Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [120]
The menu for lunch and supper is a veritable encyclopedia of local favorites, including turtle soup, andouille gumbo, barbecue shrimp, corn bread filled with crawfish tails, softshell crab, and crawfish pie. Desserts include bread pudding with rum sauce, which is more of a New Orleans thing than a Cajun one, and gateau sirop, which is extremely local. Made from sugarcane—grown and processed all around here—it is a block of moist spice cake with the distinctive smoky sweetness of cane sugar.
A friendly old brick-wall storefront that has been renovated to serve as an art gallery and live-music venue as well as a restaurant, Café des Amis is a gathering place for locals (who love swilling the excellent strong coffee) and an easy destination for passersby, just a short drive off I-10. If you are looking for a full, true, and joyous taste of Acadian Louisiana, you’ll find none more satisfying than this.
Café du Monde
813 Decatur St.
504–581–2914
New Orleans, LA
Always open | $
Café du Monde is a New Orleans institution, serving café au lait and beignets to locals and tourists for more than a century and a half. It is always open, and the characters you’ll meet here—any time of day, but especially at odd hours in the middle of the night—are among the Crescent City’s most colorful. The best seating is outdoors, where the chances are you will be serenaded by street musicians of the French Quarter as you sit under the awning and watch life go by.
There is not much to the menu: chickory coffee, either black or au lait (with a lot of milk), white or chocolate milk, orange juice, and beignets. Beignets are wonderful: square, hole-less donuts, served hot from the fry kettle and heaped with powdered sugar.
After leisurely coffee-sipping and beignet-eating, you can buy New Orleans souvenirs inside the restaurant, then stroll across Decatur Street to the place where fortune tellers, tarot card readers, and palmists set up shop every evening and, for the right price, reveal your future.
Casamento’s
4330 Magazine St.
504–895–9761
New Orleans, LA
LD (closed in summer) | $$
Oyster loaves are served throughout New Orleans and the Cajun country of the South, and we’ve yet to find one that’s bad. But for the best, loaf-lovers go to Casamento’s. Oysters aren’t the only item of note on the menu of this spanking-clean neighborhood oyster bar that closes for a long vacation in summer, when oysters aren’t in season. You can also have fried fish and shrimp and springtime soft-shelled crabs, and there’s even a plate of that arcane Creole Italian meal, daube, which is flaps of pot roast in gravy on spaghetti noodles.
Casamento’s oyster loaf is nothing short of magnificent: a dozen crackle-crusted hotties piled between two big slabs of what New Orleans cooks know as pan bread, aka Texas toast. Each single oyster is a joy, its brittle skin shattering with light pressure, giving way to a wave of melting warm, briny oyster meat across the tongue. When we asked proprietor Joe Gerdes what made his oysters so especially good, he modestly replied that his method is “too simple to call a recipe.” Of course he uses freshly shucked local oysters, and he does recommend frying in lard, but the real secret is ineffable. “Everything is fried by feel and sound,” he said. “It requires a lot of personal attention and experience.”
Central Grocery
923 Decatur St.
504–523–1620
New Orleans, LA
LD | $
The name “muffuletta” once referred only to a chewy round loaf of bread turned out by Italian bakeries in New Orleans. Grocery stores that sold the bread got the fine idea to slice it horizontally and pile it with salami, ham, and provolone, then top that with a wickedly spicy mélange of chopped green and black olives fragrant with anchovies and garlic. The place that claims to have done it first is the Central Grocery on Decatur