New Orleans Guide: 18 Places to Dine Now
For over 15 years, New Orleans has been my other top U.S. city after my own San Francisco. Here, a large piece of my comes home: my jazz-girl soul, my Cajun/Creole resonant palate, the soulful people, architecture and even tempestuous weather, much as I loathe the opppresive heat and humidity. Like my own city, costumes, eccentricity and celebrating all manner of odd things is standard and elemental. Each of my beloved cities expresses it differently but no less extravagantly.
I’ve visited (and written about) literally a few hundred restaurants, bars and jazz clubs in Nola over these years, some of them many times each. While I never want Nola to lose it’s Cajun and Creole soul, unable to recreated or understood properly anywhere else in the world from restaurants to historic bars, I also appreciate the gains it has made in recent years with a few more internationally-minded restaurants even if in most cases these aren’t always competitive with many of the best in cities dense with Asian and Latin American populations, which are still tiny numbers here compared to what I’ve spent a lifetime with in LA, NYC and SF areas. But there is more range than ever in Nola and still the only-in-Nola kind of spots one can’t imitate anywhere else.
In 2022 I went to Nola twice a week at a time, to judge in Nola Spirits Competition and Tales of the Cocktail in the…