Real Creole flavors and great jambalaya in a tiny Portsmouth hole-in-the-wall

Sometimes the journey is the thing. Sometimes it’s good to finally be home.

James Claude Bailey has had a longer trip than most on the way to finally opening his own homestyle New Orleans-style cookery, Bailey’s Bayou — a takeout hole-in-the-wall off the main drag of Portsmouth’s Olde Towne, where you can find thick-spiced jambalaya and sumptuous shrimp Creole of such depth it’ll have you checking your ZIP code.

Bailey began making Creole cuisine at the age of 12 with his grandmother in New Orleans; she cooked for a number of restaurants there. He’d been offered an ultimatum: Learn how to cook, or start mopping and sweeping.

He chose food. And ever since, he’s nurtured a dream to open a restaurant. He held onto that plan through a career with the Navy, a culinary degree, and years of community organizing for civil rights.

But after he finally retired two years ago, it was finally time to go right back to work.

“Now that I’m old and retired,” Bailey said, “I’d like to see if people appreciate real Cajun and Creole.”

Two years ago, Bailey began by serving his Creole fare at a series of pop-ups: first at the Church Street Culinary Loft in Norfolk, then bouncing around from restaurant to restaurant as one-night events.

From there, he ended up at a spot over on Hodges Ferry Road in Portsmouth, where he set up temporary shop last year, hoping to make it permanent. Customers drove from as far away as Smithfield to pick up his po’boys and dirty rice, Bailey said. But negotiations with his would-be landlord broke down.

And so instead, he found himself trying to open a restaurant on Olde Towne’s Court Street in the middle of a pandemic, putting his old gadfly skills to use by hounding the city about getting his building permits.

This time, it worked — and finally, his cooking has a place to call home.

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The restaurant’s interior is still unfinished, aside from a few Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras posters on the walls. A lone table, with a sparkly tablecloth, sits waiting for the occasional dine-in customer. But for now, most of the food goes out the door in plastic bags. As of press time, Google remains convinced he’s “temporarily closed.” (He’s open every day but Monday.)

But none of that really matters. Because Bailey’s Bayou is serving some of the richest and most dedicated down-home expressions of Cajun and Creole cooking you’re likely to find in this region — at prices that could allow it to be a regular habit.

For best results, stick mostly to the section of the menu that says “Cajun and Creole.” In particular, the shrimp Creole thumps resoundingly with a quality that can only be called rightness, a flavor buried deeply even in people who’ve never tasted it before. To make it, Bailey and his two cooks slowly saute his holy trinity of bell peppers, celery and onions in roux — chopped coarsely for lightly crisp texture — working in seasoned chicken stock and tomatoes and generously apportioned jumbo shrimp cooked to juicy plumpness.

If you’d like, you can get that shrimp Creole slathered over some cheesy grits for a Low Country twist. These too get their own seasoning, before being fattened up like Hansel with gooey cheese. Like all the best dishes at Bailey’s, the dish is layer upon layer of spice and flavor: Bite down, and find more strata than at an archaeological dig.

The jambalaya is deceptively simple but just as good, a tomato-stewed Creole version of the classic rice dish with grill-charred shrimp, spicy-salty andouille and juicy chicken. The crawfish etouffee is as classic as it comes, countless tails curled into thick-spiced and thick-textured roux. The dirty rice, layered with spice and meat, is as ugly as sin and just as enjoyable.

The dishes are mostly humble in both price and presentation. But each does receive a party-favor garnish of a little purple flower on top, a lilac ode to the fleur-de-lis.

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Elsewhere on the menu, Bailey’s Bayou serves a broad scattering of po’boys, within classic Gambino’s bread when Bailey can get it; on our visit, we got a puffier roll with a bit less character than you’d hope. Its bread halves arrive layered with mayo on each side and heavy-laden with your choice of fried or grill-seared seafood, along with tomato and pickle and lettuce and remoulade. A catfish rendition was inch-thick and flaky, its breading crisp and lightly seasoned.

Among mostly old-school options, the Cajun linguine here is a bit of an outlier, albeit a popular one. Customers had apparently begged Bailey to serve the nontraditional mash-up of Louisiana seasoning and Alfredo-sauced pasta that you can nonetheless find all over New Orleans, where adding Cajun spice to literally anything is a basic-level pastime — a bit like starting parades for no reason, or drinking legally on the street.

Most extravagantly, the Bayou serves a meat-loaded “Hopkins” pasta named after the customer who invented it. The linguine plate is a heart attack for the indecisive, loading up sausage, shrimp and a hulking half-pound filet of breaded salmon atop a world of spicy noodles. A customer had special-requested the conflagration, and declared that if Bailey put it on the menu, it’d become one of the restaurant’s most popular items.

Hopkins was right, and so Hopkins remains immortalized in menu form. That said, I’d personally stick to the more focused shrimp or catfish versions — or to the many Cajun and Creole rice dishes and roux-based stews where Bailey’s homegrown mastery is more precious.

Bailey hopes to install indoor dining by summer, with a vibe he describes as being like sitting down in your own home. By July 4, he’s also promised a machine churning out endless daiquiris, a drink that he declares “a staple of our culture.” And from there, he hopes to build out a courtyard space behind the restaurant, perhaps with music.

But for the moment, Bailey’s Bayou is as bare-bones as it gets: a cash register in a dim hallway of a room, a sign out front, and some Creole shrimp ’n’ grits that will tear your heart in two.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com

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If you go

The spot: Bailey’s Bayou, 509 Court St., Portsmouth

The vibe: Tucked-away and tiny takeout spot serving excellent homestyle Cajun and Creole fare

Order this: Shrimp Creole, jambalaya, etouffee of choice, dirty rice, collards, cheesy grits, beignets

Hours: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday

COVID protocols: Online ordering, almost exclusively take-out for the moment

Food prices: Entrees, $7.50 to $16, with rice dishes on the lower end of the scale; po’boys, $10 to $14 ($16 to $18 for double-stuffed); sides, $2 to $4.

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Drinks: $1 water; $2 to $4 blended “Cajun juice.” Liquor license to come.

Kid-friendly? It’s takeout. Do what you’d like!

Vegan/veg/gluten: This is fish- and chicken-stock and pork bone country, sorry. That said, pescatarians and the pork-averse will find pork-free dishes clearly marked. Always ask about gluten content — flour-and-butter roux shows up all over.

Disabled-access? Yes

Reservations? Nope, but you can time your order if need be

Parking: Street, sometimes difficult

Contact: 757-537-5178, baileysbayou.com