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Gheens, La. (AP) -- Vicki Guillot has served her last seafood
po-boy.


      The local bounty of fresh shrimp and oysters that once kept the
only restaurant in this rural Louisiana town bustling can no longer
be culled from the Gulf of Mexico because of the massive oil spill
that has fouled the water.


      All her distributors can offer her now is imported shrimp at
twice the price she was paying 10 weeks ago before an oil rig
explosion triggered the disaster that has dumped millions of
gallons of crude off the Gulf Coast.


      "The last price I got from him was for imported shrimp, and I
said, 'No thank you,"' Guillot said Thursday. "Our waters are all
around here, our boys fished all the time. To buy imported?"


      Then, she shook her head from side to side as she broke down in
tears in the kitchen of Debbie's Cafe.


      Guillot, 49, had to close the restaurant for good Tuesday after
just six months in business.


      She said she battered her own shrimp and fried her own fish. But
now there's no more batter, no more frying oil where Guillot and
her family served up sandwiches, ice cream and ice snowballs seven
days a week to loyal customers in the town of mostly commercial
fishing families.


      Guillot is one of a slew of small business owners who rely on
the Gulf waters for fresh seafood. But with more than 70,000 square
miles of those waters closed to fishing since the spill, the well
that kept the businesses running is running dry.


      Larger restaurants are able to maintain their seafood stocks,
but at a price.


      "We are a strong player in the market," said Tommy
Cvitanovich, owner of famed Drago's Seafood Restaurant in Metairie,
a New Orleans suburb. "I've got a few more cards to play with some
other people."


      Nevertheless, Cvitanovich says the price he pays for Gulf
oysters has nearly doubled since the spill. He pledges not to pass
those price increases along to customers, but may remove some
oyster dishes from his menu.


      Meanwhile, he says if prices continue to rise, more and more
restaurants will be forced to drop the Louisiana staple from their
menus.


      "Oysters have reached the ceiling," Cvitanovich says. "At
some point, restaurateurs or consumers will only pay so much."


      At Zydeco's Cajun Restaurant in Belle Chasse, owner Raelynn
Scott pulled shrimp from her menu a week ago and put an end to the
restaurant's all-you-can-eat shrimp special.


      When she can get shrimp, Scott says the cost has increased by
more than 50 percent. The restaurant has raised the prices of some
seafood dishes.


      "We pretty much ate the cost for about a month and finally had
to make some adjustments temporarily," Scott said.


      None of that matters anymore back at Debbie's, where the paper
menu still hangs on the wall next to the idle cash register.


      As a small restaurant - the yellow, narrow building at the
center of town only has one table inside - Guillot has no leverage
with seafood distributors. Near the end, she made po-boys with
shrimp from her own home freezer.


      "When I knew I couldn't get the seafood like I wanted, it
brought my business down," Guillot said. "For everything that you
need to have in a business, I would have been working in here for
nothing, and I didn't want to do it anymore.


      Then, she locked the front door of the restaurant - adorned with
a sign that reads "Welcome Friends" - one last time.

Gallery

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Photo timeline of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill crisis

Disasters

Vicki Guilloi shut down her rural Louisiana restaurant Tuesday after the BP oil spill forced her to buy imported seafood -- which is twice as expensive as local fare.

No Gulf seafood, no po-boys; owner shuts La. cafe

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