The fried okra po' boy is the proof that the po' boy is a structure, not a meat. Drop the fried shrimp or the gravy-soaked roast beef and put fried okra in its place and the sandwich still works, because the thing that makes a po' boy a po' boy was never the protein. It is the bread and the dressing, and okra slots into that grammar cleanly. This is the vegetarian reading of the format: a Louisiana sandwich that gives up the boat entirely and still obeys every other rule the po' boy lives by.
The craft starts with the loaf, because that is what the whole format is built on. New Orleans French bread has a thin, glass-crackly crust and an interior so airy it is nearly hollow, and that bread shatters cleanly on the bite instead of fighting back, so a fragile fried filling is never crushed and a foot of it stays light enough to finish. Okra is the right fit for it: cut into rounds, soaked in buttermilk, and dredged in seasoned cornmeal, it fries into a sandy, crunchy crust around a soft pod, the same cornmeal logic the fried catfish leans on, made vegetarian. The okra has to be fried hot and fast so the shell sets before the pod inside goes slick, and it goes into the loaf in a generous pile because individual rounds need volume to read as a filling rather than a scatter. Dressed is the po' boy's fixed instruction and it applies unchanged: shredded lettuce, tomato, pickle, and mayonnaise, applied as a system that adds cool and acid without soaking the airy crumb, often with a remoulade standing in for the mayonnaise to give the okra a sharper counter. It is fried to order and eaten fast, because the crust softens and the loaf gives once the filling steams.
The variations stay inside that dressed-loaf, fried-vegetable frame. A mixed-vegetable build adds fried green tomato or eggplant to the okra; a remoulade-heavy version leans the sauce sharper against the pod's mild interior; a debris-style vegetarian gravy soaks the loaf the way the roast beef version does. Each of those is its own codified reading and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.