B&O Kitchen & Grocery

B&O Kitchen & Grocery sits on Burton Street in Sulphur, about twelve miles west of Lake Charles. Three generations of the same family have run the place since 1983. It operates as what it says — kitchen and grocery both, boudin and cracklins and Cajun specialties alongside whatever else you came in for. The Lake Charles Convention & Visitors Bureau lists it as a stop on the Southwest Louisiana Boudin Trail, the regional route that threads through Calcasieu Parish. Lake Charles itself is a petrochemical center on the Calcasieu River, a city that has burned and rebuilt before. The Great Fire of 1910 leveled much of it. In 2020, Hurricane Laura hit with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour — the National Weather Service called the storm surge "unsurvivable." Windows blew out of downtown high-rises. The Capital One Tower was later demolished. Six weeks after that, Hurricane Delta came through. The city was described as if "20 tornadoes came in and wiped the city." Sulphur is not Lake Charles, but it's close enough to share the weather. What survives out here survives because someone keeps showing up to make it. B&O is a family operation in a region where that phrase still means something — where the people who own the place are the people behind the counter.