Oh La La
Seeking an expertly laminated French croissant? Or perhaps memories of a trip overseas have put you in the mood for a sleek ham and cheese sandwich layered with salted butter and briny-sweet pops of cornichon. Yet it is Sunday,…
Author: Jay Forman
Fresh Catch
Get ready to peel n’ eat – there is a new seafood spot in town. Seafood Sally’s swung its doors open this spring on Oak Street, welcoming a post-pandemic crush of New Orleanians looking to get their hands dirty…
Market Fresh
Situated along a commercial stretch of Veterans Boulevard is The Larder Gourmet Market + Eatery, an independent outpost surrounded by a sea of big box chains. Owned and operated by Alison Vega-Knoll and Chris Wilson (the former also owns…
Bowled Over
New Orleans is a melting pot in more ways than one. Like its music, the food often expresses itself through improvisation. Starting from a common point, chefs play with form, rolling in local influences and ingredients to spread the…
Hometown Heroes
Like restaurants nationwide in a year like no other, the Ella Brennan Lifetime Achievement Award has pivoted for 2021. This year, in lieu of a single individual receiving this year’s New Orleans Wine and Food Experience (NOWFE) honor, 13…
Spice is Right
Aficionados of Middle Eastern cuisine have a compelling option in Saj, a picturesque new restaurant on Magazine Street that opened quietly during the pandemic’s peak last summer. With its crisp, contemporary design featuring splashes of bold color and elegant tile,…
Thai Style
fdg Budsi’s Authentic Thai, a vibrant and buzzy newcomer in the Marigny, steps into two niches simultaneously. It is both unfamiliar (with a distinctively singular regional Thai menu) and rooted in the pleasures of home (i.e. the cooking that owner…
Hidden Gem
Most cities have their neighborhood joints, casual places where you can get a sandwich or splurge a bit more for an entrée. But only one has Chef Susan Spicer working the line, helping to come up with “Thank You Baby…
Table Talk: Market Fresh
Opening a new restaurant is never easy. Opening during a pandemic, well… Yet, throughout this crisis we’ve seen several startups take root across the pockmarked landscape of the New Orleans culinary scene. Among these is Cho Thai, a Thai restaurant…
Food Lovers Guide
New Orleans is a food town, with a dedicated population that holds on tightly to old favorite haunts, while embracing and celebrating new traditions and new faces. For our annual December list of restaurant, food and drink “bests,” our team…
Table Talk: Stoked and Smoked
If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that the little things matter. Food doesn’t need to be complicated to taste good. And few things exemplify this principal more than barbeque, where it is the quality of the ingredients and…
Table Talk: Food Flip
At the start of 2020, Mawi Tortillas was a company on the move. A successful family enterprise spearheaded by chef Will Avelar, Mawi’s focus was purveying fragrant corn tortillas served in an impressive collection of New Orleans restaurants. In January…
Spice Trade
On one hand, you could refer to Plume as a new Indian restaurant in Algiers. On another, you could say it is an expression of personal experiences born of travel and discovery during a long sojourn across India, as its…
A Gumbo of Flavor
New Orleans cuisine is often described as a melting pot where various influences converged to create a unique panoply of flavor. Typical descriptors fork broadly along two tines – Creole and Cajun. More generally, in toss-away phrasing, New Orleans cuisine…
Table Talk: Weathering the Storm
Saying the last several months have challenged restaurants to adapt would be an understatement. Some became mini-groceries and others battened down the hatches to wait things out. Others have been lost entirely. Alison Vega, the chef and owner of Station…
AVO, the Italian Tradition
Italian cuisine has always played an outsized role in the New Orleans restaurant landscape. Sicilian immigrants helped shape the mercantile history of the French Quarter in the late 19th century, contributing definitive local dishes like the Muffuletta as well as…
Junior’s Faces the Chaos
Tough times don’t create character, they reveal it. Just a few months after opening Junior’s, a neighborhood eatery on Harrison Avenue in Lakeview, the coronavirus delivered its devastating nationwide blow. Luckily for the team at Junior’s, owners Nick Hufft and…
Big Shot
Chinese-American cuisine strikes a resonant chord. Equal parts nostalgia, comfort and flavor, it has a particularly broad appeal. So what happens when you get a couple of guys with Link Group-experience who decide to do their own take on it?…
Going Greek
It’s not often that a new Greek restaurant opens in New Orleans, let alone one that elevates this cuisine to the level of fine dining. Rockrose, which opened last fall, steps gracefully into this niche. Here at the International House…
Jack Rose Blooms
It’s Carnival time once again. And should you be looking for a restaurant in which to celebrate, consider Jack Rose. With its prime time location in the Pontchartrain Hotel on the St. Charles parade route, Jack Rose also possesses an…
Ella Brennan Lifetime Achievement Award: John Folse
John Folse is a difficult guy to categorize. Is he a chef? Undoubtedly. He made a name for himself with Lafitte’s Landing, an ambitious Cajun restaurant in an out-of-the way spot capable of drawing customers in from far and wide.…
Bakery Bar Adventures
Looking to take a step off the beaten path? Then Bakery Bar belongs on your list of places to check out. Located in the Lower Garden District just a stone’s throw from the GNO Bridge, this savory/sweet mashup opened back…
Table Talk: Culture Connection
There are plenty of Vietnamese restaurants in New Orleans, but there is only one like the Em Trai Sandwich Company. Recently opened by chef and owner Tung Nguyen, Em Trai cleverly melds traditional Vietnamese, American barbecue and local poor boy…
Best of Dining
For our annual December list of restaurant, food and drink “bests,” our team of writers, plus our editorial staff, met with the difficult task of honoring a few of our favorites. The restaurants, people and places listed within mark some…
A Modern Presentation
Many sushi restaurants are cookie-cutter, offering interchangeable lists of the same sushi and sashimi choices. Perhaps they are differentiated by a selection of specialty rolls but, more often than not, one seems much like the other. This is most certainly…
Mastering the Fundamentals
Barbeque is a curious thing. It carries with it not just a method of cooking but also some serious cultural trappings. You don’t often see a restaurant spill out of its dining room to encompass patios, music stages, boat docks…
Coastal Mexican
Katrina had a profound effect on the restaurant scene in New Orleans. In the years that followed a profusion of establishments filled niches that were underrepresented or even non-existent. But it was about more than just places to eat; whenever…
A Fresh Taco Take
What happens when taco appreciation, culinary curiosity and entrepreneurship come together in a new restaurant concept? For Dinner Lab and Ace Hotel alum Brett Jones, the result is Barracuda. Already popular with families, hospitality types and millennials, this blink-and-you-miss-it Tchoupitoulas…
Best New Restaurants
Discussing food, cooking and restaurants is a part-time sport for New Orleanians. From breakfast to brunch, lunch to cocktail bites, dinner to late night eats and desserts, we’ve got a lot to talk about. Enjoy our selection of the best…
Korean Soul
If you’ve driven down St. Claude Avenue lately, chances are you’ve seen a crowd clustered around the corner of Music Street. They are waiting for seats at Morrow’s, a polished new restaurant serving classic New Orleans comfort food with a…
