New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp Is Bold, Buttery, And Bursting With Creole Flavor

If you stop by Pascal’s Manale while in New Orleans and don’t try their barbecue shrimp, can you say you’ve even been to the Crescent City? The iconic Italian-Creole restaurant, which joined the Brennan & Co. family of restaurants in 2023, has had this regional specialty on the menu since the 1950s.

The name has nothing to do with barbecue or even a grill. It’s instead a tribute to the shrimp’s reddish-brown tint, the result of many spices and herbs cooking in the loads of butter and Worcestershire sauce. In New Orleans, you’d never find barbecue shrimp without shells and heads. Cooking the shrimp with heads on is a wonderful way to impart an intense shrimp flavor to the sauce. Outside of the Big Easy, however, finding fresh, head-on shrimp can be a little tricky, so even just unpeeled shrimp will be great.

Our barbecue shrimp recipe takes a lighter hand with the Worcestershire sauce and butter than some other versions. It is certainly forward in flavor but is still much lighter than many barbecue shrimp dishes out there (while still calling for a half cup of butter). But the butter is the key to taming the generous amount of cayenne pepper and black pepper, both essential to the dish’s authentic flavor. The sauce by itself is great, but the shell-on shrimp transform it with a wonderfully bright and salty depth.

Recipe Tips From The Test Kitchen

• In Step 2, the reduced sauce is going to look over-reduced but that’s ok. Once the shrimp are added, the sauce will stop reducing. The butter is going to add a lot of volume to the sauce as well. It really transforms!
• It’s kind of hard to tell the doneness of the shrimp because of the tail, but to check, feel free to remove the skillet from the heat and cut one of the shrimp in half.
• Cold butter is important for an emulsified sauce. It doesn’t need to be added gradually but it has to be cold so the fat slowly disperses into the sauce, creating a stable emulsion. 
• Feel free to add 1 teaspoon of chopped fresh oregano along with the thyme; a lot of traditional recipes call for it.