Husband and wife Joshua and Nailah Curry, co-owners of Lou Lou's Seafood, stand for a portrait in their new restaurant in Lexington.
A Shrimp Boil Plate with honey habanero sauce at Lou Lou's Seafood.
The new Lou Lou's Seafood in Lexington.
The menu in the Lou Lou's Seafood restaurant.
The Crab Mac 'N' Cheese at Lou Lou's Seafood.
Nailah Curry, co-owner and head chef at Lou Lou's Seafood, prepares a Shrimp Boil Plate with honey habanero sauce.
Nailah Curry, co-owner and head chef at Lou Lou's Seafood, prepares a Shrimp Boil Plate with honey habanero sauce.
Nailah Curry, co-owner and head chef at Lou Lou's Seafood, prepares a Shrimp Boil Plate with honey habanero sauce.
A young couple is spreading their love of seafood through a takeout spot at 514 N. Main St. in Lexington.
“Seafood is just one of my favorite foods. I love cooking seafood,” said 31-year-old Nialah Curry who opened Lou Lou’s Seafood in mid-December with her husband, Joshua, 34.
Lou Lou’s has a tight, focused menu that lends itself to takeout. “This is Lowcountry seafood boils. It’s not fried Calabash seafood,” Nialah said.
The couple, who met at N.C. A&T University in Greensboro, spent about four years living in Myrtle Beach after graduation to be near Nialah’s parents, who had moved to South Carolina from her native New York City.
While in the Myrtle Beach area, Nialah attended the culinary program at Horry-Georgetown Technical College while working at such restaurants as Nacho Hippo, Wicked Tuna and Planet Hollywood. Joshua also was cooking at area restaurants and hotels.
The two moved back to Joshua’s hometown of Lexington in 2018 as newlyweds with no plan to open a restaurant. He was working at a warehouse. She was working at Café 35.
On weekends, Nialah would cook up seafood at home, and photos invariably wound up on social media. “I was just cooking every weekend, cooking crabs for my husband and he would post them on Facebook, and people would say, ‘I want some.’ From there it just grew. Other people you don’t even know start seeing it and start messaging you, and it’s like ‘wow.’”
Soon Nialah starting selling plates on the weekends. “It got really popular. We started to get a food truck. But then we decided to go ahead and get a building instead.”
Lou Lou’s is a takeout business, and not just because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We have a few tables but it’s more like a lunch area; it’s not really a dining room,” Nialah said. “With 50% capacity, we could seat like one family.”
The heart of the menu is boiled seafood. Customers can choose from shrimp, lobster tail, blue crabs (when in season), snow crab legs or mussels. Plates include a boiled egg, corn on the cob, red potatoes and beef smoked sausage. Prices run from $15 for the mussels up to $30 for the lobster or snow crabs. A pan-fried salmon filet or salmon salad also is available for $15.
The boiled seafood comes with a choice of six sauces or seasonings: butter, lemon-garlic butter, Curry’s Original, sweet mango habanero, Old Bay seasoning, or cocktail sauce.
Customers can add extra seafood to any of the plates, as well as extra sides. Additional sides include pasta salad, house salad and mac ’n’ cheese.
Nialah also makes a special version of mac ’n’ cheese with crab ($10) – that’s one of the most popular dishes that Lou Lou’s sells. She uses blue crab meat with elbow macaroni, mozzarella, Parmesan and cheddar cheeses, along with garlic and Old Bay seasoning.
Nialah also offers specials, which often are something like chicken with mushroom gravy or another dish that might appeal to the non-seafood lover in the family.
The Currys said that it took a while to get the restaurant up and running during the pandemic.
“For a while we couldn’t get any contractors to come out,” Nialah said.
“I became handier than I thought I could be,” Joshua said. “Since we couldn’t go out or anything, we’d come in and here do whatever work we could. We painted, we built the countertop (out of recycled palettes) and tiled.”
Nialah said that the restaurant was well on its way to completion before she heard about similar concepts in the Triad from such chains as Juicy Crab, Crazy Crab and Red Crab.
“That’s really popular now. But I didn’t even know they had restaurants like that for a while,” she said.
“I had just been doing this on my own, selling plates. Lexington is a small town, and we wanted to have something for all the people who usually go out of town to eat.”
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January 19, 2021 at 11:00PM
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Couple is bringing Lowcountry-style seafood boils to Lexington - Winston-Salem Journal
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