Louisiana Joe's in Oceanside gears up for Mardi Gras

In New Orleans, Mardi Gras is celebrated with parties and parades. On Long Island, the eateries do the heavy lifting, dishing out epic portions of gumbo and jambalaya, po'boys and muffulettas.

Louisiana Joe’s Sandwich Shop barely recovered from Super Bowl (a huge catering day) before gearing up for its busiest day of the year: This year, Mardi Gras falls on Feb. 17, a scant nine days after The Big Game.

There are bigger and older New Orleans-style restaurants (Big Daddy’s in Massapequa, Blackbird’s Grille in Sayville), but none better than Joe LoSchiavo and Terry Hanna’s tiny breakfast-lunch spot. When the two opened it in 2015, "we thought we had a good idea because there wasn’t a lot of Cajun food around," LoSchiavo said.

Eleven years later, there is significantly less Cajun food around — among Joe’s fallen comrades are Biscuits & Barbeque in Mineola, RS Jones and Bayou Jones in Merrick, The Bayou in North Bellmore, Mara’s in Syosset and Storyville in Huntington — and it’s clear that what has kept Louisiana Joe’s busy is not the concept but the execution.

This is the rare restaurant where both the owners are in the kitchen all the time. LoSchiavo and Hanna arrive around 4:30 a.m. to start prepping which, depending on the day, might involve making a batch of peanut butter cookies or stewing red beans with andouille sausage or smoking a few racks of ribs.

LoSchiavo butchers his own meat and, increasingly, produces his own charcuterie. "It’s a weird cheffy thing I do," he said. "But it’s also more profitable than bringing stuff in." He wasn’t happy with the bacon he was getting — too much variation in quality and in the proportion of fat to lean — so he cures and smokes his own. The cost of shipping boudin sausage from his preferred Louisiana purveyor got so expensive, he began making it. He’s an old hand at sausage making, having long ago perfected his recipe for a suave, sage-forward breakfast sausage.

Many of these treasures wind up as specials, while the regular menu includes all the regular suspects: gumbos with chicken or shrimp and sausage, jambalaya, shrimp or crawfish étouffée, grits with shrimp or smothered catfish — none of which cost more than $17. But Joe’s is, nominally, a sandwich shop and it goes hard on the cold-cut-and-olive-salad extravaganza muffuletta and po'boys (shrimp, catfish, crabcake, crawfish, pork belly, blackened chicken, roast beef) as well as sandwiches that are not strictly Louisiana style.

Among panini are a "Cajun Cuban" with roast pork, chorizo, pickles and Swiss cheese, and a triple-pork specimen that features braised shoulder, belly and bacon with provolone and garlic mayo. There’s a hero of house-roasted beef blanketed with mozzarella and what’s known here as "debris brown gravy" — it’s the leftover braising liquid from the short ribs that feature in the French dip on garlic bread. Or have a piece of Southern fried chicken with ham, Swiss and honey-mustard on toasted country white bread — or a grilled chicken-avocado wrap or a blackened catfish wrap. (Sandwiches range from $10.99 to $15.99.)

Fries are a must-order. Hand cut and fried to a deep mahogany, they come plain, seasoned, topped with brisket or cheese, or smothered with cheese, chorizo and "bayou" sauce or inundated with gumbo. The same sense of delicious excess is also applied to mac-and-cheese, which can be topped with anything from Buffalo chicken to brisket.

Between all the sandwiches, heros, panini and po'boys, the shop goes through a lot of bread, and any odd bits are cubed and encouraged to dry out in a big box that Hanna has labeled "bread puddin. " Periodically she will transform them into individual puddings (plain, banana and French-vanilla coffee) that provide the perfect ending to a Louisiana Joe’s meal — if you can manage one more bite.

Louisiana Joe’s Sandwich Shop, 488 Merrick Rd., Oceanside, 516-442-9839, louisianajoes.com. Open Tuesday to Saturday 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.