To sample some of Lafayette, Louisiana's best Cajun-style barbecue, just sneak your way backstage at the Festival International de Louisiane and call out "Bubba." Before you know it, guys with heaping plates of étouffée will surround you. Don't be alarmed. The Bubbas--a group of 100 amateur chefs and their crew--come in peace to cook up Cajun cuisine and a whole mess of fun.

Every April, downtown Lafayette attracts musicians and artists from the Francophone (French-speaking) world for five days of exotic music and flavorful foods. Jeff Moss, the founding Bubba, rounded up his cooking coterie in 1987 after attending the first Festival International and seeing the entertainers dining on fast food, fried chicken, or cold sandwiches in the hospitality suite. "I said, 'Man, we're treating our guests this way. That's horrible. These people ought to be tasting food from South Louisiana,' " says Jeff, then chairman of the Downtown Development Authority that helped plan the event.

So the call went out to friends who knew a thing or two about cooking Louisiana barbecue. Eventually, the crew grew to 100 outdoor cooks. While Jeff welcomed all the volunteers, he had a hard time keeping track of them. "At some point, I certainly couldn't remember all of them. So I started calling them 'Bubba,' " he says.

In the tradition of fraternities, this Cajun-cooking club has a pecking order. The Bubbas each get a badge with a number identifying them by rank--from 1 to 100. The guys who've been at it the longest get the lowest numbers. These are the "Pot Bubbas," who man one of the group's many pots and make calls such as how much cayenne pepper to add to a dish. The newbies, say Bubba 88 or Bubba 100, often spend their shifts scrubbing pots, chopping vegetables, and bringing beer to their superiors.