"new orleans food" news and stories

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, eating in New Orleans is definitely not the same. Quite possibly, it's better. "I'd argue that our restaurants are better today than before," says Brett Anderson, restaurant critic for the city's paper, the Times Picayune. "It has a lot to do with the remarkable number and quality of new places that were unimaginable before September or October [of 2005]."

Eating in New Orleans is geographically specific like in no other American city. And where there is eating, there is passion -- passion about the food, passion about the region, and passion about the neighborhood. "We have a tradition of eating in neighborhood restaurants," notes Anderson. Willie Mae's Scotch House, famous for its fried chicken, could only exist within the fabled streets of Treme, just as the Creole stronghold Antoine's is unimaginable anywhere but among the genteel blocks of the French Quarter.

Since Hurricane Katrina, only a handful of the best neighborhood spots haven't reopened, and it seems that for every one shuttered, two or three new ones have moved in. Among those Anderson names as the best are Coquette, an Uptown wine bar and bistro; the nationally renowned pork paradise Cochon; Mahoney's, a new po' boy shop ("It's not easy to make po' boys in this town and get noticed," attests Anderson); and Boucherie, a crew of young chefs reinventing Southern food (think Krispy Kreme bread pudding). "It's also the small things," Anderson says, "now, New Orleans is a better place to get Italian. You can get really high quality meats and better sandwiches."

• The Big Easy is making its way to a big comeback.
• Where does Vietnamese food meet Cajun? In Atlanta, it would seem.
• Donatella's coming out with a cookbook, a TV show, and a food collection. (No, not that Donatella.)
• The Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges hits the Upper East Side mark.
• Mark Bittman proves that springtime can be bitter, if you just have enough escarole.

New Orleans is America's original foodie mecca. In the 1700s, there was already a 400 vendor farmers' market in the center of town (on the site of the current French Market). By the 1800s, cookbooks were being published here long before the rest of America, like the local newspaper's anthology recently reprinted as 'The Times-Picayune's Creole Cook-book'. "Our cuisine is 25% French, 25% Spanish and 50% African – the French and Spanish influenced the food, but it was the Africans who largely cooked it," explains Tom Fitzmorris, author of "Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans", "It's a creole cuisine in every sense of the word." (Creole is derived from the Spanish criollo or 'native')

Several different factors influenced the eclectic tastes of New Orleans. Firstly, it was a port city throbbing with newcomers from across the world. "People don't realize that in the 18th and 19th centuries, we had more immigrants coming through our port than they did in New York," food guru Poppy Tooker explains. Those new arrivals couldn't scatter into self-defined ethnic enclaves as they did in Chicago or San Francisco either. "Look at our geography, wedged between [Lake] Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, there's not a lot of room to expand," notes Kelly Hamilton, who leads food tours around the city. Settlers clubbed together to cook and so produced hybrids of the foods they'd eaten back home.

Read our "only in New Orleans" list after the jump...

Our friends over at Blogging New Orleans hung out at the New Orleans Jazz Fest this week, and mixed in with the reports of concerts by people like Harry Connick, Jr. and Dottie Peoples and a wild-haired John Mayer are reports on what the food was like.

Pictured above is the Indian Taco that Kelly had, and that looks tasty. Meanwhile, Mike had the boiled crawfish and the soft-shell crab po-boy. Wow, that looks...interesting.

Kelly also had a plate full of this, which I probably wouldn't try in a million years, but then I'm not a seafood guy.

The author of Tom Fitzmorris's New Orleans Food: More than 225 of the City's Best Recipes to Cook at Home, Tom Fitzmorris, was actually born on Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which certainly gets him brownie points in terms of heritage and, although that birth date didn't come with any guarantees, Fitzmorris certainly knows his stuff with it comes to NOLA foods. He is one of the leading food writers (if not the leading one) and restaurant critics in the area and runs the New Orleans Menu website that keeps tabs on the reopenings of restaurants in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

Getting back to the book, it has a great collection of food favorites from Crescent City. Most have been updated to suit modern tastes and to cater to some more modern food trends (small plates, for example), the dishes are basically staples of the area, the types of food that residents already know and love. Drago's Charbroiled Oysters and Cajun Smothered Duck are two of the more regionally-familiar recipes, while everyone will recognize Bananas Foster and Beignets. Whether you're interested in trying New Orleans' cuisine for the first time or are already a fan, you probably can't go too far wrong with this volume.

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