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When Zteve wrote his review of Harold and Belle’s last month I was moved to search out some gumbo that day. A quick survey online showed that the Gumbo Shack wasn’t too far away in Inglewood.

The Gumbo Shack is on Market Street, which looks like the historic shopping district it once was, but a bit run down. There is apparently some renovation going on, but I have to say that the area was a bit depressing with a large boarded up theater right in the middle.

The Gumbo Shack is a bit of a diamond in the rough. The store and its signage are clean, with a nice simple design and a cool logo. I got to the Shack a little before noon and I was the only customer there. Since I hadn’t been there before and I was the sole person in line, there was a bit of pressure to make a quick decision.

I glanced through the menu and made my choice

The seafood gumbo jumped out at me, and not just because it was the first item on the menu. Not wanting to under-order for my first visit, I went for the medium which proved to be a two meal portion.

As for a drink, when I looked at the bottom of the menu, I saw that they had a selection of Homemade Drinks. Hmmm, homemade sounds good. What are they whipping up back there? Turns out that it’s RED KOOLAID and “lemonade”. I use quotes around the word lemonade because that’s what I ordered and it turned out to be Country Time and I’m not sure that there are any lemons going into the Country Time factory.

I didn’t go to the Gumbo Shack for the lemonade though, I went for the gumbo. Good thing too, because the gumbo was unreal. When I say that it was stuffed with seafood, I mean that it had about a half of a crab and maybe a dozen plump shrimp swimming in the delicious cajun spiced broth. I looked like a maniac digging the crab out of the shells with my little plastic fork and ended up shoving the fork handle down the crab legs to dig out the meat.

The picture above is actually from round two, once I got the bounty home. The shrimp were long gone, but the shells stuck around, even though I thought about gnawing on them for a bit.

Back to the soup, which was spicy and distinctively southern, but a bit thin compared to some other gumbo I have had. Not thin in a bad way, probably thin in a missing cornstarch way, which is probably a good thing.

Overall, amazing gumbo and worth the field trip. I’m looking forward to trying the chicken based gumbo and finding out what you get after paying $200 for a full pot (do you get to keep the pot?). The garlic bread was pretty awful, soggy and covered in processed garlic spread, but the gumbo again made up for it.

In short, go for the gumbo, not for the koolaid, lemonade or bread.

Gumbo Shack
128 N Market St
Inglewood, Ca
310-677-2993

By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.