As my son pondered whether the Nova Scotian oysters were more briny than those from Alabama, my daughter tucked into a creamy bowl of crabfat agnolotti, and my wife slurped up the cider-spiked broth of the mussels à la Normande, I leaned back in my seat to take a bit of pride in the scene. It was our first night out in New Orleans, where we’d brought the kids for their spring break, and it finally dawned on me that this was really my family’s first food-focused vacation, in which eating out topped our to-do list.
These were just the beginning bites of our trip, at Le Chat Noir in the Warehouse District, where Wu-Tang, De La Soul, and The Roots laid the soundtrack for the open-kitchen format just a few blocks from our room in the Higgins Hotel. But the days that followed would be consumed by consumption, whose caloric impacts we mostly offset, thankfully, by miles and miles of walking each day through the city’s culture-soaked neighborhoods.
There were beignets at Café du Monde, of course, where we opted to sit down and get served by the hustling waiters rather than wait in the long to-go line; lemongrass crab Caesar, spring som tam salad, and fried catfish with pickles and “zippy” ranch at Marjie’s Grill, where casual, complex cocktails completed the backyard vibe; multiple servings of crawfish noodles at Peche Seafood Grill, where you can’t go wrong on the menu, even when it comes to catfish swimming in a pickled-greens broth; and cracklins and chili butter oysters at pork specialist Cochon, where my daughter sat a seat that had just been vacated by Nicolas Cage.