AT RESTAURANT, ALLIGATOR NOT JUST ON MENU; FELIX THE ALLIGATOR FINICKY ABOUT FOOD

Felix VII's home is 48 inches long and 13 inches wide. The floor is covered with water, and loud rock 'n' roll and blues plays until all hours of the night. But Felix is implacable. Strangers are forever pecking at his window and wondering, "Is he real or is he stuffed?"

Felix is real. Ask the two bar patrons who picked him up a few weeks back and got bloodied for their trouble. Like all good alligators, Felix bites.

But Felix, the seventh in the line of Felixes who have held the position of pet alligator at Broussard's Cajun eatery in downtown Cape Girardeau, is a picky eater.

The early Felixes that came from a Louisiana alligator farm gorged themselves on leftover chicken from the kitchen. The past two Felixes hailed from a pet shop in Nashville, and for some reason turned up their snouts at dead meat.

When they arrived, the alligator menu at Broussard's changed to live white mice and goldfish, hold the red beans and rice.

The people menu at Broussard's offers fried alligator, meanwhile, either as an appetizer or in a full dinner.

Which brings up the current Felix and his dietary habits. Last fall, when the pet store ran out of white mice, restaurant manager Dionne Chaudoir-Hoffmeister presented Felix with a black one instead.

Felix utterly refused to eat the black mouse. Chaudoir-Hoffmeister tried the starvation approach. "I didn't bring him any mice for two weeks," she said. "I figured if he gets hungry enough he'll eat him."

That didn't work. Thinking perhaps Felix was just tired of mouse, she brought him another as a test. That mouse, a white one, disappeared within five minutes.

For whatever reason, Felix wasn't going to eat that black mouse.

As Chaudoir-Hoffmeister describes it, they looked more like pals than dinner and diner. "They'd snuggle up together," she said. "And the mouse would use him as a bridge."

Eventually, the restaurant staff was dropping lettuce and cheese in the tank for Felix's new roommate. Eventually, the black mouse moved back to the pet store.

"We decided it was not a good idea to have a mouse in a restaurant," Chaudoir-Hoffmeister said.

Because the white mouse supply comes and goes, Felix's current diet consists exclusively of 30 goldfish per week.

At more than two feet long and going on a year old, Felix VII and his 55-gallon tank are a snug fit. He stays in shape by running around the bar floor after hours.

In the past, the restaurant's gators were shipped back to the alligator farm once they got too big for petting and Polaroids, a nice little gimmick for the restaurant. Those babies could still bite, but "it felt like a puppy..." says Chaudoir-Hoffmeister.

A few years back, however, the health department called off the Felixes' outings during restaurant hours. The government said touching Felix before dining presented a danger of salmonella poisoning.

Finicky.