When Life Gives You Lemons, Throw 'Em In The Pot

By David W. Brown

His name is Larry Thompson, but you probably know him as Mr. Shrimp. In the last few months, his seafood pop-ups have become must-see (and taste) events at Rouses Market on Tchoupitoulas in Uptown New Orleans. His Throw It in the Pot seafood boil appeared in select markets and then disappeared, as people just couldn’t get enough of it. Today he is in recovery mode from Hurricane Ida, which wiped out his capacity to make the seasoning and rendered his house unlivable. He’s not giving up, though—the man is tenacious and knows how to work—and is working with Rouses Markets to keep “feeding the people,” as he likes to say.

Pre-Ida, Mr. Shrimp might have seemed like an overnight success, but Thompson has been in the culinary industry his whole life. He started at the House of Blues, where the chefs hired him to work as a dishwasher. He was 13. Soon after, he was promoted to prep cook—a job that opened the door to his next job, at Semolina’s. He worked there during his high school years. The restaurant enrolled the future Mr. Shrimp in classes that covered everything that involved cooking.

He went from dishwasher to pantry to sauté station to grill to key supervisor, and then a manager—a job that involved yet more training on how to run both the front and back of the house. Over the years, he would also work at Macaroni Grill, Margaritaville, and Chili’s.

The next phase of his career began in 2019 while he acted as caretaker for his father, who had lung cancer. His dad was a former Marine—”a real tough guy,” Thompson says—who loved his son’s cooking, and always enjoyed having full meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “When it came to lunch, he always wanted seafood—fish, shrimp—he wanted the works! And one day I was cooking it for him, and he said, ‘Wow, I’ve been all over the world and I never knew the best cook came out of me!’ I thought he was just telling me that because I’m his son.”

After his father died, Thompson considered opening a restaurant, and linked up with local fishermen. (His shrimp comes strictly from the Gulf of Mexico.) Once he saw the quality of the shrimp, which included a lesscommon extra colossal variety, his plans changed slightly. He decided to become a wholesaler and sell the shrimp as part of a home and business delivery service.

He had the training and experience from the restaurant industry. The transportation part of his background came from his father, who was a truck driver for the federal government. “I had both of those things: the cooking and the transportation part, and that’s how we got here.”

Mr. Shrimp and his family from left to right: Keia’ly Thompson, Lawrence Thompson, Larry Thompson, Keionne Thompson, and Kyron Sumler.

Photo by Channing Candies.

THE MR. SHRIMP EXPERIENCE

To get the word out, he started marketing his new shrimp business on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The Super Bowl in 2020 was when things went supernova. During halftime, he boiled his shrimp live on Facebook as a way to get people to buy them, and comments started flooding in—people could not get over their color and how appetizing they appeared. So, Thompson started hand delivering boiled shrimp, in addition to raw—and he did so with a twist. He called it the Mr. Shrimp Experience.

“If I came to your house with boiled shrimp, you had to taste it in front of me. I wanted the raw reaction—an on-the-spot review,” he says. The response was universal praise, and he asked people to write just what they had told him on the Mr. Shrimp Facebook page. Word of mouth grew, and soon people were asking specifically for the experience. Delivery was one thing, but how often does a business seem to really care what you think? “The idea was getting them the food, but everybody was gravitating to the personalized customer service,” says Thompson. People really got into it, raving about Mr. Shrimp on personal Facebook pages and groups such as Where Black NOLA Eats. “They were leaving long reviews—I’m talking reviews almost like a novel.”

The burgeoning online Mr. Shrimp family started making requests: could he do sides? Could he do boiled potatoes that tasted like the shrimp? Yes he could! And after that success, people started asking if he could do corn? Yes he could! Can you do sausage? Can you do turkey necks? Yes and yes! In fact, the turkey neck became so popular that people started asking if he could only deliver that. “That wasn’t my thing,” he says, “because me being Mr. Shrimp, I’ve got to bring you some shrimp!”

In April 2020, he got an email from Chef Marcus Jacobs at Marjie’s Grill on Broad Street in New Orleans. “He said, ‘I see you are delivering shrimp, but are you licensed to deliver to a restaurant?’ I said, ‘You are the first person to ask me that! Yes, I am licensed to deliver to homes and restaurants.’” They set up a meeting, and Marjie’s became the first—but certainly not the last—restaurant to carry Mr. Shrimp’s shrimp.

“I thank him every day,” says Thompson. “A lot of the restaurants I deliver to today are because of Marcus. They trust him, and they started trusting me.”

A REVELATION

A confluence of tragedy led to Mr. Shrimp seasoning. His wife, Keionne, was hospitalized when she was 21 weeks pregnant. She gave birth at 23 weeks. They lost the first twin, a boy, but the second survived—“He’s a miracle,” says Thompson—and for five months and two days, the family remained in the newborn intensive care unit.

The idea for Throw It in the Pot came to Thompson while staying at the hospital. One of his customers asked if Mr. Shrimp could somehow sell the flavor of the shrimp he had been delivering. It really stayed in the back of Thompson’s mind, and one night, he says, he had a revelation.

“God came to me and said, ‘Young man, I know you are tired, but the item you are boiling is going to take you far,’” Thompson recalls. “It was like somebody hit me with a baseball bat across my face.”

He created the product that would be Throw It in the Pot that morning.

The Throw it in the Pot Flavor Enhancer also emerged from prayer, and materialized yet again though a lot of hard work.

THROW IT IN THE POT

The team members at Rouses Markets are always on the lookout for great products from local entrepreneurs and found Mr. Shrimp very quickly. (“I was like, has Rouses been following me around?” Thompson laughed. “Little ol’ me? I’m just trying to feed the people!”) Within the month, Thompson did his first pop-up event, giving customers at Rouses Markets on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans the Mr. Shrimp Experience. Two weeks after that, Mr. Shrimp’s Throw It in the Pot was on select store shelves.

It was wildly successful, and Thompson and Rouses began working together to roll the product out to every Rouses location. Then Hurricane Ida came.

The storm did not spare Mr. Shrimp. Thompson lives in Estelle, Louisiana, not far from Jean Lafitte. He and his family evacuated to Dallas on August 28th. The hurricane arrived the next day, on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. From afar, there was an impending sense of dream as friends who had stayed behind reported that Thomson’s area was hit hard, but access was impossible. Government officials asked all people who had evacuated to stay away, and they did so. On September 3rd, they returned home.

“There were several holes in my main roof. There were several holes in my workshop where I do my work at and develop my product.” He immediately climbed on his roof and things looked even worse. He went in his house, and his fears were realized. “My house smelled awful, like somebody died in it,” he said. His attic was filled with water. The insulation was soaked. His garage was ruined and already developing mold. His master bedroom had water in the walls—“It looked like the walls were sweating,” he said—and his hallway was the same. His workshop was wet and mildewed due to water coming in from the ceiling. His machinery was destroyed as well. He did as much cleanup as he could with the remaining hours in the day. Power was out, and once the sun set, that would be it until morning.

Then hard rains arrived—a miserable setback for anyone with roof damage.

It got worse from there. His insurance company began robbing him blind. They said they wouldn’t cover any living expenses because there wasn’t a mandatory evacuation. FEMA deemed his house unlivable, and the adjuster actually said that despite all that, it wouldn’t be so bad because “It would be like camping,” Thompson recalls. “I said, ‘My wife is pregnant. I have a young son with a compromised lung, and we’ve already been through a lot. We need to do things faster.”

He went through all this before, after Hurricane Katrina. He calls the entire process “overwhelming.” Seventy percent of his house had to be gutted. The insurance company continues to give Thompson the runaround.

It goes without saying that his stock of Throw it in the Pot and flavor enhancers were ruined, and impossible to make until some semblance of recovery would arrive. The local seafood industry and fishermen that Thompson connects with buyers were likewise devastated in the weeks to follow.

Since then, the community has rallied to the Mr. Shrimp cause. A GoFundMe is ongoing, slowly inching toward its goal. As fishing resumes, Mr. Shrimp has again been able to get his shrimp back into homes and restaurants, and Thompson is slowly rebuilding his ability to make his Throw It in the Pot products, which will end up in more of Rouses Markets seafood departments in the months to come. Rouses Markets has partnered with Mr. Shrimp to have him cook for people in need in places like Chauvin, Dulac, and Thibodaux, and for first responders and soldiers in the Army National Guard. He has also been doing pop-ups at the Rouses Market on Tchoupitoulas in New Orleans.

“I’ve been going out there feeding people, trying to help people recover from this terrible devastation of a storm,” he said. “It’s been a piece of work, but my wife and my family, we are doing what we need to do. It’s been a lot. And I’m still trying to find a way to put a smile on a customer’s face.”

Despite this, the best days for Mr. Shrimp are ahead. To get Throw It in the Pot back on store shelves, he is looking at business locations to set up shop and get capacity to full strength. His partnership with Rouses Markets is strong and getting stronger. It is going to take time, but Thompson will do what it takes. He is grateful for how far Mr. Shrimp has gone, and hopeful about how far it might yet go.

“It has been a blessing to see, from 2019 to now, how far things have gone. The best is yet to come,” Mr. Shrimp says. “I really love what I do, and it’s the people who make me get up every day. It’s not work at all. It really isn’t.”