Crawfish Monica is many things to many people. It’s a Jazz Fest staple. A signature New Orleans dish with a well-known history. A trademarked brand that, like many famous labels, has spurred thousands of knockoffs. (Don’t be fooled by the online imposters.)
But at its essence, Crawfish Monica is a love story.
Monica Davidson had only been married a few years when her husband, Chef Pierre “Pete” Hilzim, created a silken cream sauce and tossed it with crawfish and rotini pasta. The dish came together while Hilzim was cooking one evening at a friend’s house in the 1980s. When his wife inquired about the sauce, Hilzim, wise man that he is, dubbed it Crawfish Monica. What could be more romantic?
Little did either of them know that the world would soon fall in love with Monica as well. And that’s hardly an overstatement. Hilzim’s creation ranks among the most popular foods at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, a spring food fest that also happens to offer a little music. The eight-day event, which included a special Thursday performance by the Rolling Stones, drew nearly 500,000 people to the Fair Grounds last year. The 2025 Jazz Fest is set to open on Thursday, April 24, and will also span two four-day weekends. (Jazz Fest’s highest attendance came in 2001, when 650,000 people passed through its gates, according to The Times-Picayune — the vast lot of them likely making their way to the Crawfish Monica booth at some point.)
With six lanes stretching across a double booth in the festival’s Food Area II, the team behind Crawfish Monica has its game plan so dialed in that the staff has been known to ladle out an estimated serving a second in recent years, Davidson said. Speed is of the essence, as the lines can be 120-people deep at the Crawfish Monica tent. Davidson has been known to walk up and down the lines, chatting with customers and posing for selfies with fans who are thrilled to meet the Crawfish Monica.)
It’s been more than 40 years since Davidson and Hilzim’s first appearance at Jazz Fest, a distance that Davidson, with a rueful smile, can hardly believe. “I was five when we started,” she joked.
In their first booth back in 1983, Crawfish Monica wasn’t on the menu, though. Another vendor was selling a pasta item, so Davidson and Hilzim couldn’t. Instead, they offered a shrimp dish. “We didn’t have any idea what we were doing,” Davidson said. “We peeled 1,000 pounds of shrimp by hand. I remember thinking, ‘Gee, this is fun,’ but I love my husband.
“I think we made no money,” she added. “But in terms of experience, it was huge.”
Soon, Crawfish Monica would make its big public debut at the fest, and the rest is creamy crawfish sauce history.
“We feel very fortunate that we have been able to add a dish to the culinary lexicon of the great food city that is New Orleans,” Hilzim said via email.
Many languages, one famous sauce
Betty Crocker isn’t a real person. Neither are Juan Valdez, Lorna Doone or even Mrs. Dash.
But Crawfish Monica is the real deal, a charming woman who is much more than just the namesake of a famous pasta recipe. That said, “It is nice to be a dish,” Davidson joked.
Born in Chile, she speaks three languages — English, Spanish and French (“three and half” if you count the years she studied German in school, she joked during a Restaurants Unstoppable podcast interview) — and earned a degree in linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Davidson comes by languages naturally; her mother is Chilean; her father, American. During her childhood, she attended school in four countries before landing in San Francisco.
Davidson was working in Macy’s management training program when she met Hilzim, a New Orleans native. “He told me he was going to marry me on our first date, and I thought, ‘Oh really?’” she said with a laugh.
Hilzim’s prediction would eventually prove true when the couple said their “I Do’s” in the 1980s. Then, like a good New Orleans native, he persuaded his new bride to move back to his old hometown.
Soon, Hilzim launched a company, Kajun Kettle Foods, to sell fresh pasta to local restaurants, while Davidson earned an MBA from the University of New Orleans. To show off their pastas to prospective customers, they needed sauces, so Hilzim got to work on those as well.
“Pierre said to me one day, ‘You should work with me,’” Davidson said, laughing. “I thought, ‘That’s a terrible idea. People should never work with their spouses.’”
Nonetheless, Davidson would put her business degree to good use at Kajun Kettle. Hilzim ran the kitchen; Davidson handled the marketing and many other duties. She was the one who trademarked the Crawfish Monica name.
Together, the couple grew the business; at its height, the company offered “more than 100 ready-to-serve savory soups, sauces, entrees and side dishes to the restaurant industry — all named Monica’s, as in Monica’s Jambalaya Base and Monica’s Country Style White Beans,” according to a 2007 Times-Picayune article.
A restaurant for seven days each year
Operating a Jazz Fest food booth is like an epic drama that unfolds over seven days. The stage: a fast-paced kitchen environment that demands the highest-quality ingredients and precise execution but takes place in a soft-sided tent with a dirt floor. The weather is always an antagonist. Monsoon rains can turn the festival grounds into a mud wrestling ring.
Through it all, everyone keeps on cooking. “One of the areas back in the old booth, it got so hot you could lose a pound an hour sweating,” Davidson said, adding that Hilzim now installs an exhaust system to keep everyone from passing out. “It’s no longer a weight loss center,” she joked.
And then there are the perks. Before the festival gates even open, you might get to hear a megastar rehearse his entire act with nary a soul blocking your view.
Preparations for the festival begin in January for Davidson and Hilzim’s Big River Foods — the company they created for the festival operation. Twenty-two people work in the booth, including both their daughters, their attorney and scores of friends.
The good stuff is made from scratch on-site. Hilzim arrives early — often 7am — to get things going, and Davidson comes a little later to bring any supplies that they may have forgotten.
In the early days, Hilzim set up a line of burners inside the tent, but today, the batches are all made in big tilt skillets, Davidson said. (As the name implies, these commercial devices can cook large batches of food and then tilt to efficiently — and safely — transfer the hot stuff into other containers.)
Over the decades, Crawfish Monica — like Mango Freeze — has become synonymous with Jazz Fest. And writers far and wide have tried to boil its essence down to words, since the real recipe is a closely guarded secret.
A quick Google search for “Crawfish Monica recipe” dredges up thousands of results — none of which have the actual technique, not even the one that claimed to be “Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Crawfish Monica Recipe.” The acclaimed chef, now deceased, was a friend of Hilzim and Davidson; but no, he didn’t create the dish.
Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Pope John Paul II are among the notable names who have scooped up some Crawfish Monica, as have Bill Murray and Francis Ford Coppola.
The recipe remains a secret, but in a 2015 video at Jazz Fest with Ann Maloney—now a Rouses Magazine contributor and then a Times-Picayune editor—Hilzim described Crawfish Monica this way: ‘It’s a spiced cream reduction sauce, with heavy cream and a lot of other good, yummy things, and we add to that crawfish—Louisiana crawfish, of course!’
See the recipe for Almost Crawfish Monica on page XX.
