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GULF COAST
W
hen I first moved from
Maryland to the French
Quarter in New Orleans back
in 1984, my nightly dining ritual involved
two Louisiana delicacies I had never eaten
before: raw oysters and Lucky Dogs.
But my true savory awakening occurred when
I took my first bite of a catfish po-boy. Who
ever knew that what we derisively termed as
“trash fish” back home on the Potomac River
could ever taste so sweet and meaty?
It was like a forbidden delight for me.These were fish,after all,whose
Southern regional nomenclature includes the terms polliwogs and
chuckleheads. Coming from a well-respected, church-going family
from the East Coast, catfish was simply not in my family’s epicurean
portfolio. But oh, how I came to love it.
Long before Hurricane Katrina rearranged the dining culture of
New Orleans, my favorite catfish po-boy in the city was made by
a Mexican woman in a Cajun restaurant owned by Koreans in an
African-American neighborhood.
And it is in the writing of a sentence like that which reminds me
how much I love this place and how lucky we all are to live here
on the Gulf Coast, where food is such an amalgam of cultures,
traditions and locations.
You don’t need to globetrot to taste the great cuisines of the world.
They’re all right here in front of us, in increasing numbers and
diversity. It’s just that sometimes we don’t realize it.
International visitors to the region should feel right at home
when they wander the Rouses grocery aisles or peruse our region’s
restaurants’ menus. After all, we’re making the same stuff they do
back in Argentina, Portugal, Ethiopia and Cambodia.
We just probably call it something else.
As the famed chef, author and champion of international cuisine,
James Beard, put it: “Food is our common ground, a universal
experience.” No truer words.
It’s a frequent theme in this
magazine: everything most folks
consider to be native cuisine
actually comes from somewhere
else—and often that somewhere
else is very far away.
One man’s snails are another
one’s escargot.
• • •
When you think about it, eating seems to be the best way to travel
around the planet very cheaply. And the most fun. And often the
most doggedly confusing, confounding and contradictory. But
roaming along our great Gulf Coast region, you can taste the world
at your fingertips.
Esquire magazine recently named Shaya on Magazine Street in
New Orleans as America’s Best Restaurant. It’s an Israeli restaurant
run by an Israeli-born chef, Alon Shaya, who made his reputation at
Domenica,an artisanal Italian eatery,and is located at the former site of
Dominique’s, which was owned by and named after chef Dominique
Macquet, who hails from the African island country of Mauritius.
The proprietor of New Orleans’ trendiest Vietnamese restaurant,
MoPho, calls his cuisine a meeting of the Mekong and Mississippi
Deltas. But Michael Gulotta also has a side gig cooking Irish fare
at Rum & The Lash inside Finn McCool’s pub. And he recently
announced plans to open a Sicilian restaurant on Tulane Avenue in
the former location of Treo, a Spanish restaurant.
NewOrleans:The only place you can get jet lag just by going out to dinner.
• • •
Now, back to those chuckleheads. You can get a killer catfish po-boy
at Domilise’s corner bar and restaurant in Uptown New Orleans or
at Mr. Ed’s Bar & Fish House in Metairie, and it feels as if it is the
very salt and earth of the Gulf Coast, so very tasty, seasoned and
…native.
But is it?
The eating of catfish was not
a Southern tradition from the
start. Mississippi catfish farms
produce over half the catfish
consumed in the United States,
but it’s actually a relatively new
“You don’t need to globetrot to taste the great
cuisines of the world. They’re all right here in
front of us, in increasing numbers and diversity.
It’s just that sometimes we don’t realize it.”
Globetrotting Across
the Gulf Coast
with
Chris Rose