2003 update:
THE NEW ORLEANS MENU DAILY
By Tom Fitzmorris
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
THE 25 BEST NEW ORLEANS NEIGHBORHOOD RESTAURANTS
1. Jacques-Imo's. 8324 Oak, Riverbend 861-0886. Jack Leonardi, former K-Paul's cook, teamed up a decade ago with former Chez Helene owner Austin Leslie to create a convincing neighborhood Creole cafe uptown. Austin does the fried chicken and acts as the patron saint. Chances are that Jack will come by, introduce himself, take the temperature of your appetite, and improvise dishes to fill it. A little front dining room and the rear courtyard are both available. Always interesting, sometimes excellent, usually difficult to get a table.
2. Mandina's. 3800 Canal, Mid-City. 482-9179. Mandina's comes closer than any other restaurant to the Orleanian's cherished ideal of the old-time neighborhood cafe. A renovation a few years ago added tables and a parking lot, making the place even more inviting. The front room is busiest, with tables vying for space with the customers waiting for their turn at the bar. In the back is a utilitarian dining room that's a bit quieter. The best food on any given day will be the homestyle specials, with a further edge to non-seafoods. All portions are titanic, but somehow avoid grossness. The service staff has been here a long time and will not be impressed by anything you have to offer.
3. Uglesich's. 1238 Baronne, Lee Circle Area. 523-8571. Uglesich's is a concentrated dose of New Orleans funk--a bit much for some who, after inspecting the place and its neighborhood, drive on by. If you take the leap of faith you will be rewarded with food that some gourmet restaurants would do well to imitate. The oyster po-boy, for example, is made from oysters that are not only fried but shucked to order. Anthony and Gail Uglesich have pushed their menu's envelope far beyond sandwiches in recent years; you can now get an astounding assortment (considering the kitchen) of grilled, sauteed, and fried platters, many highly original. Beware: if they tell you something is spicy, believe them. Those raw oysters at the bar are good, too. There's never an open table when you walk in, but there will be by the time the food comes out. We may be in the last days of this 79-year-old restaurant. At this writing, Uglesich's they're closed for an extended summer vacation, but scheduled to re-open in October.
4. Mandich. 3200 St. Claude Ave, Bywater. 947-9553. Restaurant Mandich has always been predominantly a lunch place; its original clientele came from businesses on the riverfront, which start and shut down early in the day. That legacy lives on in the food, which is two or three cuts more ambitious and better than that of the typical neighborhood restaurant--although you shouldn't entertain any notions of finding anything unconventional. The dining room verges on the antique, but it's comfortable enough. Most of the customers are regulars, but they always welcome unfamiliar faces. Few enough restaurants of this ilk survive these days that a meal here becomes special.
5. Bruning's. West End Park. 282-9395. We're still waiting for the reconstruction of Bruning's old over-the-lake quarters. But in the long-wait-for-a-table meantime we note no slide in the quality of the food. A new specialty: big slabs of broiled redfish.
6. Fury's*. 724 Martin Behrman Ave., Metairie. 834-5646. A neighborhood seafood cafe in the old style, with all that implies both in the way of honest, cooked-to-order food as well as outmoded (but also honest) atrocities. The shortcomings are easily ignorable, however, in view of the low prices and goodness of the basic specialties. Seafood dominates, with every imaginable combination platter, fried or broiled. But the specials are pure backstreet New Orleans cuisine, served to a clientele as regular as ever patronized a corner cafe.
7. Bozo's. 3117 21st Street, Metairie. 831-8666. Bozo's has been around since the 1920s, moving from Mid-City to Metairie in the 1970s. Bozo's selects its seafoods well and cooks it all to order, adding a few minutes to the process but resulting in hot, greaseless and crisp eats. The menu is limited. The only fish is catfish--but perfect, small, wild fillets, cornmeal-encrusted and crunchy golden brown. Bozo's oyster bar is one of the best, perfect raw and great fried. I start every meal here with the chicken andouille gumbo. Service is professional, and owner Chris Vodonovich is always in the kitchen.
8. Katie's. 3701 Iberville, Mid-City. 488-6582. Mid-City has more good old-style neighborhood restaurants than anywhere else in town, and Katie's is one of its best. The layout is classic: two big rooms, one with a bar and a jukebox, the other with a window through which the kitchen passes its work to the waitresses. They not only excel at all the classics of local streetcorner cuisine (po-boys, red beans, seafood platters, etc.) but also get ambitious at times with the daily specials. The raw foodstuffs are of far greater intrinsic interest than in most such places.
9. Liuzza's By The Track. 1518 N. Lopez, Mid-City. 943-8667. The lesser-known of the two Liuzza's, but the slightly better one--if only because the kitchen is more ambitious. They have the standard lineup of poor boy sandwiches and platters, but the chef producing excellent specials. All of this is served in the cramped circumstances of a neighborhood hangout, with prices to match.
10. Liuzza's, 3636 Bienville, Mid-City. HU2-9120. Liuzza's is your archetypal neighborhood "Bar & Rest." There is a signature item: the frozen glass schooners of root beer and not-so-root beer. Just like in the old days, the menu is implausibly large, starting with a really good roast beef po-boy and continuing with homestyle daily specials, seafood platters, and Italian dishes. Fresh-potato fries and the hole in the dining room wall through which you see evidence of a bursting kitchen are artifacts of the style, once far more commonplace than it is now.
11. Barrow's Shady Inn. 2714 Mistletoe, Uptown. 482-9427. Barrow's, well-hidden Uptown since 1943, fries incomparably light catfish that's so good you eat it like popcorn. And that's all they have. The fish has a little touch of pepper in the flavor that makes it unusual. You also get some fine homemade potato salad.
12. Galley Seafood. 2535 Metairie Rd., Old Metairie. 832-0955. The proprietors are famous (justly) for the soft-shell crab po-boy at the Jazz Festival. This little place serves that year round, as well as a menu of small and large seafood platters, usually fried lightly to order. The blackboard shows off a passel of home cooking every day; the soups here are always especially good. They also boil the usual crustaceans for eating in or removing to home.
13. Charles Sea Foods*. Harahan: 8311 Jefferson Hwy. 737-9190 For most of the history of Harahan, this has been the only restaurant in town. It's always been a good one, but in the past few years they've added a growing range of specialties. This is one of the best places in the area to eat boiled seafood in season. They serve it the way they did before we became self-conscious about sucking the heads and pinching the tails. The fried and stuffed seafood platters are also good.
14. Cafe Atchafalaya. 901 Louisiana Ave., Uptown. 891-5271. Spare but comfortable, Cafe Atchafalaya serves not only Creole food but also the very different (and locally uncommon) dishes of the rest of the South. The latter tend to lower spice levels, but are so well made with such fine groceries that there's no lack of excitement. The homely daily specials are heartwarmingly wonderful. Unexpected delights abound: terrific jalapeno cheese bread comes shortly after you sit down, for example. "Slightly sophisticated, rather Southern" is the menu motto, and that about captures it.
15. West End Cafe. 8536 Pontchartrain Blvd., Lakeview. 288-0711. This is a successful hybrid of two cherished ideals: the classic neighborhood cafe and the casual fried-seafood restaurant. The result is uniquely enjoyable, even when the food falls a little short of your dreams. The West End is full of surprises; their occasional forays in to the world of ambitious cooking are quite successful. Good daily specials, especially things like meat loaf (a sellout every Tuesday) and soups. Boiled seafood is often available still steaming hot. If you have kids, hand them a roll of quarters and point them toward the claw machine, and you'll be able to have a conversation for a change.
16. Cafe Reconcile. 1631 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., 568-1157. The non-profit mission is unique: to lift undereducated, underskilled people into careers in the hospitality industry. A staff of pros orchestrates things, but the students do everything else. What comes out at breakfast and lunch comes as a surprise, particularly at the laughably low prices. This is very good Creole cooking, using good ingredients and served well. If you didn't know about the student aspect, you'd never know it.
17. Dunbar's. 4927 Freret, Uptown, 899-0734. Although the all-you-can-eat red beans and fried chicken has gone the way of all other too-good deals, this is still a very cheap, honest source of Creole-style home cooking. The place reminds me of the soul food restaurants of the Sixties, but the place and the food are better. Tulane and Loyola students come here a lot.
18. Mr. Ed's. 1001 Live Oak, Metairie. 838-0022. Mr. Ed operates a few deli-style restaurants in Metairie, but this is his main location, with an unadorned but comfortable dining room and a big menu of all the low-end local specialties. There's a tilt toward seafood platters and po-boys, with the rest of the day's specials being in the red-beans category. It's not brilliant cooking, but not bad. If you want to watch television, you can here.
19. Ye Olde College Inn. 3016 S. Carrollton Ave, 866-3683. The Rock 'n' Bowl guys bought this old (since the 1930s) Carrollton Avenue standby and did very little to it. The plan is to retain every scrap of that old-time New Orleans funkiness, but perhaps to brush up things a little. The College Inn has always been good, but already I'm seeing some improvements.
20. Joey K's. 3001 Magazine, Uptown. 891-0997. The Irish Channel is where you expect to find restaurants like Joey K's, and they take full advantage of that cliche here. All the backstreet dishes are here: red beans, fried catfish, brisket, liver and onions, etc., etc. Of course, we really do love all that stuff, and so the place does a good business with people who used to eat in joints like this when they didn't dress as well as they do today. Some specials are better than others, but the chances of having your palate satisfied are decent. It is inconceivable that your stomach will leave wanting for more. Just grubby enough to be convincing without becoming sleazy.
21. Casamento's. 4330 Magazine, Uptown. 895-9761. Although it's not as consistent as it once was, Casamento's--a big, long room covered with enough spanking-clean Art Nouveau tiles that it looks like a gigantic bathroom--is still a first-class vendor of oysters. They're terrific in either raw or fried form; no small number of patrons start with the first and finish with the second. The oyster loaf here is not a po-boy but a sandwich made on thickly sliced, toasted, buttered "pan bread." The Italian dishes are completely forgettable.
22. Landry's. 789 Harrison Ave, 488-6476. Not to be confused with the Landry's chain, this is a little corner seafood and short-order spot in Lakeview. Deliciousness starts at the oyster bar and proceeds without a misstep through sandwiches, daily specials, gumbo, and seafood platters. Inexpensive and unprepossessing.
23. Elizabeth's. 601 Gallier, Bywater. 944-9272. "Real Food Done Real Good" is the slogan of this unlikely cafe in the Bywater section. The food is also disarming: it's Southern food, as opposed to the very different Creole cooking usually found around town. They do breakfast and lunch weekdays only, and every bit of it is honest home cooking that always winds up delighting you more than you think it will.
24. Judice's. 421 E. Gibson, Covington. 892-0708. Judice's took over the antique former location of Nathan's, an ancient po-boy place in Old Covington. It serves a menu of breakfasts and lunches that include both very familiar food and some unexpected concoctions. The environment is that of the neighborhood hangout, with a large old bar dominating one side of the room. Everything is loose and casual.
25. Praline Connection. 542 Frenchmen, Marigny. 943-3934. The soul-food restaurant of the Nineties: hip, jazzy, and cooking slightly gussied-up but still homestyle Creole meals with good fresh ingredients. You get your beans and greens (whatever kind you like), your chicken, fish, and chops. Not entirely consistent, but usually pretty good. The original location in Marigny is hard to find a table in. The Warehouse District location is much bigger, encompassing a full-fledged jazz and blues hall.