Michael Murphy - Eat Dat New Orleans: A Guide to the Unique Food Culture of the Crescent City (Up-Dat-ed Edition)

: Kathleen Horn. Used with permission.

Copyright 2014, 2015 by Michael Murphy

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Eat Dat New Orleans

978-1-58157-317-6

978-1-58157-581-1 (e-book)

Dedicated to the spirit of New Orleans, which feeds me every day

Please bookmark your page before following any links.

Maryjane Rosas, chef at the Country Club, and Rik Slave, Cochon Butcher, wielding sharp instruments

To get to New Orleans, you dont pass through anywhere else.

Allen Toussaint

A t the risk of annoying every potential reader who doesnt live in or currently love New Orleans, Im going to open by stating when it comes to food, New Orleans is the greatest city in America. My provincial claim was recently echoed in Saveur magazine. Their cover and the issues theme was, New Orleans, the Best Food City in the Nation. The same month Bon Apptit had a one-page Q&A profile of Mario Batali. When asked to name his favorite food cities, he responded, I love Sydney, Melbourne, and Shanghai right now, and whats going on in Peru and on the Chilean coast. In the U.S., its New Orleans, hands down.

New York, San Francisco, Torontomany cities have great restaurants and big-name chefs, but New Orleans is a food culture. The people here will argue over where to get the best gumbo or the best po boy the way other cities will argue about the best sports teams. Just as you cannot be both a Yankees and Mets fan or a Carolina and Duke fan, you cant use Tabasco Pepper Sauce and Crystal Hot Sauce indiscriminately here. You have to choose sides.

While taping in New Orleans for his new TV show, The Layover, Anthony Bourdain said, There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Dont even try to compare it to anywhere else.

Chicago has a style of pizza, Philadelphia has cheese steaks, New England has its chowda, but no other city has such a wealth of indigenous dishes, like gumbo, beignets, jambalaya, Bananas Foster, touffe, pralines, po boys, muffuletta, Doberge cake, Oysters Rockefeller, bread pudding, crawfish pie, king cake, and red beans and rice (every Monday night).

There are food festivals in New Orleans practically every monthWine & Food Experience (May), Creole Tomato Festival (June), Louisiana Seafood Festival (October), Food Fest (March), Coolinary New Orleans (August), Oyster Festival (June), Po Boy Festival (October), Tales of the Cocktail (July), Roadfood Festival, Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, Treme Creole Gumbo Festival, Crawfish Festival.

The food tents are an integral part of the annual Jazz Fest, where there are long lines for crawfish Monica, cochon de lait po boys, and mango freezes. The French Quarter Fest is a music festival with $5 samplings from the great restaurants like Galatoires and K-Pauls. It also features a signature and award-winning dough boy by a local donut shop, Blue Dot Donuts. The Thai-style pulled pork dough boy is served only one weekend each year, after smoking for twelve hours in the Blue Dot owners backyardnever in the shop.

There are at least five cooking schoolsCrescent City Cooks, Langlois Culinary Crossroads, New Orleans Cooking Experience, New Orleans School of Cooking, and the Mardi Gras School of Cookingand each summer the one-hundred-year-old New Orleans Museum of Art offers cooking classes with name chefs included with the price of museum admission.

Tastebud Tours, Langlois Culinary Crossroads, Culinary History Tours, and Destination Kitchen are four of the growing number of food tours for visitors to the city. Clandestine New Orleans is my personal favorite because they create customized experiences.

New Orleans has nationally known TV chefs like Emeril BAM Lagasse, Paul Prudhomme, John Besh, and the late Justin I gar-own-tee Wilson plus two local radio shows devoted to food. Poppy Tooker has her twice-weekly Louisiana Eats, and Tom Fitzmorriss The Food Show breaks into ESPN for three hours each Monday through Friday.

Eat Dat will reveal the very unique food culture of New Orleans through its story-filled culinary history. There will be profiles of key restaurants, not all restaurants. There are 1,359 restaurants in New Orleans this week. Im pretty sure we are the only city that counts our restaurants each week. You can get the latest tally at Tom Fitzmorriss www.nomenu.com. To include all restaurants would require a book the size of the old two-volume Oxford English Dictionary.

Choices had to be made. I have chosen not to include any restaurants outside the city limits. There are many fine restaurants in Abita Springs, Bucktown, and Old Metarie. Moscas in Westego and Middendorfs Seafood in Akers definitely deserve mention.

Moscas was awarded the 99 James Beard Award as an American Classic. Chef and co-owner Mary Jo Mosca refused to go to New York to accept the award, saying Wed have to close the restaurant. But, alas, Moscas sits on the wrong side of the Huey Long Bridge to be included in Eat Dat. In of this book, local experts have chosen their Best of; Middendorfs was chosen by two noted food writers as among the best in the area, but is just outside the area within Eat Dats scope.

There are many restaurants in the heart of New Orleans where you can have a very decent meal, but (in my mind) neither their food nor their stories were rich enough to be included. Sorry, Rum House, getting on a Food Network show is not enough of a story to overcome your jerk chicken. Chain restaurants are automatically jettisoned. If you come to New Orleans and seek out the packaged blandness of a Subway or Papa Johns, I ask you to put this book down immediately. No, I mean