"po boy" news and stories

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...

In this month's issue of GQ magazine, food guru Alan Richman took a glossy, 8-page look at the food of New Orleans post-Katrina. The idea sounds like a good one, so why is the article so controversial? The problem is that the piece was not gushing, not exactly sentimental and, in parts, not accurate about the city and its food.

To date, the vast majority of the pieces about New Orleans have been stories of survival and of working to restore the city to its former state. People rebuild their homes and lives. Restaurants struggle to clean up, reopen and attract customers. Richman writes some about the touching, uplifting parts and the grassroots movements of people to get their lives back in order, but does not write exclusively about the uplifting parts, in fact stating that "New Orleans shouldn't exist," referring to it below-sea level elevation right on a vulnerable coastline. In another controversial assertion, he says that Cajuns originated in Canada, which is true, contrary to what some of his critics have said. However, Richman also states that he doesn't think Creoles ever really existed, but the term applied to a definite and large group of people in the city. He explains his position in the GQ podcast, by the way.