From the New York Times:
IT is the siren call of a magnificent, broken city: “This, here, is the real New Orleans.”
Spend any time sweating through a shirt and walking slow and purposeful along Magazine Street toward a Sazerac before dinner, and you’ll hear the cry, in this bar or that one. You’ll hear it on the radio, driving the high-rise bridge over the Industrial Canal, someone spinning funk on WWOZ and talking about New Orleans soul. You’ll see it in the defiant eyes of a man lurching out of a second line in Pigeon Town.
....
I walked through crowds in the French Quarter to a meal of oysters Rockefeller and crab Yvonne at Galatoire’s, and along the barren streets south of Lake Pontchartrain to another of po’ boys amid crowds at the Parkway Bakery.
There was plenty to sample — there are roughly 1,000 restaurants in New Orleans now, up a cool couple of hundred from before the storm, according to The New Orleans Menu, a Web site dedicated to the subject that is run by Tom Fitzmorris.
....
And for a critic on the prowl for an authentic taste of the city in full springtime bloom, surprises abounded. One of the most purely joyful and purely New Orleans restaurants of the moment is Emeril’s, a place run by a television chef who was born in Fall River, Mass., and lives mostly in New York City. Another, Cochon, is devoted not to the Creole cosmopolitanism of the city center, but to the Cajun traditions of the bayous and backwaters outside of town, in the tidal soup of southern Louisiana.
And a third group of genuine, true-to-type New Orleans restaurants that sit near this city’s culinary heart is not Southern at all, but Vietnamese.
Read the rest of the article at the NYT, and you'll be salivating. Great food in New Orleans is back with a bang, back better than ever. I've never sampled Vietnamese food, but I've dined at a good many of the restaurants mentioned in the article, although I've not been to the new Emeril's yet.
Interesting surprise to see that Emeril Lagasse's restaurant is good. I only know him from his Food Channel programmes, where I'd formed the impression that he is something of a d-ck.
ReplyDelete["Duck", obviously].
Lapin, as you see from the article, some folks thought he had abandoned New Orleans. He's full of himself and a showman, but he can cook. His Delmonico's is very good dining.
ReplyDeleteI've never sampled Vietnamese food
ReplyDeleteMimi, cher: what are you waiting for?
[Anticipating dining soon at my dad's favorite restaurant in my hometown of Sacramento---"Lemongrass", Vietnamese---when I move home in a month. If a 90 year-old white guy can love it, what have you to be afraid of? ;-/ P.S. PLEASE pray for me, as I move! :-0]
JCF, I'm not afraid of Vietnamese food. I've just never eaten it. We should try.
ReplyDeletePrayers for your move, luv. Moving is a bitch.
Oh yes- Vietnamese- one of our favorites. Pho (pronounced phuh) is a lovely lunch
ReplyDeleteWe have a local Vietnamese restaurant that is lovely. The flavors are often very subtle, with a hint of France. Pho is wonderful basic food--a broth fragrant with warm spices, fresh veggies.
ReplyDeleteBut this made me remember years and years ago--like 35--when my parents went to New Orleans several times a deux. Being from the Bay Area, they are total foodies, and would come home with beignet mix and chicory coffee and tales of oysters and Antoine's and late nights at Preservation Hall.
The Vietnamese restaurants seem to be clustered in Gretna, La., which is on our side of the river and would be easier for us to get to.
ReplyDeleteIT, the story of your parents' trips to New Orleans is lovely. Oysters, Antoine's, and Preservation Hall. What more could you ask for?
Mimi ... Delmonico's is my favorite of the Nawluns restaurants I know.
ReplyDeleteI hope you'll try Vietnamese. I love it. There was a wonderful little place in our old neighborhood where we ate dinner 2-3 times a week. The woman who ran it and did the cooking grew many of the specialty vegetables in her garden at home. She is a true artist in the kitchen. She often cooked off-menu items just for us.
I hate to be a downer about all this, but . . . what will be the future of oysters abd crabs once the oil slick hits the coast?
ReplyDeleteOrmonde, my second post in line is about the oil approaching the Louisiana coast.
ReplyDelete