fish market founded in 1982 by Nicole's father, Bernard Ganier, a retired construction worker from New Orleans.
Not long after he opened the market, Ganier-Cosme predicted that one day she would own it.
"He told me that 'I didn't pay for you to go to college to own a fish store,' " she recalls her father saying. But she didn't want to face the prospect of losing a family business she'd grown up with.
The market, at Vernon and Arlington avenues near Leimert Park, is one of a handful of stores in Los Angeles that have kept direct ties to their New Orleans and other Southern roots.
Each week, the market has its crawfish, oysters, blue crabs and smoked sausage flown in directly from the Gulf. The shelves are stocked with cans of okra, bags of red beans and spices used to prepare such traditional regional dishes as chicken jambalaya and crawfish etouffee. And on the counter are big round barrel jars full of pickled pig lips and pig feet.
Nicole and Anthony assumed ownership of the market in August shortly before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, knocking out many of their suppliers. Even when shipments resumed, there were questions about whether the products were safe to eat. They lost business.
"We weren't certain what we were going to do," Ganier-Cosme says.
Gradually, many of their customers returned -- some just to get a taste of the city they had left long ago; others, evacuees from the storm, seeking the comfort of flavors still fresh in their memories.
