K Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen is in the French Quarter in a beautiful Creole townhouse. It was the flagship restaurant of the late, groundbreaking Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme, who brought Cajun food out of the countryside and into New Orleans, and then to the whole nation. I really recommend this oral history of Paul Prudhomme from NOLA.com – I’ve excerpted a few quotes but the whole thing is worth checking out.
Continue reading “Smoke and Thyme in New Orleans: K Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen”
The New Orleans Feast menu will run on the 16th and 17th of May, at The Varsity Club, on the Oxford High Street. The night will celebrate the food, the music and the libations of the Crescent City. Tickets are £30 and that includes the four courses listed above as well as a cocktail of your choice from The Varsity Club’s special New Orleans themed menu. If I’ve said enough and you’re already ready to book, click here.
If you want to learn a little more, read on and I’ll walk you through the menu.
Continue reading “New Orleans Feast at The Varsity Club, Oxford”
Saffron NOLA is an Indian restaurant with a New Orleans accent. They make some of the best Indian food I’ve had anywhere.
Continue reading “Smoke and Thyme in New Orleans: Saffron”
Just across Canal St from the French Quarter are the refurbished factories and stockyards of the Warehouse District. Cochon, and its Executive Chef Donald Link, are right at home there. Cochon cooks Cajun food, the down-home, country-style cuisine of Louisiana.
Uptown, on the west side of the city (“Up” being a river direction in New Orleans), is host to enough excellent restaurants to overflow the page of a moleskine notebook devoted to listing them. And if you go asking every waiter, barfly and streetcar-rider the best place to eat in town, one of the names you will hear over and over again is Shaya.
In the leafy uptown suburbs near Audoban park is a quaint, romantic, neighborhood restaurant that serves classic French food with a local accent: Patois.
On the last day of my New Orleans trip last year, I treated my brother, my best friend and our NOLA host to dinner at Patois. It had come recommended to me by nobody and it turned up in no research I had done about Crescent City culinary tableau, but Patois was a “can’t miss” destination for me for one reason: it was the filming location for Chef Janette Desautel’s restaurant in Treme.
I have her fictional menu memorised.
The Krewe of Red Beans was started by Devin De Wulf, a red beans aficionado and transplant to New Orleans from Charleston by way of Brazil. One Mardi Gras he dedicated an old jacket, two weeks of his life and a whole lot of hot glue to celebrating his love of red beans in costume form. It was such a hit he decided that next year, he’d have his own red beans themed parade. Continue reading “Smoke and Thyme in New Orleans: Red Beans Parade”
Strike out east from the red-light charms of the French Quarter and keep going through the hipster homes and pop-art covered renovated warehouses of the Bywater. When your way is blocked by a hulkingly functional wall of freight train cars, turn around and you will see a distressed brickwork and plaster building that looks just as in-place here as it would in a French mountain village. Continue reading “Smoke and Thyme in New Orleans: Bacchanal”
This was the best thing I ate in New Orleans on my last trip
Served at an outstanding Creole/French restaurant called Patois (to be featured in an upcoming blog post), this pudding remixes its components in ways that I had never imagined. If you can’t do six impossible things before breakfast, consider eating three of them for dessert. Continue reading “Sweet Potato Bread Pudding with Bourbon Cayenne Syrup”
Through a combination of a beloved tv show, an adventurous brother, the organisational skills of two perfect strangers and a best friend with some annual leave to use up, I found myself in New Orleans for almost two weeks over Halloween. It was the trip of a lifetime to a city whose blend of food, culture, music, history, public nudity, street drinking, tragedy, friendliness and cheap plastic tat on a string was everything I never knew I needed in my life. Continue reading “Smoke and Thyme: New Orleans”
