Bouligny Plaza was divided into a maze of good eats Saturday for the Cajun Creole Food Festival and Shopping Extravaganza, an event leading into today’s Greater Iberia Chamber of Commerce’s 19th annual World Championship Gumbo Cookoff.

Booth after booth offered delicious concoctions located on makeshift streets in the plaza with fitting names like Tasso Trail, Andouille Alley and Roux Row.

Janet Faulk, president and CEO of the Chamber said roughly half of the booths that will enter gumbos into the cookoff today also were cooking anything but gumbo on Saturday.

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Gerald Faulk, Chamber chairman, said the crowds were beginning to swell around lunchtime Saturday and he expected them to grow as the day progressed.

“What I like to see out here is a lot of kids, we really want it to be a family affair,” he said. “We want family-oriented crowds and that is what we are getting.”

Most of the downtown New Iberia merchants were open for the shopping extravaganza and some offered special deals and discounts for the day.

Nancy Porter, manager of Accentrics, said merchants get a tremendous amount of traffic through their shops for the event.

“We get a lot of customers for this and we always try and visit with them, find out where they are from and why they came,” she said. “A lot of people come in just looking today because they really came to eat the food. But many of them come back afterwards.”

Despite having so many food items other than gumbo to prepare and eat Saturday, the cooks’ minds were focused on today’s competition.

Winner of two first places last year in the professional seafood and non seafood categories, Kernis “Big Lou” Louviere, head cook for the Krewe of Lou, said his team is prepared to win again and are feeling good about its prospects. Krewe of Lou will enter a traditional seafood gumbo but go the extra mile preparing homemade seafood stock which he said makes all the difference. The krewe also will prepare a traditional chicken and sausage gumbo for the competition.

Louviere gets plenty of practice cooking for large numbers of people. As a technical planner for Halliburton, he travels to other parts of the country cooking meals for Halliburton facilities. He also owned a Cajun restaurant in St. Louis with a friend years ago and when into the barbecue business a few years later doing well in barbecue contests in Memphis.

Larry Latiolais and Butch Bayard, two of the four gumbo cooks for the Cajun Buckaroos team representing Buckwild Saloon, said there was only one thing on their mind Saturday regarding the next days contest — winning.

Bayard said they cook a traditional gumbo with “a touch of an extra thing or two”  and use no measuring or ratios.

“It’s exciting for us to have made one of the best gumbos last year because we aren’t professional cooks,” Bayard said. “Its all done homestyle, we throw it all in and hope for the best.” 

Last year the Cajun Buckaroos placed third in the amateur seafood category and Latiolais said this year, at the very least “we will do better than third.”

Becky and Brent Allen, of the Buzzard Bar Cooking Team come all the way from George West, Texas, 437 miles to be exact, Becky Allen said, to compete in the gumbo world championships.

“This is our third year here,” she said. “We have a good time and we like to compete, last year we cooked two gumbos that made finals in each of the categories.”

Coming from Texas, traditionally more home to chili than gumbo, Allen said she thinks their gumbos are pretty good competition for the home teams.

‘We have a little Texas spin on our gumbo,” she said.

Another first for the weekends event this year is the placement of two big screen televisions for diehard football fans who cannot miss the game, even for food of this caliber.

Gerald Faulk said two big screen televisions would be brought into Bouligny plaza Saturday as kickoff time for the LSU and University of Florida game approaches and will return for Saints fans who could not bring themselves to miss Sunday’s game even if it were for a taste of the world’s best gumbo.