Blue Dog Café is a great restaurant combined with a unique art gallery featuring the quirky blue-dog paintings of Cajun artist, George Rodrigue. If you’re not familiar with Rodrigue’s blue-dog art, see the link below to his website. Over 150 of Rodrigue’s pop-art paintings adorn the walls of the restaurant, creating a fun atmosphere. These paintings are not for sale; they are actually part of the artist’s personal collection on loan to the restaurant.
In addition to the fun atmosphere, what makes Blue Dog Café a great place is the food. The menu features a number of award-winning Cajun recipes, including my personal favorite, the Chicken Bayou Teche, a stuffed chicken breast topped with a creamy, spicy sauce made with Rotel tomatoes and bacon. Another excellent selection is the crawfish enchiladas, a spicy combination of crawfish tail meat, cheeses, onions, and other ingredients rolled in flour tortillas and topped with a spicy sauce. Virtually all entrées are served with the local favorite side dishes, dirty rice and corn maque choux. For those watching their diet (personally I tend to put my diet, and normal concern for healthy eating, on hold when in this part of the country – Cajun food just isn’t quite the same if it’s not full of butter and fat), the menu identifies a wide selection of dishes that can be made with a lower-carb preparation, and a few "lighter selections," which are the items with the lowest fat and calorie counts on the menu. To round out your meal, a nice selection of appetizers, soups, salads and desserts are available.
While I don’t consider the food at Blue Dog Café to be quite on the same level as Café Vermilionville or Prejean’s, it is still very good. The restaurant is conveniently located on Pinhook Road in the heart of Lafayette’s oil center, putting it close to many hotels and other attractions. Prices here are slightly cheaper than some of my other favorite restaurants in town, making this a great place to experience some very good Cajun cooking at prices that won’t burn a hole in your wallet, and I’ve typically found the waiting time for a table at Blue Dog to be much shorter than other restaurants like Prejean’s, where I’ve waited well over an hour before. And Blue Dog Café has something that no other restaurant in the world does – walls covered with humorous paintings of a curious blue dog (sometimes posing with his red, yellow, and other brightly colored dog friends) staring back at you.