Always an open invitation
To eat even a few meals here is to discover the truth: Nothing tastes like this. “Our food is the strangest thing,” says chef Leah Chase, at 92 still a daily presence in the kitchen at Dooky Chase’s, which opened in 1941. As Brett Anderson, the veteran restaurant critic of the Times-Picayune, puts it: “The city has places that simply can’t be found anywhere else.”
F’true. The society restaurant Galatoire’s is the only place in this country where lunch too easily slips into the dinner hour, coffee is more intoxicating than stimulating (welcome to cafe brulot) and underdressed novices to the spectacle are heard to say, “No one gave me the hat memo.” Other than at the beloved Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, would there be dozens of people willing to wait 30 minutes or more for a cone of shaved ice in 104-degree heat, weather that felt like a swamp on fire? At Toups’ Meatery, my server almost insisted I order an appetizer of crawfish fritters: “Oh man, last of the season!” And when the bartender at the Mayhaw saw me debating a second cocktail before 11 a.m. on a weekday (research, baby!), he settled the matter with, “Man, you’re in New Orleans.”
Lolis Eric Elie, the TV writer, food historian and author of “Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans,” says his native city has a long history of equal opportunity when it comes to good food, pointing to the roast beef po’ boy and red beans and rice as “inexpensive, high-quality and emblematic of New Orleans.”
San Francisco likes to talk up the ultra-freshness of its larder and New York counts more stars than there are in heaven, but “New Orleans has its own cuisine,” says Liz Williams, founder of the food and beverage museum, which relocated from the Riverwalk mall to Central City last year. “All of us identify ourselves with our food.” Crucially, she adds, “Rich or poor, we all eat beans and rice.”
Alon Shaya, a protege of esteemed chef-restaurateur John Besh, knew as much when he returned to New Orleans with his boss mere days after Katrina to help feed emergency personnel in the parking lot of a looted Wal-Mart. On his person: a pistol, which he never had to use. On the menu: red beans and rice. “We could have just made rice,” says Shaya, who won this year’s James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef: South for the hit Israeli restaurant that bears his name. But red beans and rice “hold a special place here. People would be comforted” by the complete dish.
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