New Orleans Restaurants
We’ve compiled the best of the best in New Orleans - browse our top choices for Restaurants during your stay.
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We’ve compiled the best of the best in New Orleans - browse our top choices for Restaurants during your stay.
This eatery wows diners with rustic Italian cooking, a rarity in New Orleans's culinary landscape. In the renovated Roosevelt Hotel—a 19th-century landmark—friendly and knowledgeable waiters happily help patrons with lesser-known ingredients, but it doesn't take a lengthy explanation to know that the fresh pastas and wood-fired pizzas are a must. The restaurant departs from the hotel lobby's historic, gilded decor and opts instead for sleek black walls and chain-link curtains, warmed by jewel-box displays of house-cured meats. From 2 to 5 pm daily, all pizzas and wines are half off, so come hungry. A smaller, more casual PIZZA Domenica has opened Uptown (4933 Magazine Street).
Rustic and charming, this cramped dining room lords over Frenchmen Street and serves big plates of classic Italian-American cuisine with a Creole twist. Decadent seafood sauces are especially pleasing for garlic lovers. There are no reservations, it's cash only, and the food and service is a little mixed, but it's always an experience here (and usually lots of fun). Put your name on the list and then head downstairs for some music and drinks at the Apple Barrel, which usually has live music, or wander Frenchmen Street as you wait for a table.
Every dish on the short menu here shows an obsessive attention to detail. The main attraction are the pizzas, which follow Neapolitan rules and use only flour, water, yeast, and salt for their dough; they enter an 800°F oven—imported from Naples—and emerge a minute later charred and fragrant. The starters prominently feature the sausages and other cured meats that hang inside a glass-walled room in the back. Despite the seriousness of the kitchen, the vibe out front is casual and contemporary. This welcoming pizzeria, like many other places on burgeoning Freret Street, suits the needs of neighbors but turns out food worthy of a visitor's attention.
Since 1969 the Cvitanovich family restaurant has been a fixture in Metairie, just a short drive from downtown New Orleans, so when it was revealed the family would open a second location inside the Hilton Riverside hotel, locals started salivating and the word quickly spread. The charbroiled oysters are the absolute must-order (you'll want extra bread to mop up the toothsome sauce). After that you can branch out to authentic Italian pasta dishes, Maine lobster, and fried seafood entrées. Families love the place—especially because of the kids' menu—and the warm apple cobbler is the sweet stuff legends are made of.
An evening at this corner restaurant combines a sophisticated night out with nourishing, down-to-earth food. Chef Rebecca Wilcomb, the former James Beard Award–winning Chef de Cuisine at Herbsaint, named the restaurant after her nonna, who is also responsible for the menu’s tortellini en brodo recipe, a hearty-yet-light favorite from Northern Italy. Elsewhere on the menu, Wilcomb draws inspiration from seasonal ingredients found at local farms. The five-course “Feed Me Menu” makes for a festive group meal, served family-style with optional wine and digestif pairings.
The walls here are festooned with enough snapshots, garlic braids, and crockery for at least two more restaurants, but it all just adds to the charm of this cozy Italian-Creole eatery. From Irene DiPietro's kitchen come succulent roast chicken brushed with olive oil, rosemary, and garlic; delicious, velvety soups; and fresh shrimp, aggressively seasoned and grilled before they join linguine glistening with herbed olive oil. Waits here can stretch to the 60-minute mark during peak dinner hours, which is just enough time for a bottle of wine in the convivial little piano bar.
This is a charming little stop on the way down St. Claude Avenue. The friendly owner will fix you a cappuccino (or hot-pressed panini), while you decide over dozens of flavors of freshly made gelato.
This airy, industrial space has two equally enjoyable identities, depending on the time of day. Weekend brunches are bustling and lively and heavily feature their popular boozy brunch drinks and the to-die-for lemon ricotta pancakes while at night, things are more subdued under the chandelier and pendant lamps when the open kitchen serves up housemade pastas and pizza. Tables of locals and dates unwind over wine and sophisticated comfort foods. Whichever you choose, it's best to make a reservation.
Barbecue shrimp is an addictive regional specialty that involves neither a barbecue nor barbecue sauce, and Pascal's is considered the dish's birthplace. The original recipe, introduced a half century ago, remains unchanged: jumbo shrimp, still in the shell, are cooked in a buttery pool enhanced with just the right amount of Creole spice and pepper. The rest of the menu here is taken up with generally unexciting regional seafood and Italian-style creations, although the turtle soup and the fried eggplant are good starters, and the upper-crust scene always amuses (particularly because most diners don bibs). Most important, the atmospheric old bar might be the best place in the city to slurp raw oysters.
Here Verona-born chef Samantha Castagnetti turns out sumptuous, authentic northern Italian pasta dishes, like fusilli with peas, shallots, and Italian prosciutto in an elegant white cream sauce, alongside meaty mains, such as veal osso buco over decadent polenta. This is the kind of place that turns first dates into lifelong affairs; you'll feel like you're dining at nonna's house. The all-Italian wine list is surprisingly affordable, with many glasses at $10 or less.
The upscale dining rooms here are clubby and festive, the crowd is always interesting, and the menu seamlessly blends Creole and Italian. There are several types of oyster appetizers to choose from, including the signature Oysters Tommy with Romano cheese, pancetta, and roasted red pepper. Entrées focus on sophisticated preparations of fish and meat, but make sure to find out the chef's imaginative daily specials before you make your decision. Service is gentlemanly, and the wines span all of Italy.
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