Ferguson's Creole Comfort Runs Deep
Cathy's Kitchen works the overlap between soul food and Creole cooking, and the menu says exactly what it is: a shrimp po'boy, a Cajun chicken pasta, crawfish. The po'boy draws repeat business, the kind of order regulars stop deciding on and just ask for. The Cajun chicken pasta reads as the kitchen's signature, a dish built on a cream base carrying real Cajun spice rather than a mild suggestion of it, and the record suggests it lands hard enough that people come back specifically for it. Crawfish rounds out the seafood side, keeping the menu in Gulf Coast territory rather than drifting into a generic fried-seafood house. None of this is delicate plating or restraint.
It is a kitchen that leans into seasoning and lets the sauce and the spice do the talking, which is the right call for the cuisine and the price point both. Ferguson does not have a deep bench of sit-down Creole cooking, and a moderately priced room doing shrimp po'boys and crawfish with any consistency is doing real work for the neighborhood, not filling a gap with something safer. The room itself runs warm rather than formal, staff-forward, the kind of service that greets regulars by what they usually order. That matters for a family-friendly room where the ticket needs to move but nobody wants to feel rushed through a plate of pasta that requires unbuttoning a collar. Portions read generous rather than precious, in keeping with the price.
This is not a room chasing a Central West End reservation crowd. It is built for a table of four on a Tuesday, for someone craving a po'boy without driving to Soulard or the Grove, for a neighborhood that wanted its own kitchen doing this food well and got one. The seasoning is the argument here, not the room's design, and on the evidence it is an argument the kitchen wins consistently enough to matter.
