By Karen LeBlanc, host of LA64, a Louisiana Travel Show on PBS
Louisianans, we love our mud bugs. We’re raised on a hearty dose of Louisiana crawfish at every backyard boil and family reunion. But here’s the thing most of us never stop to think about: the work that goes into harvesting them. So when I had the chance to spend the night at Crawfish Haven & Mrs. Rose’s Bed and Breakfast — deep in the Cajun Country near Kaplan, Louisiana — and actually pull the traps myself, I jumped at it.
What I found was something rarer than a triple-sack haul: a place where the crawfish, the cooking, and the history all belong to one remarkable man, and where staying the night means you’re not a guest so much as family who happened to book a room.
Meet Barry Toups, the Renaissance Man of the Bayou
Barry Toups is, by his own cheerful admission, a man of many talents. A retired electrician who spent 33 years running the maintenance department for the parish school board, he’s also a furniture maker, a crawfish farmer, and an award-winning Cajun cook. Walking through his house and seeing the headboards, nightstands, and kitchen table he built with his own hands, I told him he was a Renaissance man. He didn’t argue.
“I figured out a way to get people to pay me to do my work,” he joked as we headed out to the ponds. Spend an afternoon with Barry, and you understand his crawfish ponds hold a higher purpose. “It’s not about the money anymore,” he told me. “It’s giving somebody that experience.” People come from all over the world for the experience of harvesting and boiling up mudbugs.
The Story of Mrs. Rose
The bed and breakfast is named in honor of Barry’s friendship with neighbor Rose.
“Rose was born in this house,” Barry told me, standing beside a photograph of her parents, the original owners. The oldest part of the home was built in 1903, and Miss Rose lived here nearly her whole life. Barry met her in 2010 after buying 28 acres across the road, and every time he came to check on his crawfish ponds, he’d check on her too. “You couldn’t come in for five minutes,” he laughed. “You had to stay for half an hour.” He’d fix her lawnmower, repair her lights. They became close. When she passed away in 2013, he was a pallbearer — and when her son decided to sell the house, Barry bought it.
He’d planned to flip it like the other houses in his rental business. But this one was different. “It was too nice a house to rent,” he said. After some relatives came down from Biloxi to go crawfishing and had the time of their lives, the idea was born: turn it into a bed-and-breakfast and a working crawfish destination. He named it for the woman who’d lived there, and her presence is everywhere — her embroidery and cross-stitch framed on the walls, her furniture still in its place. Miss Rose was a skilled needleworker, and these are all her originals.
Three Rooms, Each With Its Own Louisiana Soul
The bed and breakfast has three guest rooms, and every one has its own identity, all of it Louisiana to the bone.
There’s the Crawfish Room, which sleeps nine — a favorite for hunting parties in season and, as I learned, for ladies’ weekends where the guests “get served by a man all weekend.” (Sign me up.) Grandparents can rent the whole house and pile the grandkids in here.
There’s the Cypress Room, paneled in warm cypress and full of pieces Barry built himself, right down to the bathroom he carved out of an old closet. It’s his favorite room in the house — and the one he sleeps in now.
And there’s the Fleur de Lis Room, the king-bed honeymoon suite on the south side of the house. Barry hosts weddings here, and the bride and groom often spend their first night in this room.
Tucked into the welcome center where you sign in, Barry built a little shrine to the place’s character: old porch windows repurposed into display cases for his cooking awards, and his great-great-grandmother’s antique sewing machine table. This is also where you’ll find his crawfish-pardoning proclamations. Yes — every year, the same week the President of the United States pardons a Thanksgiving turkey, Barry and Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser pardon a lucky crawfish.
Crawfish 101: Your Primer Before the Boat
Before Barry let me anywhere near the water, he handed me some homework. He and his family wrote a book called The Last Sack of Crawfish, born from the realization that visitors arrive genuinely hungry to learn everything about these mud bugs.
His favorite teaching tool is what he calls the Cajun Zoo. “A regular zoo has a description of an animal underneath it,” he explained. “The Cajun Zoo has a recipe underneath it.” The lessons are real: when crawfish bury, when they emerge, what they eat, and how to tell a male from a female. A single female can carry up to 500 eggs on her tail. The babies molt up to 12 times a year, doubling in size each time they shed their shell — and they molt best when the water sits between 65 and 70 degrees.
Out on the Ponds: Cajun Engineering and a Crawdad Mansion
We filmed in November, which is early — early — in the crawfish season. But that’s part of the education. Barry runs permanent crawfish ponds flanked by sugar cane fields, and instead of the big farmers’ rice-then-crawfish rotation, he plants rice purely as a food source, sowing late, around August 15th, with no intention of harvesting it.
He pointed out fresh mud homes where the crawfish had buried two to three feet deep at the end of last season and were just now working their way back out after a good rain. “That’s a lot of work a mud bug makes,” I said, staring at one. Barry nodded — that’s likely how they got the name in the first place. “They sure don’t taste like mud,” he added.
Then there was the boat, which has no steering wheel. “How are you turning the boat?” I asked. “With my feet,” Barry said — a foot pedal that keeps my hands free to bait and pull traps all day long. “I call it Cajun engineering.”
Soon, we fall into a rhythm: pull the cage, hand it back, bait it, drop it in, and let the small ones fall through a sorting grate while the keepers go in the sack. We pulled around 140 traps. Along the way, we found a little turtle hitching a ride in one of the cages — cute, but a crawfish predator, so back into the water he went. (Barry’s full-time job, he’ll tell you, is trapping predators. Crawfishing is his part-time gig.) And who’s the number one predator of crawfish? “The Cajuns,” Barry deadpanned. Otters, raccoons, possums, birds, and frogs round out the list.
When we weighed the haul, we came in at 14 pounds. I’d guessed 15 — which, by Price Is Right rules, meant I’d gone over and technically lost. Barry let me boil up the crawfish with his signature seasoning eat them anyway.
A Few Things You Didn’t Know About Harvesting Crawfish
Spend a day on the water with a farmer, and you learn the economics fast. The average crawfish farmer pulls about 500 pounds per acre per year — at least that’s what gets reported. Barry says it’s closer to 700. The year of the drought yielded just 200 pounds per acre; his best year ever hit 1,100. Rain at the right time is everything, because a wet summer keeps the ground moist and the crawfish buried at a manageable two to three feet. In a major drought, they’ll dig down eight to ten feet, and that takes a long, long time to recover from.
The market is its own creature, too. When I visited, processors were paying around $4 a pound — not bad — but once the big farms flood the market in January, that can drop to $2. Barry charges $5 a pound and serves five pounds per person. It’s not a restaurant, so you can’t just show up — but prebook, and he’ll accommodate you.
La Boutique: The On-Site Gift Shop
Before we boiled, we stopped by La Boutique, the on-site gift shop, where Barry also keeps three RV camper hookups for travelers. The shelves are a love letter to Louisiana makers: pickled banana peppers (made by local kids, whom Barry helps sell), strawberry-fig jelly, and small-batch goods you won’t find on a chain-store shelf. Shopping here means directly supporting Louisiana entrepreneurs.
The star of the shop is Barry’s own seasoning. It’s MSG-free, and his fish fry is something special — it took him a full year to perfect the blend, which includes potato flakes and citrus spices. “You don’t need lemons in your water,” he told me. “It’s already got the citrus spices in it.” Locals come to eat his crawfish for the first time and leave with cases of the stuff.
A Cajun Cooking Lesson at the Kitchen Table
Because Barry lives on his own side of Mrs. Rose’s — doing breakfast, nighttime meals, and his Cajun cooking classes all from that kitchen — staying here comes with a built-in 24/7 concierge and, as it turns out, a cooking lesson.
That night, Barry invited me in to learn how to make crawfish étouffée and fried fish. I gave him fair warning: “I am only comfortable with an air fryer. If this involves a pot, you are in for a challenge.”
“It involves a pot,” he said, “but I don’t think you can mess this up.”
Famous last words. But the kitchen itself disarms you. On the counter sits his cookbook, full of his mother’s handwritten recipes — she passed away eleven years ago — alongside his own and his aunts’ best dishes. One page is dedicated entirely to her memory. Cooking in that room, you feel the generations stacked up behind every roux.
We sat down to a true Cajun spread: étouffée and fried fish served with rice, cornbread, and potato salad. The whole thing was a crawfish immersion from the pond to the plate.
Why You Should Go
I’ll be honest — Louisianans can get a little jaded about crawfish. Been there, peeled that. But Crawfish Haven & Mrs. Rose’s Bed and Breakfast is a whole different experience: being out on the water, doing the manual labor yourself, and finally understanding what goes into the mud bugs we take for granted.
You come for the crawfish that you boil up and eat after a day spent harvesting the mudbugs in Barry’s ponds. You stay for everything around it — the handmade cypress furniture, Miss Rose’s embroidery on the walls, the seasoning that took a year to get right, and a host who genuinely doesn’t consider any of this work. As Barry puts it, he gets to travel the world without leaving home, one carload of “suckers for the experience” at a time.
So prebook your stay, bring your own drinks, and come hungry. You won’t read about this place in the mainstream travel guides — which is exactly why you should go.
Crawfish Haven & Mrs. Rose’s Bed and Breakfast is located in Cajun Country near Erath, Louisiana. Stays are by reservation; crawfishing excursions, boils, and Cajun cooking classes can be arranged with advance booking.
Karen LeBlanc is a travel journalist and host of LA64, a Louisiana Travel Show on PBS. Discover more of the Louisiana you won’t read about in the guidebooks at DiscoverLouisianaTravel.com.
