Tupelo Serves Up Great Food With a Side of Culture

Eating is as universal and timeless a human experience as exists. Food has always been much more than just sustenance. Throughout human history and across the full range of human cultures, food has always been not just a vital necessity and visceral pleasure, but a social unifier and a cultural signifier. Food is art, and like literature, film, and painting, cuisine is created and evolves through dialogue; it is handed down and built upon almost like an oral epic. Each dish and ingredient tells a complex and continuing story about the people that produced it. What reaches our tables today expresses the ingenuity, love, and dedication not only of those in our modern kitchens, but those who first picked a suspicious looking morel mushroom or first decided to throw a disconcertingly hideous monkfish in a pan.

Using a rare parental visit as an excuse to venture outside the usual Square culinary offerings of burritos, pizza, and more burritos, I recently found myself at Tupelo, a Cajun restaurant near Inman Square which wholeheartedly embraces the varied cultural elements of its cuisine.

Cajun cuisine is at the core of a culture defined primarily by its mixed identity. The term itself is a deformation of “Acadien,” originally used to define the French Canadian colonizers of the bayous of lower Louisiana, but which has now come to apply to the diverse population throughout the region. These people are one of many unique segments of American immigrant societies—poor, subjugated, and concentrated into local majorities—that incubated and grew a coherent cultural and artistic style. The culture has produced Zydeco music, its own French dialect, a vibrant social culture with a penchant for raucous festivities, and an incredibly flavorful cuisine which reflects the rich boldness, economic poverty and diversity of the culture that created it.

We started the meal with fried oysters and remoulade (tartar sauce’s more interesting cousin, an aioli-based condiment usually flavored with pickles, chili, a touch of curry powder, and other ingredients particular to each chef). Fried oysters are classic Cajun fare, using a mollusk loved by the French but, at the time of the dish’s creation, inexpensive and largely overlooked in the United States. Tossed in a thin, crunchy batter and deep-fried, the juicy oysters, drenched in tangy remoulade, burst with flavor and steam heavily when they split open. Tupelo’s were, in our friendly and earnest waiter’s humble opinion, the best in the Boston area. Despite limited experience with Boston’s fried oysters, I’m inclined to agree with him.

Fried catfish and a rich gumbo, even more directly communicative of the history of the culture that created them, followed. Catfish—a dirt cheap, bottom-feeding fish generally looked down upon by most cuisines—is a Cajun favorite. Moist, tender, and succulent, the fish can hold its own against the nearly overpowering ingredients ubiquitous in Cajun cooking. Cajun catfish is often served “blackened”—lightly battered with a potent mix of garlic, cornmeal, flour, cumin, generous amounts of chili, and other spices—and pan fried until the spices have bubbled to a deep golden brown and let off a resinous, intoxicating steam. The one we ordered was remarkably delicate, lightly caked with tangy spices, and bedded on a creamy pool of thick, salty, utterly satisfying cheddar grits.

The gumbo, a New Orleans staple, was one of the best I’ve had. Gumbo is about as clear an expression of its cultural roots as food gets. The dish is an almost magical transformation of an impressive number of cheap ingredients into a potent, dirty reddish-green witches’ brew. Composed largely of throwaways from other dished, it’s about as good as a soup can get. To make a gumbo, you start with the roux, a classic French soup base which is used as one of the soup’s two main thickeners. It’s formed by nothing other than flour and butter, burnt together in a large stockpot until it bubbles golden and then rich dark brown, its flavor maturing into a sweet, nutty richness neither of the ingredients alone suggests. Nearly all gumbos have tomatoes, chicken, rice, sausage, and red pepper flakes, and are thickened by okra. Okra is a small, green squash-like vegetable whose sappy secretion transforms gumbo from a thick stew to something halfway towards gelatinous. The sausages, Cajun Andouille sausages, derived from the far milder French Lyonnaise pigs’ intestine sausages of the same name, combine pork offal and piles of spices into a dark red, incredibly rich and flavorful ingredient that gives gumbo the bulk of its flavor. Tupelo’s Andouilles, and, by extension, their gumbo—like everything else we ate there—was spot on.

Beyond the food, Tupelo, as a restaurant, embraces the entirety of its cuisine’s cultural heritage. Zydeco and folk played over the bustle of the restaurant, where colorful southern cityscapes adorned the walls, and playful glass chandeliers hung over the bar. A sort of cozy hominess oozes from the warmly shining copper tables and the mason jars the restaurant uses as water cups. Named for a city in Mississippi (or the tree that gave it its name, or the mild and thin honey made from these trees indigenous to mostly southern states) Tupelo is a restaurant that plunges you for an hour or two into the fun and vibrant atmosphere of a culture with a cuisine that doesn’t mess around.