Full Belly Files | Eating Mean in New Orleans

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on January 20, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

As my son pondered whether the Nova Scotian oysters were more briny than those from Alabama, my daughter tucked into a creamy bowl of crab-fat agnolotti, and my wife slurped up the Basque cider-spiked broth of the mussels Normande, I took a moment to lean back in my seat and enjoy a bit of pride in the scene. It was our first night out in New Orleans, where we’d taken 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.

In an era where pickiness reigns supreme in so many households, we had somehow employed the right parenting strategies — and no doubt benefited from ample dumb luck — to guide our kids into lives of culinary curiosity. This was just the first meal of our trip, at Le Chat Noir in the Warehouse District, 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.