For 47 years, the chicken at Cajun’s has been a South Mississippi staple

Fried chicken, biscuits and dinner rolls glistened with oil and butter under the heat lamps as locals slid trays down the buffet line, pausing for sides until their plates disappeared beneath Cajun rice and red beans.

The lunch crowd — mostly gray-haired, save for a few stiff cowboy hats — settled into tables and booths, the same seats they’d claimed for years. Some conversed over diet colas and plates doused with Louisiana Hot Sauce; others sat comfortably alone, content in their own company. Nancy Sinatra, then Patsy Cline, played from the speakers, singing stories of failed love.

Perhaps over the years, time skipped past Cajun’s Fabulous Fried Chicken — and yes, it is quite fabulous — in Gulfport. That still seems true today, even as the Gulf Coast rapidly grows in both population and development, including new offices and boutiques neighboring the restaurant.

Owner Tom Harvey, who opened the first shop in 1979 with his father, seems to recognize his own resistance to change. For the first two or three years, his wife, Patricia, mixed the spices by hand until they finally agreed to get a machine — a decision that came only after many discussions, they said, laughing together in a lemon yellow booth.

Just over a month ago, chicken tenders were added to the menu, the first addition in years. That, too, required its own fair share of convincing.

In a world of debit cards and mobile payments, the chicken shop accepts cash only. And don’t get your hopes up: That is unlikely to change any time soon.

While little has changed inside the restaurant, the opening of Cajun’s itself was part of a larger shift in South Mississippi, as it was among the first restaurants to bring Cajun food to the Coast.

Back when Tom Harvey and his father opened their first storefront in Biloxi’s Edgewater Village, étouffée appeared on the menu — a dish customers didn’t even know how to pronounce. Today, Cajun food stretches well beyond Louisiana’s bayous and the sole of its boot, into neighboring states like Mississippi.

But the Harveys, who had never been in the restaurant business, didn’t open Cajun’s with that mission in mind. Their reasoning, in fact, was rather simple.

“We like to eat fried chicken,” Tom Harvey said.

As a New Orleans architect designed the building, the family perfected the fried chicken. Tom Harvey, along with his father, his wife and anyone willing to taste-test, spent about a year making and mixing spices for recipes that have remained unchanged for 47 years.

“We wore our friends and family out on fried chicken,” Patricia Harvey said.

The restaurant started as a takeout place, pairing its main dish with Cajun rice before transitioning to a buffet in 1982. That was around the same time Cajun’s was expanding across the Coast, with storefronts in D’Iberville, Pass Christian and Ocean Springs, before franchising in 1989. The first out-of-state store opened in Baton Rouge, followed by locations in Florida and Alabama.

Those shops are no longer around. The Harveys stopped franchising after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the original Cajun’s. When they returned after the storm, little remained. A single gaslight stood amid the wreckage, spewing gas onto the ground.

The only Cajun’s now sits along Pass Road in Gulfport, where carrots are peeled, cabbage is cut and red beans simmer before the doors open to a line of customers at 10:30 a.m. If they’ve been coming long enough, they know the menu will be the same as it was yesterday — and the year before.

That’s because Tom Harvey’s philosophy on the food is as simple as the reason he opened Cajun’s in the first place.

“If something’s not selling real good,” he said, “Something’s wrong with the recipe.”

His favorite dish on the menu is the fried chicken. Patricia Harvey, meanwhile, favors nearly everything, from the brownies topped with ice cream to the coleslaw and fried fish. Unlike many restaurants along the Coast, the fish doesn’t come from the Mississippi River or the Gulf. Instead, it’s an Alaskan deep-water fish, caught in “the Gulf of Alaska, I guess,” Tom Harvey said with a hint of dry wit.

Cajun’s old commercial jingle, which once rang from televisions across Mississippi, had its own opinion: “Red beans and rice, they taste so nice and our biscuits can’t be beat. It’s the greatest fried chicken in the whole wide world.”

It’s hard to say what the rest of the world has to offer when it comes to fried chicken. No longer confined to the South, the delicacy now appears in nearly every corner of the globe. Popeyes can even be found on the streets of London and Paris — telling signs that the times have indeed changed for fried chicken.

But along the side of the road in Gulfport, you’ll still find some of the South’s greatest.

This story was originally published February 25, 2026 at 2:24 PM.