Restaurant solves detour with deliveries

Cutline: Peggy and Richard Albair have owned and operated Peggy’s On The Bayou restaurant since 2009 at 2682 E. Roundbunch Road in Orange.

For The Record

Feed the people.

That’s been the goal for Peggy and Richard Albair for more than two decades.

The couple who own and operate Peggy’s On The Bayou restaurant, 2682 E. Roundbunch Road, said they are making plans to go back to their beginnings when upcoming bridge work presents a detour to many of their lunchtime clients.

“We’re starting to deliver to homes in Orange, the Orangefield area and Bridge City,” Peggy Albair said. “We already deliver to motels and now we have an app.

“We have started pick up and delivery service.”

Peggy’s On The Bayou opened in 2009, after Richard Albair retired from his plant job and turned a part-time venture into a full-time operation.

The Cajun seafood restaurant draws a steady lunch crowd from surrounding plants on FM 1006 to the east and nearby Bridge City, to the west.

The swing gate bridge on East Roundbunch Road that crosses the Cow Bayou is only a couple hundred yards west of Peggy’s On The Bayou.

Restoration work on the historic bridge is tentatively scheduled to begin in the second half of the year and is expected to take 18 months to complete.

“At least 50 percent of our business comes across that bridge,” Richard Albair says.

Folks from Bridge City can still access Peggy’s On The Bayou by taking the longer drive down Texas Avenue/Texas 87 to FM 1006. But the detour will add several minutes to the trip.

“We do have a lot of people who will drive around,” Richard Albair said. “But we would lose a lot of the lunch crowd, people coming from downtown Bridge City who only have a short time for lunch.

“We’ll probably lose 25 percent.”

Takeout meals are how the Albairs got their start serving food in Orange County since late in the 20^th century.

They operated the Old Salt Poor Boy Shoppe, selling takeout sandwiches and hamburgers.

Richard Albair is a former crab fisherman who splits his time in the restaurant’s kitchen cooking barbecue crab and boiling crawfish, depending on the season.

It’s crawfish season at Peggy’s On The Bayou and the staff of 10 serves up hundreds of pounds of mudbugs each day of the week.

“We won’t get crabs again until the end of crawfish season,” Peggy Albair said, “and we have crawfish longer than other people do, until the end of August.”

With Easter on the horizon, Peggy’s On The Bayou, of course, has Lent specials that start with half a catfish filet.

The AYCE (All You Can Eat) buffet is also in play, for sure.

Peggy Albair says the restaurant will begin taking orders for Easter in mid-March, but the supply is limited.