New Orleans - Dining

It’s a dieter’s nightmare but no one comes to New Orleans to abstain. A port city for the better part of three centuries, New Orleans absorbed culinary influences from all over the world and distilled them into what may be country’s most distinctive regional cuisines.

The city is famous for two cuisines: Cajun and Creole.

• Creole cuisine evolved as the European immigrants – French, Spanish, Germans, and Italians – adapted their cuisines to local ingredients, and incorporated Native American and African flavors.
• Cajun cooking, which is the other famous cuisine in the city, arrived with the French-Canadian Acadians, who introduced their more rustic single-pot style of cooking, using the traditional blend of flour and oil as a base.

On our last day in New Orleans, we patronized the Gumbo Shop, which evoked a sense of old New Orleans. We had to wait in a queue for nearly an hour before we managed to find a seat in the restaurant. Like many old buildings in New Orleans, it has a nice courtyard.

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The menu is chock-full of relics. My wife and I shared one set meal. We had Seafood Okra Gumbo (spicy, thick soup is made with okra, peppers, shrimp, crab, oysters, and sometimes chicken or sausage and served on a bed of rice) for starter, Alligator Andouille Sausage for appertizer, and a Creole combination platter comprising Shrimp Creole (shrimp cooked in a spicy Creole tomato sauce – served over rice), Jambalaya (Creole version of Spanish paella; mixture of smoked sausage, shrimp, vegetables and chicken in a seasoned sauce, and cooked with rice) and Red Beans and Rice (a flavorsome combination of red beans, rice, smoked pork, hot sauce, onions and garlic), accompanied with a small bowl of garlic mashed potatoes. Dessert was a serving of hot bread pudding (prepared with French bread and custard served with whiskey sauce), which was very sweet. Overall, the meal was heavily flavored but light on the wallet. Total cost including a small local beer (Abita draft) was US$32.36 excluding the obligatory tips of 15-20%.

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There are also plenty of good quality restaurants in town. During our stay, we dined at several restaurants at the top end of the food pyramid. The full dinner meal costs between US $50 and $80 per pax. In total, we spent approx. US $500 on our dinner meals.

Our favorite was the Red Fish Grill – this restaurant offers a festive yet casual atmosphere, a giant-sized oyster bar, and every kind of seafood you could ever want. Awarded the best seafood restaurant in town, it has an interesting marketing tagline, "friends don't feed friends with frozen fish."

The hickory smoked red fish (served with tasso and wild mushroom, lyonnaise potatoes, topped with Louisiana crabmeat and lemon butter sauce), was exceptional. We also enjoyed the other specialties, such as house salad, barbeque oysters and crab cakes.

Its signature dessert, double chocolate bread pudding - a rich dark and semisweet chocolate bread pudding served with white and dark chocolate ganache and chocolate almond bark, is sinfully rich but spectacular.