[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Featured photo: Boudin king cake from Blue Southern Comfort Food in Shreveport.
There’s a joke about Louisiana that goes: “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.” While I know she’d bristle at the comparison, Carolyn Huggins Simmons’s Blue Southern Comfort Food – an eatery located in Shreveport’s South Highlands neighborhood – is unpredictable in the same way. When Simmons relocated Blue from its original location in mid-2016, I thought of the restaurant as a burger and barbecue joint with killer smoked Buffalo wings and key lime pie. Nine months later, you can still get burgers, wings and pie (Wednesday only for the wings!), but the majority of customers during my visit were ordering pizza and pizza pockets. Oh, and there’s boudin-filled king cake. Because Louisiana.
“I change with my environment,” Simmons says. “When I moved into the new place, I spent two long weeks just looking at that pizza oven. Then one day, I said to myself: ‘You know what? This is just fire. I know fire.'”
What comes out of the fire these days is crispy, thin crust pizza topped with many of the creations that Simmons built her reputation on. There’s a pulled pork pizza, a Buffalo chicken pizza, a Hawaiian pizza dusted in homemade Caribbean jerk seasoning and more. No pizza, of any size, costs more than $15. Simmons and her team spent a week fine-tuning the crust, which pays homage to pizzerias in Pennsylvania, where she once lived and worked.
“All of these years, I’d missed that taste,” she says. “I was scared to do pizza, and making it based on a memory kind of calmed me down. Now we’ve got it figured out – this is the exact pizza that I would eat in Pennsylvania.”
Recently, Simmons and her team started making single-serving “pizza pockets,” filling them with anything and everything imaginable. Want a bacon cheeseburger as a pizza pocket? No problem. Craving an Elvis Presley-inspired pizza pocket filled with chocolate, peanut butter and banana? It’s on the menu.
Oh, and about that boudin king cake: It is not a joke. Stuffed with smoked boudin and cheese and topped with Blue’s bacon jam, it is outrageously decadent and very, very good. It can be ordered by the slice for $5 per serving.
What we have in Blue Southern Comfort Food is a restaurant that does whatever it feels like doing and – for now, at least – what they feel like making is crispy, interesting pizza that stands out in a crowd. The best way to keep up with that’s happening at Blue is by liking their Facebook page.
If you enjoy this kind of info on local food, check out 20×49.com’s archive of restaurant reviews or download Eat Here: A Food Lover’s Guide to Shreveport-Bossier. 20×49.com is a project of the Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][us_testimonial style=”3″ author=”Carolyn Huggins Simmons” company=”Blue Southern Comfort Food” img=”6174″]Our crust is something that I created from a memory…I was scared to do pizza, and making it based on a memory kind of calmed me down.[/us_testimonial][/vc_column][/vc_row]
