New Orleans: So What's on the Menu?

The BP oil spill's impact is being felt on restaurant menus in New Orleans and the dining scene elsewhere. But in the Big Easy, restaurateurs aren't ditching Gulf seafood. According to the Washington Post's Theresa Vargas:

Restaurants in the French Quarter brag about serving homegrown Louisiana seafood, which makes up about 30 percent of the U.S. domestic product . . . there is no question that the loss of the normal supply of shrimp, blue crabs and oysters is being felt here first.

But unlike cities that are advertising non-gulf seafood, New Orleans is not abandoning local catch: it's embracing what remains.

That means crayfish -- and, to a lesser extent, alligator -- is claiming a larger spot on menus in the Big Easy. If you haven't tried alligator, give it a shot. I found it tasty.

The Post article points out that 70 percent of Louisiana's coastline remains open. So, if you're pondering a trip to New Orleans, it sounds like you will still eat darn well.

Restaurants in the Big Easy

I spent enough time in New Orleans in the years that followed Hurricane Katrina to have told the New York Times what they discovered on their own. In this article, the Times' Sam Sifton concludes that the Crescent City's restaurant scene is incredibly robust these days:

. . . there are roughly 1,000 restaurants in New Orleans now, up a cool couple of hundred from before the storm . . .

And for a critic on the prowl for an authentic taste of the city in full springtime bloom, surprises abounded. One of the most purely joyful and purely New Orleans restaurants of the moment is Emeril's, a place run by a television chef who was born in Fall River, Mass., and lives mostly in New York City. Another, Cochon, is devoted not to the Creole cosmopolitanism of the city center, but to the Cajun traditions of the bayou and backwaters outside of town, in the tidal soup of southern Louisiana.

The article has several recommended restaurants at the very end.