Fired Up to Grill
Tommy Cvitanovich, son of restaurant founder Drago Cvitanovich, grew up working in his family’s New Orleans restaurant. In 1993 he created their signature charbroiled oyster and has helped the family business grow to five restaurants, a catering company and their own private fishing fleet, all employing nearly 500 people. He serves on the Louisiana Restaurant Association, the National Restaurant Association and the Canadian Restaurant Association. And, he has a thing for firetrucks.
“I’m a restaurant brat,” says Tommy Cvitanovich, Owner/Manager of his family’s chain of seafood restaurants in New Orleans. “I grew up in one and always knew I was going to be a restaurateur and follow in my Mom and Dad’s footsteps. I went to college for six years, but I like to say I got a doctorate degree in ‘Daddy.’” In fact, 92 year old Drago still makes appearances at the restaurant he started with his wife in 1969.
“I know my way around a kitchen and consider myself a really good cook, but not a trained chef,’ Tommy says. “One day I said, ‘Wonder what would happen if we did this, this and this?’ and I came up with a butter sauce and the idea to charbroil oysters. It was delicious. I just got lucky, simple as that.”
“We use a butter and margarine sauce with chopped garlic and just a little Italian seasoning and Parmesan and Romano cheese. Then we throw the oyster in the half shell onto the hot grill and douse it in sauce. In our restaurants we currently go through anywhere between 100 and 150 gallons of this butter garlic sauce a day. And this year we expect to go through over four million oysters.
When you see how we grill our oysters, you’ll see that a fire truck is natural. Even with a grill, we cook with a lot of flames. We put our Crown Verity grill on high, put the oysters on the half shell onto it and douse them with gallons of butter. That causes flames and you spray it with water creating more flames, more smoke. So when you see us cooking, you think, ‘Uh oh, is there a fire?’ So what comes with a fire? A fire truck.”
Our truck has not only a Crown Verity grill on the back, it has two large high definition TVs, beer taps and an ice-cold Jägermeister machine. Whenever we have an opportunity to put it in the public eye, we do. It even rolls in certain Mardi Gras parades.
Hey, every boy has a fascination for fire trucks. I don’t golf. I don’t hunt. I don’t fish. I love to have fun and attend parties. I’m into tailgating and I’ve got a thing for fire trucks. We also have another mobile kitchen we call the EMS truck (‘Eat More Seafood’), two offsite catering trailers and three large delivery trucks. I think we probably have somewhere between seven or eight Crown Verity grills we’re currently working with right now. We’re rougher than rough on those grills. We’re not like most caterers, where we cook a few burgers or a couple of steaks here and there. We cook thousands and thousands of oysters on these grills, so we need something that’s going to be durable and heavy duty.
More importantly, they need to be able to sustain the heat and the butter and the water together. You have something that’s super hot and every time you spray it with cold water, you’re affecting the metal, it’s expanding and contracting. We’ve gone through a few grills, but we beat the hell out of them, banging them around on the trucks. We’ve tried other grills. We use Crown Verity because they’re tough and they work.
At the end of the day, people come back to my restaurant because they get a good meal, good value and good service. So they come back. Same thing with Crown Verity. We get a good grill with good value. And when we need another one, we buy it. We could just as easily go to another company if we wanted to, but we don’t. We’re a satisfied customer and we come back.”
Check out Tommy C’s oyster charbroiling guide here or head over to the Drago’s restaurant website to check out the full menu!
