Cajun food truck expanding to full restaurant
Apr. 30—An Elwood, Kansas, couple who brought a taste of Louisiana to the St. Joseph area now has a permanent location.
Brandon and Anita Adams are opening an authentic Cajun kitchen and lounge in Troy, Kansas, this week.
"We're opening our actual brick-and-mortar restaurant," Brandon Adams said. "We've been operating our food truck, the Cajun Food Coma, in St. Joe all last year. We booked up quickly all the way through November. That's when we decided that we needed to find a permanent location to be able to keep it rolling instead of having to stop serving our customers in the wintertime."
Brandon Adams started out making Cajun food for his friends and family and then realized cooking may be more than just a passion.
"We started hosting what we called 'weekend throw downs' at our house where anyone was welcome to come over," he said. "It was a safe space just to have a good Sunday dinner with us. I was trying out my different recipes, seeing what everyone liked and the demand for that grew. That's when we decided to open the food truck."
The couple bought a trailer and converted it into a Cajun food truck that opened to the public in 2021.
"We were constantly busy," Anita Adams said. "Everybody was like, 'Oh something new, not just barbecue or tacos, it's Cajun food. We gotta try that.'"
After a few years of success, the couple found a centralized location at 412 W. Locust St. in Troy to open a permanent Cajun Food Coma location.
"We're 20 minutes from St. Joe, Atchison, Hiawatha and Wathena," Brandon Adams said. "We're hoping to pull people from all those areas with being only 20 minutes away. You can come to us. You don't have to drive an hour away to Kansas City."
Anita Adams said they wanted to bring a Cajun option to the area. The new restaurant's menu was created from her husband's family's recipes that include seafood sourced from Louisiana.
"We're going to serve some authentic wild-caught Louisiana seafood that I'm sourcing from my family in Louisiana," Brandon Adams said. "They get brought up here weekly. We're doing shrimp, po'boys, fresh oyster po'boys, soft shell crabs, boiled shrimp, boiled blue crabs along with other Cajun dishes. We'll have different nightly specials like gumbo, jambalaya and Étouffée."
The couple got the keys to the new location just three weeks ago and opened the doors on April 28.
"It's been crazy getting the restaurant together," Brandon Adams said. "Everything from making sure we have all the right equipment to creating a menu and staying at a price that is still beneficial for us as well as the community and everything. We both come from blue-collar, 40-hour-a-week jobs and we'd like to keep our prices on par with the rest of the community so that people from the community we come from can afford our food."
Brandon Adams said his biggest goal with the new space is to provide the Midwest with quality Cajun food.
"When I moved up here six years ago, there was nobody that had stuff like this," he said. "So I wanted to bring something from where I come from to the Midwest and share with everybody."
For now, the couple will pause the food truck service to get their restaurant up and running.
"We won't be doing the food truck, but we're hoping to start running it again next year," Anita Adams said. "We'll hire a crew to just take it out and he'll make the food here to take out to a festival or vendor shows."
The Cajun Food Coma will be open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays.
Brandon Adams said the community's response to the new space has been great so far.
"We just appreciate all the support that the community has been giving us," he said. "Everything on our Facebook page has been people telling us how excited they are for us to open up. We're just excited to bring it to the community."
Sara Rooney can be reached at sara.rooney@newspressnow.com.
