In the kitchen at Two Sisters in Treme, Colette Finister tends a stove crowded with well-seasoned pots, steam rising from under the lids into an unmistakable aroma.
It is soul food, the down-home Southern pot cooking of Black tradition, rendered with a range of rich gravies in a spectrum of brown hues. It’s the cooking Finister and her family have been serving New Orleans for more than 50 years.
Her sister, Shanel Snowton, calls the arsenal of stockpots and tureens and Dutch ovens their “soul pots.” They yield meaty, generous plate lunches built around smothered turkey wings or turkey necks, stewed oxtails, smothered hen, pork neckbones with cabbage and chitterlings, which the sisters clean twice and cook down with onions, low and slow, the way their father taught them long ago.
Two Sisters in Treme opened earlier this year, but it’s not exactly a new restaurant.
Smother turkey necks (left) and smothered okra with shrimp and sausage and a turkey wing are served at Two Sisters in Treme, a soul food restaurant in New Orleans. (Staff photo by Ian McNulty, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
“When people hear we’re back downtown, they say ‘Oh you’re home,’” Finister said. “And that’s it. A lot of people still know us from down here. It’s been good.”
Legacy cooking
In 1972, her parents, Dorothy and Ledell Finister, bought a restaurant on North Derbigny Street, just off Canal Street and near downtown. It was already called Two Sisters back then. They kept the name because someone advised it would be good luck.
Their clientele was made up of bus drivers and cops, nurses from Big Charity and City Hall staffers. Office workers left with towering stacks of takeout cartons to bring back to their colleagues.
Dreka Anderson has been taking care of regulars for decades at different locations of the New Orleans restaurant now called Two Sisters in Treme. Sunday, June 7, 2026.
STAFF PHOTO BY ENAN CHEDIAK
This backstreet spot closed in 2012. But by then, the sisters had already started their own restaurant in New Orleans East, based on the same recipes and community connections. This was called Two Sisters ‘N Da East.
Signs posted on a telephone pole advertising chitterlings and rabbit drew newcomers off Chef Menteur Highway to find a previous Pizza Hut franchise turned into soul food heaven.
The queen intervenes
Last year, when her lease was up in the East and the building was having maintenance issues, Finister decided to close the restaurant.
But before long, she was essentially recruited into business again by men she knew from the Prince Hall Masonic Temple in Treme, where her father was a member. They asked her to restart her restaurant on the ground floor of their Basin Street building, previously home to Tiger’s Creole Cuisine.
Customers wait for food at Two Sisters in New Orleans, Sunday, June 7, 2026.
STAFF PHOTO BY ENAN CHEDIAK
Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” and her husband, Emile Jackson, have been regulars at Two Sisters through the years and helped with the start-up finances to bring it back.
“This is real soul food,” Thomas said, a day after the music icon visited once again for the oxtails. “You just don’t find that everywhere.”
Rooted in tradition
For all the new restaurants opening around New Orleans, menus like those at Two Sisters are more of a rarity.
It’s not trendy, but instead deeply rooted. This cooking has a history based on necessity, ingenuity and care told through food. It’s all stewing and braising and smothering, slow cooking that invests time to build flavor and coaxes the cheapest cuts and everyday vegetables to new heights.
A selection of soul food is served at Two Sisters in New Orleans, Sunday, June 7, 2026.
STAFF PHOTO BY ENAN CHEDIAK
At Two Sisters, the list of a dozen or so dishes changes daily, but what’s consistent is a down-home style that has made Thomas and many others into regulars.
Service is very often faster than fast food. The work went into this cooking long before it’s ordered and served.
But this is food to eat slowly, letting the gravy carry bits of turkey neck to mix with the rice beneath, swiping spoonfuls of the herb-speckled potato salad through the juices around the plate.
Red beans and butter beans are cooked to bursting creaminess. Plates are finished with hillocks of rice, sometimes white, sometimes yellow, depending on the dish. Chunks of sweet potato join servings of green beans.
Steam rises from a plate of oxtails, a house specialty at Two Sisters in Treme, a New Orleans restaurant with a long history and new location.
STAFF PHOTO BY ENAN CHEDIAK
The stewed oxtails give melting mouthfuls of beefy, gelatinous meat, once worked free from the bone. The neck bones have a stronger, lean flavor, breaking down into a bony stew around the rice.
The smothered okra is about one-third okra, one-third shrimp and one-third smoked sausage in a thick sauce that gives a bright tomato tang before deepening into a mellow buttery richness.
Slabs of butter-yellow cornbread are cut as thick as reference books and are crumbly under the sweet sheen on the surface.
There’s iced tea (always sweet) and lemonade, and slices of pink and yellow sheet cake under heavy swipes of icing for dessert.
Dreka Anderson talks over the counter with Bobby Banks, who left church and came straight to the restaurant Two Sisters in Treme one Sunday.
STAFF PHOTO BY ENAN CHEDIAK
Sundays are busy, with people in their church clothes coming by to pick up lunch. The proximity of the Claiborne Avenue overpass, a major thoroughfare for second-line parades, means the restaurant often sees a late afternoon bump on Sundays, too.
Familiar faces have been coming by as news of the new location spreads. The waitress, Dreka Anderson, has been taking care of many of them since the days of Two Sisters’ first location. She knows their orders and she knows when they’re ready to throw in the napkin and get a box for leftovers.
That soul food will live again as second servings.
Two Sisters in Treme
1610 Basin St., (504) 302-2400
11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon., Wed.-Fri., Sun. (closed Tue., Sat.)
Note: Expanded breakfast hours are planned in July
Dining and Cooking