Is That A Boat Along The Highway?

If you have ever driven around Houston I am sure that you have seen one of these odd sites around the city.  Yes, that is right, a giant boat just hanging out on the side of the road.

This is Captain Tom's, the boat along I-10 past Fry Road in Katy...  Famous for its oysters and micheladas, but sadly I only wander in here at lunch so I avoid both.  Note this is an extremely difficult feat to perform for someone that loves micheladas as much as I do...

The menu is simple to say the least, basically your options are raw, fried, and a few grilled things here and there.  Then again, we do not come here for the gourmet, we come for the delicious.

Their shrimp and crap gumbo is just that, a spicy bowl that I have been known to smother in hot sauce and suck down in about 2 minutes flat disregarding all health and safety and dealing with the burned tongue and mouth in the afternoon.  The flavors are rich and the soup is good and thick like any gumbo should be.  Note that I am not from Louisiana, nor am I in any way related to the Cajun culture, so I may be completely out of touch with what good gumbo is but for my Texas tongue this does just fine.

As I mentioned, your other option is basically fried foods.  This is the Texas Mini, a dish that family friends directed me two with a couple planks of fried catfish and some fried shrimp with a decent bed of fries.  The batter is a grainy cornmeal, so it is not the best batter I have had and as you can see some days it does not batter well, but the flavor is decent and the fish is pretty dang good.

This is my favorite aspect of Toms, for those of you confused, this is cocktail sauce.  I know you are thinking "Wait, doesn't cocktail sauce come out of a jar?" and you are wrong, oh so wrong.  Here there is a tub of horseradish for you to add into your ketchup to make it as crazy as you would like, and let's just say I like it crazy.