It’s a joy to choose a restaurant, but it’s not always easy. That’s where we can help. In the Where to Eat Right Now series, we’re highlighting our favorite places in cities across the United States. These lists will be updated regularly, as restaurants close and open, and as we find new gems to share. When visiting restaurants, we do not give advance notice and we pay for all our meals.
The food at Acamaya falls into roughly two categories. There are the dishes that send your eyebrows upward at first sight, like the painterly aguachile or the arroz negro topped with mussels that look like a display of emeralds. And there are the dishes that don’t appear far removed from what you’d find on a grandmother’s stove in Mexico City (at least until you take your first bite), like the luxuriously rich acoyote beans or chochoyotes, thick with Louisiana lump crab meat. Ana Castro, already one of the most gifted young chefs in New Orleans, really finds her voice at this stylish, seafood-focused restaurant, which she owns with her sister Lydia. It’s food that excites the mind while aiming for your heart. In her first review as a chief New York Times restaurant critic, Tejal Rao gave Acamaya two stars. BRETT ANDERSON
3070 Dauphine Street; 504-299-3477; acamayanola.com
Uptown | Cajun, New Orleans Creole
Frank Brigtsen spent his early professional years learning that Louisiana food outside his native New Orleans — notably the Cajun food of his mentor Paul Prudhomme — was also worthy of attention. The result is a fusion cuisine that rarely crosses state lines, and it has been on display at the restaurant Mr. Brigtsen has run with his wife, Marna, since 1986. Brigtsen’s is a white-tablecloth restaurant in the literal sense, but inhabiting an unpretentious Uptown cottage, near a bend in the Mississippi River. Dishes like butternut shrimp bisque, puppy drum amandine and roast duck in pecan gravy merge Cajun cuisine and urban Creole cooking in a style that has become as uniquely New Orleans as James Booker’s slippery rhythm and blues.
723 Dante Street; 504-861-7610; brigtsens.com
Central City | New Orleans Creole
In New Orleans, “neighborhood restaurant” is a genre widely understood to meet expectations of affordability and informality, with a strain of vernacular cuisine headlined by red beans, gumbo and Gulf seafood po’ boys. Café Reconcile has been a reliable purveyor of this cooking for decades, but it has never been as consistently delicious as it is under the current chief culinary officer, Martha Wiggins. After years working in upscale restaurant kitchens, Ms. Wiggins was drawn to the social mission of Reconcile, which is staffed in part by students learning life skills on the job. So, your lunch helps support an honorable enterprise. If you’re planning a visit around daily specials, pay attention to Thursday’s shrimp with white beans and Friday’s smothered turkey necks.
1631 Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard; 504-568-1157; cafereconcile.org
French Quarter | Latin-Caribbean
Restaurateurs elsewhere drop seven figures to conjure what’s found all over the lower French Quarter: barrooms that seem sprung from cracks in the sidewalk, left to age for decades in the humidor of New Orleans. Cane & Table makes the most of one such space by not following a Bourbon Street model. It is an erudite saloon worth visiting for its food alone. Its owners made their name running excellent cocktail bars. Alfredo Nogueira, a seasoned New Orleans-born chef, mines his Cuban heritage on a menu that matches well with the drinks. Crab croquetas, coctel de camarones and arroz con pollo are all the better enjoyed in surroundings that evoke old Havana, or the French Quarter as many locals wish it still were.
1113 Decatur Street; 504-581-1112; caneandtablenola.com
It’s a measure of New Orleans’s singular character that even its steakhouses have personalities, none more so than Charlie’s. The family of Charlie Petrossi, who opened the restaurant in 1932, is no longer involved, but a group of new owners, which includes local chef and restaurateur Aaron Burgau, have mostly left this no-frills joint alone. There is no cowboy iconography here, and no leather booths. There is also no menu. Simply pick a cut of steak, a salad dressing and a starch, and say yes to the onion rings. With Neil McClure in the kitchen, the steaks have never been better. Pro tip: Start your meal down the block, at the oyster bar at Pascal’s Manale, the workplace of the city’s best-known shucker, Thomas Stewart.
4510 Dryades Street; 504-895-9323; charliessteakhousenola.com
Your romantic vision of a New Orleans restaurant might be a sophisticated joint, perched on a corner of a residential street. It’s not fancy, though the tables are covered in pressed linen. The menu is Paris-at-the-mouth-of-the-Mississippi, the wine list biased toward Burgundy. It is not quiet. You’ve imagined Clancy’s, the paradigmatic Uptown New Orleans bistro. The restaurant is unchanged following the death in 2024 of Brad Hollingsworth, the longtime owner and former waiter for whom Clancy’s was a life project of nearly 40 years. The co-owners, Brian Larson, a former Clancy’s chef and Mr. Hollinsworth’s stepson, and his wife, Mary, oversee a staff of longtime veterans. The kitchen has mastered a blended repertoire of French-Creole standards (turtle soup, shrimp rémoulade), idiosyncratic house signatures (sweetbreads du jour, fried oysters covered in melted Brie) and happy marriages between butter and fresh Gulf finfish. Everyone gets lemon icebox pie for dessert. So should you.
6100 Annunciation Street; 504-895-1111; clancysneworleans.com
Warehouse District | Cajun-Southern
South Louisiana is the world capital of Cajun restaurants, but don’t assume there are a lot of other Cajun restaurants like Cochon. Few others deliver the high standards of quality and service found at this restaurant, opened in 2006 by the chefs Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski. The meat pies, boudin balls and rabbit and dumplings all resemble dishes found in the truck stops and plate-lunch places of Cajun country. At Cochon, these dishes are turned out with notable technical proficiency, and in the company of charcuterie and wood-fire cooking, bringing to mind the smart, unapologetically rustic restaurants of Tuscany or the East Bay. Note that the same andouille deepening the flavor of Cochon’s gumbo is found next door, alongside other house-cured meats, at Cochon Butcher.
930 Tchoupitoulas Street, 504-588-2123; cochonrestaurant.com
Garden District | Modern New Orleans Creole
Starting in the 1970s, the restaurateur Ella Brennan collaborated with a series of chefs — notably Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse — to create a modern, unstuffy version of New Orleans cooking she called haute Creole. That history is a reason Commander’s is famous. A bigger reason is the sense of occasion at this turquoise mansion in the Garden District. Many diners leave with a taste for new things, be they seersucker, tasso-stuffed shrimp with pepper jelly, 25-cent (not a typo) martinis at lunch (on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays). In 2020, Meg Bickford became the latest interpreter of the kitchen’s by turns classicist and bodacious aesthetic, and the first woman executive chef of what has long been a woman-owned restaurant. It’s a vital chapter in the story of one of New Orleans’s most consequential cultural institutions.
1403 Washington Avenue; 504-899-8221; commanderspalace.com
Caribbean Creole | Warehouse District
New Orleans is as much the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean as it is a city of the Deep South. Nina Compton has proved that adage for nearly a decade at Compère Lapin. The restaurant’s sensibility can be summed up by its two most famous dishes. One, the heavenly buttermilk biscuits, is synonymous with the American South. The other, curried goat with sweet potato gnocchi, nods to both Ms. Compton’s native St. Lucia and her facility with Italian cuisine.
535 Tchoupitoulas Street; 504-599-2119; comperelapin.com
Uptown | Senegalese, New Orleans Creole
The chef Serigne Mbaye’s tasting menu underscores the debt New Orleans cuisine owes West African and Caribbean antecedents, including enslaved laborers. Dakar Nola, which he owns with his business partner, Afua Richardson, connects that history to the city today. The restaurant, which opened in a new location in June, also revels in local ingredients, especially seafood, in dishes that blend the flavors of Senegal, where Mr. Mbaye was raised, with techniques honed in upscale American restaurants. After courses of soupou kanja (an okra-crab soup similar to gumbo) and jollof rice, it’s difficult to tell where the West African influences end and the New Orleans influences begin. (In August 2026, our critic Tejal Rao awarded Dakar NOLA two stars.)
937 Leonidas Street; 504-493-9396; dakarnola.com
Dolfy’s food invites group participation. Pintxos like the matrimonio, gildas and spicy mussels are naturally designed to pass and share. But so are the charred leeks, presented in bite-size coins on a thick spread of romesco, and the platters of Ibérico pork and dry-aged txuleta steak, sliced for easy distribution in the style of the Basque sidrerías and wood-fire steakhouses that are Dolfy’s touchstones. The chef and co-owner Adolfo Garcia Jr. fell for Spanish food in the 2000s while working at RioMar, his father Adolfo Sr.’s trailblazing Latin-Spanish restaurant. That’s a lifetime ago for a 33-year-old who went on to cook around the world. But Mr. Garcia’s undiminished affection for Spain’s cuisine is obvious in the delicious food at the spirited, smooth-running restaurant he opened this year with Sophia Petrou Garcia, his wife and business partner. BRETT ANDERSON
4508 Freret Street; 504-841-9110; dolfys.com
Treme | New Orleans Creole
Leah Chase took over Dooky Chase’s in the 1940s, when segregation was still in place, transforming what her in-laws had first opened as a po’ boy shop into an elegant Creole restaurant. Ms. Chase died in 2019 at 96, but Dooky’s lives on in the hands of family members, including her grandson Edgar Chase IV, the restaurant’s executive chef, and her great-granddaughter Zoe Chase, who is being groomed to replace her. New Orleans society, particularly its Black political establishment, still descends on the art-lined dining rooms in the Treme neighborhood for weekday lunches and the week’s two dinner services, on Friday and Saturday. The menu is deep with New Orleans Creole standards, some increasingly rare, like shrimp Clemenceau. The fried chicken and gumbo are famous for a reason.
2301 Orleans Avenue; 504-821-0600; dookychaserestaurants.com
Warehouse District | Haute Creole, Tasting Menu
Before Emeril Lagasse became simply Emeril, there was Emeril’s, the flagship restaurant that propelled the chef to mononymous fame. After a renovation in 2023, the 35-year-old institution is now the domain of another Emeril: Emeril John Lagasse IV, better known as E.J. He is the restaurant’s new co-owner, its chef and its founder’s 23-year-old son. Skepticism that E.J. is too green to land the restaurant’s pivot to a pricey tasting-menu place is erased by a suite of canapés that includes an oyster po’ boy and a daube glacé, both about the size of an adult’s thumb. Too cute by half? Not the way this kitchen executes. Many courses refer to the restaurant’s past; the barbecue shrimp and banana cream pie live on. And anxious Emeril fans should be relieved to find that there is an à la carte menu in the bar. The wine cellar is one of the South’s deepest. (Read restaurant our critic Tejal Rao’s 3-star rave of Emeril’s here.) BRETT ANDERSON
800 Tchoupitoulas Street; 504-528-9393; emerilsrestaurant.com
The Kingsway’s food seems to exist in a dream space. Gulf snapper finds its way into green curry. Duck breast char sui corrals inspiration from China, Singapore and Japan. But everything is grounded in the chef-owner Ashwin Vilkhu’s childhood memories of New Orleans. The elegant restaurant’s kitchen is equipped with the woks his father, Arvinder, used to cook Asian food at home. Those long-ago meals already provided inspiration for Saffron, the Vilkhu family’s Indian-New Orleans bistro down the block. At the Kingsway, the same muse yields radiantly attractive dishes that recall the kind of proficient cooking once rarely found outside luxury hotels. The secret to the salt baked shrimp? Mr. Vilkhu insists it’s his dad’s old woks.
4201 Magazine Street; 504-506-9272; kingswaynola.com
Mid City | Po’ Boys, New Orleans Creole, Cajun
There is no such thing as a single best po’ boy in New Orleans, but the ones at Liuzza’s by the Track, which is basically a barroom with a menu, are consistently excellent. (Consider going for roast beef with horseradish.) But the kitchen pays as careful attention to the rest of the dishes as it does to the sandwiches. The best examples are the Creole and Cajun stews that often appear as daily specials, and one of New Orleans’ beloved gumbos: a brothy version filled with shrimp that are cooked to order, which prevents them from going mealy in the pot. It’s seasoned so well you won’t need hot sauce but may require a draft beer, served in a frosty goblet the size of a young pumpkin.
1518 North Lopez Street; 504-218-7888; liuzzasbtt.com
French-sounding dishes are easy to find in the French Quarter. But restaurants whose food closely resembles what you ate on your last trip to Paris have never been that common. MaMou is a French restaurant as much as it is a New Orleans one. While there are nods to local tradition — Gulf fish court-bouillon, red beans in the cassoulet — the chef Tom Branighan owes more to Fernand Point than to Paul Prudhomme. Braised celery hearts carrying thin slices of smoked beef tongue are a representative (and exquisite) menu mainstay. The talents of Mr. Branighan and his business partner, Molly Wismeier, one of the city’s top sommeliers, are well matched. High spirits course through this neighborhood, but rarely coexist with such high refinement.
942 North Rampart Street; 504-381-4557; mamounola.com
Westwego | Creole-Italian
It’s only a half-hour’s drive from downtown, but it feels much farther than that after you cross the river, and even more so once your car wheels crunch the gravel in Mosca’s parking lot. Lisa Mosca, a third-generation owner, is the manager; Mary Jo, her mom, is in the kitchen. Since 1946, their family has authored a type of Creole-Italian food unique to this almost-rural roadhouse restaurant. The menu isn’t big, but the portions are, and the must-orders — crab salad, baked oysters, housemade sausage, meatballs and red gravy — are numerous, so be sure to bring a lot of friends. Don’t listen to anyone who says you need to decide between the chicken a la grande and the chicken cacciatore. You’ve come this far. Order both.
4137 U.S. 90 West, Westwego; 504-436-8950; moscasrestaurant.com
Wrapped in tile, tall windows and walls the color of the blood rare onglets that have anchored its outstanding steak frites for a quarter century, Lilette looks like a grand French-Creole restaurant shrank to fit its leafy corner at the edge of the garden district. Yet, it isn’t a restaurant where you’ll come across words like meunière, rémoulade or gumbo. The chef-owner John Harris has been drawing most of his inspiration from France and Italy since opening Lilette in 2001. The resulting staples include duck confit, brown butter gnocchi and cold sweet corn broth crowned with Louisiana crab meat. It’s a classic, grown-up New Orleans restaurant with a distinctive voice, filling a microniche that requires experience with local dining to understand, but not to appreciate.
3637 Magazine Street; 504-895-1636; liletterestaurant.com
Faubourg Marigny | Italian
Paladar 511 is a favorite of locals, particularly those who remember when you had to travel to the other coasts to find Italian cooking so light on its feet. For much of the last century, eating Italian here meant choosing from a roster of red-gravy pastas and butter-sauced finfish. This self-assured trattoria is where to go for vegetable-centered antipasti and maybe some tuna crudo in charred green tomato aguachile, before deciding whether the occasion calls for Neapolitan pizza, fresh pasta, roasted meat or some combination of the above. Opened in 2015, Paladar has settled into its role as a stylish neighborhood canteen in the Faubourg Marigny, just downriver from the Quarter, that happens to serve the most consistently excellent Italian food in town.
511 Marigny Street; 504-509-6782; paladar511.com
Warehouse District | Seafood
When it opened in 2013, Pêche joined the American oyster-bar new wave. It also proved that a great Louisiana seafood restaurant didn’t have to traffic heavily in étouffée or beurres blanc and noisette. The clean, forthright flavors of menu mainstays like the catfish in chile broth and grilled whole Gulf fish draped in salsa verde seem to echo the minimalist aesthetic of the raw bar, whose offerings you should seriously consider. Nicole Mills, the chef de cuisine since 2019, has maintained the high standards set by the chef-owners Ryan Prewitt, Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski (see also Cochon, above). How is it that steak tartare is a can’t-miss dish at a seafood restaurant? It’s served on toast spread with oyster aioli.
800 Magazine Street; 504-522-1744; pecherestaurant.com
At this point, New Orleans’s Caribbean restaurant scene is dynamic enough to justify debates over who is serving the most flavorful jerk or callaloo. Everything on Queen Trini Lisa’s compact menu ranks high. The sunny, welcoming neighborhood cafe feels like it’s been in Mid-City for ages, even though it opened just last year. The restaurant all but single-handedly created a local market for doubles, the curry chickpeas served on flatbread in the streets of the chef-owner Lisa Nelson’s native Trinidad. And the fried fish served on coco bread with plantains, pineapple and hot sauce should be on your list of must-try New Orleans sandwiches.
4200 D’Hemecourt Street; 504-345-2058; queentrinilisa.com
Seventh Ward | new American
Talented hospitality professionals early in their careers are prone to dreaming openly about the restaurants they’d love to have, though starting one is easier said than done. Respite is an exception. The chef Haley Vaughan and her business partner, Sage Ellis, have already built a devoted following, despite having just opened in July. Raw oysters and steak frites are mainstays on a tight menu, which Ms. Vaughan fleshes out with resourcefully creative, seasonal dishes. That could mean cantaloupe gazpacho blended with coconut milk and lime leaf oil, or crackly eggplant Milanese escorted by a summer pickle salad. Ms. Ellis oversees a similarly concise and intelligent selection of wines from small producers. If you can snag a seat at the bar, you’re not going to want to give it up.
2438 Bell Street, Suite B; no phone; respiteneworleans.com
Great Israeli cooking is nothing new in New Orleans. Alon Shaya, who co-owns Saba, introduced it a decade ago at his first Middle Eastern restaurant, Shaya, which he is no longer involved with. The food at Saba is representative of what got diners hooked. Try the meticulously crafted salatim (tabbouleh tossed with toasted pecans, field-pea tzatziki) and hummus bowls (get the one with blue crab), or platters of peach fattoush, harissa-rubbed roast chickens, turmeric-scented Louisiana shrimp sitting atop beds of labneh. And, of course, order the fresh-from-the-oven pita that should come with two warnings: Don’t eat too much, and don’t touch too soon.
5757 Magazine Street; 504-324-7770; eatwithsaba.com
Saint Claire sits near a high levee on the west bank of the Mississippi in a corner of the Algiers neighborhood that feels like a rural idyll, just 15 minutes from the French Quarter. The short journey to the century-old property, which was converted by the chef Melissa Martin and the contractor Cassi Dymond, is part of your meal’s narrative. The restaurant inverts the magic of Mosquito Supper Club, Ms. Martin’s celebrated east bank restaurant, where the coastal Cajun cooking appears perfectly cast for its city dwelling. Here you’ll find seasonal produce like figs and muscadine grapes, pickled peaches and sautéed plums gilding plates of rabbit rillettes, rare tuna paillard and duck confit. It’s as if the trip to this stylish country refuge of antiques, oak trees and dark roux gumbo passed through Western Europe. Once again, the artistry of Ms. Martin’s food is enhanced by the craft and intelligence invested in the setting. BRETT ANDERSON
1300 Richland Road; 504-766-9316; saintclaire.me
Bywater | Tasting Menu, French
Saint-Germain is the most culinarily ambitious of New Orleans’s next-generation tasting-menu restaurants. It’s in an old pizza joint — the sign still hangs out front, confusingly — that the chefs, Blake Aguillard and Trey Smith, treat as a kind of gallery for their often-thrilling, foundationally French experimentation. The tasting menu begins at the long bar with edible miniatures — a slice of seared Hokkaido scallop, say, topped with fermented jalapeño, held by creamed leeks to what tastes like a high-thread-count tater tot. The breadbasket contains improbably light cornbread pancakes served with aged butter that tastes like Camembert. You’re also welcome to drop in for drinks on the back patio, one of the most enchanting restaurant gardens in town.
3054 St. Claude Avenue; 504-218-8729; saintgermainnola.com
Lower Garden District | Pizza
St. Pizza is a slice place with a sidewalk takeout window, offering the kind of crisp, sparely appointed pizza that the co-owner Tony Biancosino ate growing up in southern New Jersey. But walk past the register and into a partly hidden, seductively lit tavern, where those same excellent pizzas — topped with housemade fennel sausage, with in-season greens and sweet ricotta, with crushed tomatoes and fennel pollen — are served as whole pies. They’re the backbone of what amounts to a red-sauce Italian place stripped to its essentials and polished to suit modern tastes. The restaurant — which Mr. Biancosino opened in 2024 with Leslie Pariseau, his business partner and wife, and another partner, Abhi Bhansali — is two doors down from Patron Saint, the couple’s shop and bar specializing in low-intervention wines. So yes, you can enjoy your pizza — and crab pasta, eggplant Parm or Calabrian chile Buffalo wings — with a bottle of Slovenian pet-nat rosé.
1152 Magazine Street; 504-603-7771; st.pizza.com
No country’s food has had a greater impact on New Orleans restaurants in recent decades than Vietnam’s. The culture blending began in the 1970s, as immigrants fleeing war settled in South Louisiana, and is most obviously manifest in the regional proliferation of Viet-Cajun crawfish and banh mi, which some locals still call “Vietnamese po’ boys.” Tan Dinh is arguably the best of the many Vietnamese restaurants on the West Bank, a stronghold of the local Vietnamese American community. The menu sticks mainly to traditional dishes but ranges far beyond the crowd-pleasing nước chấm chicken wings and pho. The owner, Quoc Trieu, represents a new generation at a family restaurant that stands apart for deep cuts like salt-and-pepper frogs’ legs, claypot-cooked catfish steaks and roasted quail.
1705 Lafayette Street, Gretna; 504-361-8008; tandinhnola.com
Dining and Cooking