• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 588 0

city, and I’d felt as if I were going back to see a relative I’d neglected for too long. Of course this is completely self-absorbed—I know that the city didn’t care one way or the other about my arrival. Still, that’s how I felt, and it wasn’t until I sat down to a couple dozen charbroiled oysters with my friends Dora and Paul and Reilly that I could start to relax. Drago’s is a New Orleans institution, even if it’s a couple miles out of town, and walking in there felt good. Seeing the bar crammed three deep on a Thursday night felt even better. And working through the oysters—the wood fire had melted the butter, garlic, and Parmesan and Romano cheeses on each into a perfectly smoky, crusty cap—while washing them down with a beer or three was nigh on to blissful.

I don’t want to overstate this, but the return—the survival—of places like the old-school hangout Drago’s means something. It means people going out with friends for things they’ve been eating for years; it means sitting at a familiar table, taking a bite and raising a drink. It means just knowing that the place is crammed midweek, that people are lining up at the bar, that the wood fire is roaring. It’s not everything; it’s something. “Everything was just so emotional when we started coming back,” Dora says. “This restaurant, that restaurant, the first Saints game. It was all loaded. Highs and lows.”

Which was all the permission I needed to treat eating in New Orleans as akin to a patriotic duty. The city’s restaurants needed my help; I would help them until I could not see.

So already this week I’ve had charbroiled oysters and shrimp with fried eggplant and something, God help me, called the “Shuckee Duckee” (blackened duck breast and oysters in cream sauce over fettuccine). I’ve had fried rabbit liver on pepper-jelly toast, hogshead cheese, hen-and-andouille gumbo, barbecue shrimp, and shrimp and grits. I’ve had Creole tomato salad, fried-potato omelet, and a Ferdi Special po’boy filled with roast beef, ham, gravy, and debris (the blackened yummy bits from the roasting pan). I’ve had spearmint sno-balls and nectar sno-balls, fried oysters and fried shrimp and fries. I haven’t had much green, but I’ve had pecan waffles with bacon, and I’ve inserted beignets and café au lait between meals with the regularity of an Old Testament prophet chanting “begat.”

After a while I’ve begun to honestly fear I might die.

Now I’m at the expo; and appearances notwithstanding, I’m not there to embarrass myself. I’m there because it hosts the Great American Seafood Cook-Off, which an announcer dramatizes as having begun with “a single eight-by-ten piece of white paper” on which Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal inscribed a challenge—in blood, we are left to assume—to the nation’s other sitting governors. But the truth is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started the event six years ago to promote the nation’s sustainable seafood stocks. The cook-off is tucked along the back edge of what seems like a square country mile of vendors promoting their wares; it’s a promotional event within a promotional event. There’s nothing spontaneous about it—it’s a performance, not a festival—and when six masked, befeathered samba dancers arrive, drumming and marching to announce the event’s beginning, they serve less to attract revelers than to leave three small alligators in a glass tank looking moderately surprised.

But, spontaneous or not, it’s an event with a serious purpose; fish are the only wild foods that Americans still eat with regularity. We still know the difference between salmon and swordfish, just as people once distinguished between mallards and canvasbacks and wood ducks. But as Twain’s menu shows, such things can be lost fast; already, Louisiana’s beloved speckled trout and redfish are limited to a sports fishery, appearing in restaurants only when farmed or brought in from Alabama. We don’t have to eat sustainably, but if we don’t, the nonnegotiable fact is that our menus are going to get a lot less interesting. Today there are fifteen chefs here to