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Truffled macaroni and cheese is typical of the atypical New Orleans fare at Capdeville, owned by partners James Eustis (left) and Robert LeBlanc. In the last year, LeBlanc, along with other partners, also opened the restaurants Ste. Marie and Sylvain. In December, Time magazine writer Josh Ozersky praised Sylvain for its deviation from traditional Louisiana cuisine, saying it was “not the final word in gastronomy, but the food there would be at home in New York City, Portland, Ore., or San Francisco — which isn’t true of any place else I know of in the Quarter.” Ozersky, a James Beard Award-winning writer, said he had eaten “many, many, many meals in the food-crazed city — but rarely any really good ones,” adding that much of New Orleans’ cuisine was “overwrought, old-fashioned and generally lame.” PHOTO BY CHERYL GERBER
The best of the new guard restaurants are leveraging the old traditions and tipping their hats to them.
The best cooking anywhere does that; it respects tradition but riffs on it.
Miss Claudia’s
VINTAGE CLOTHING & COSTUMES 4204 MAGAZINE STREET · 897-6310
— John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi
Hurricane Katrina or the exposure locals had to other cities’ dining scenes during their own prolonged Katrina evacuations. Others point to the drumbeat of national media food coverage and the hyper-connectivity of the wired generation with its constant online posting about the next new thing. “We do seem more open to the next trends here now than we used to,” says David Beriss, an anthropologist at the University of New Orleans who studies local food culture. “They seem to have legs here now whereas before they might turn up but die quickly.” There’s no doubt that two New Orleans examples of the pop-up trend (or restaurants using an à la mode model of opening for limited stints inside other businesses) have quickly captured the interest of local diners. One is Pizza Delicious, where New York transplants Greg Augarten and Michael Friedman serve takeout pizza on Sunday evenings from a Bywater commissary kitchen. Customers call in orders using a phone number posted on the Pizza Delicious blog, and since first starting up last year, demand has grown to the point where the wait for a pie can be up to five