Jan-Feb-2016_Final-1-4-16-attempt2

GULF COAST

Globetrotting Across the Gulf Coast with Chris Rose

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?

• • •   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

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.

…native. But is it?

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.

“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.”

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

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