• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It’s a heavy thing to take in—a real specter of death and destruction—so the best thing you can do next is to head to nearby Mandina’s, on Canal Street, for some Italo-Creole comfort food (3800 Canal St.; 504–482–9179). Its quaint pink-with-white trim exterior and front porch conceals thirteen-foot-high ceilings, bow-tied waiters, and a clientele of cheery, well-dressed locals and policemen chatting away. On the day I visited, it felt like a scene from Back to the Future.

Refreshingly, there were no tourists whatsoever. I took my seat in the first dining room and ordered an iced tea. Over my left shoulder I spotted a faded old Times-Picayune story about how the place was opened in 1932 by the sons of Sebastian Mandina, from Palermo, Sicily. He’d opened it as a shop in 1898, and was briefly jailed for selling home brew, hidden in a false window in the store. It became a neighborhood—and, indeed, citywide—institution, and stayed in the Mandina family.

Katrina tried to silence this place too, deluging the dining room up to about six feet. But because the restaurant is raised up from street level, the water came up to just below the tabletops, which were found eerily still set when Cindy Mandina first ventured back inside about six weeks after the storm. Now restored to its 1930s luster by Cindy and her family, the food is excellent and the portions hearty. The catfish po’boy is one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever eaten, in any city. And a word to the wise: the “whole loaf” is huge; the “half loaf” could feed two people, and the quarter loaf is just right for one.

DETOUR

NEW ORLEANS’ BEST

COMFORT FOOD

Central Grocery (deli & market) • 923 Decatur St. • New Orleans, LA 70116 • (504) 523–1620 & Café du Monde (café) • 800 Decatur St. • New Orleans, LA 70116 • (504) 587–0831

Unless you have superhuman powers of self-control, exploring the beer bars and eateries of the French Quarter in New Orleans will lead to foggy mornings, your brain, body, and soul crying out for sugar, caffeine, and fatty Italian meats on bread. First, proceed to the wonderfully decayed Café du Monde, a traditional coffee stand open since 1862 (and open every day except Christmas). One order of beignet per person (say “behn-yay”) means three puffy warm dough fritters gloriously dusted with powdered sugar. The joe is strong and not too terrible, though the chicory version is an acquired taste, a blend of coffee and dried endive plant root that was favored during the Civil War.

Just down the block is Central Grocery, an Italian market opened in 1906 and home of the muffaletta, the signature New Orleans sandwich. The concept is simple: it’s a circular loaf of soft Italian bread sliced horizontally, layered with top-quality sliced ham, salami, and provolone cheese. That trio is then capped with a layer of olive salad—chopped green and black olives minced with anchovies and garlic. A half feeds two adults handily, and if there’s room in the back, you can sit at a little lunch counter and tuck in, or head back outside and try for a bench in front of St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. With the perfect sandwich, the riverboats, and the former home of Jax Brewery (now a shopping area) in view, you’re suddenly, completely whole again.

Beyond New Orleans

BAYOU TECHE BREWING CO.

1106 Bushville Hwy. • Arnaudville, Louisiana, 70512 (337) 303–8000 • bayoutechebrewing.com • Established: 2010

SCENE & STORY

It’s a family affair. Early in 2010 the brothers Knott (Karlos, Byron, and Dorsey) opened the doors on their little train-car-turned-taproom on farmland once used for growing beans, a good-sized patch of earth maintained by the Knott family since the 1800s. Karlos and his brothers grew up in a Cajun French–speaking home, and their father Floyd writes about Acadiana, the traditional Cajun name for the area. The only beers around when the boys were growing up in the area were Jax (defunct), Budweiser, and Falstaff, all industrial lagers. Later Karlos served in the military in Germany and then at Fort Lewis in Washington State,