Atlas Obscura Itineraries

Gastro Obscura’s 10 Essential Places to Eat and Drink in New Orleans

It’s not hard to find a great meal in New Orleans. Every neighborhood—from Carrollton to the Bywater and across the river into the Westbank—is teeming with restaurants, bakeries, and bars, all serving up something they call their own, all contributing to this great symbiosis of flavors and cultures we call Southern cuisine. So the trick isn’t in finding places to visit, eat, and drink while here, it’s in deciding which places out of an overabundance of options. Do you trace the roots of Creole and Cajun cooking, or seek out the flavors of global diasporas spread across the city? Do you sit for a multi-course tasting, or do you dig into neighborhood dives, cultish in their fandom, where everything is handed over in to-go containers? The spectrum of dining in New Orleans is as diverse and exciting as the city itself. Here is but a small offering of all there is to explore—consider it more of a culinary snapshot of a city in constant flux than a best-of list. You’ll find James Beard nominees and previous winners to neighborhood diners, soul food favorites, and punk rock outposts in Algiers Point, plus some of the best Thai food this side of the Mekong. If there’s a prevailing sentiment here, it’s that of community, of meals shared and cultures crossed, of service in all its manifest forms, and of how food can be a catalyst for all these things. In New Orleans, love and togetherness are woven into the city, shared over and over again, one great meal at a time.