It’s not just gumbo: here’s what to know about NOLA dining as the Super Bowl arrives

When I host people visiting New Orleans, a restaurant tour often ensues. There will be reservations and impromptu quick stops. Memories will be made, diets forgotten.

We will toggle between the everyday accessible and elevated indulgence — maybe rolling up sleeves over crawfish outside at Clesi’s Seafood and later putting on a jacket for the mirror-lined dining room at Clancy’s across town, hoping the season has provided soft shell crabs.

These tours don’t come about just to keep my visitors’ bellies full; they are a way to take part in one of the prime appeals of this city, our food and the culture that New Orleans people build around it.

During Super Bowl week, New Orleans is hosting visitors on a different scale than normal, even for this high-profile travel destination, and the attention goes way beyond actual occupancy. The intense media coverage that accompanies the Super Bowl will bring stories from this host city to vicarious visitors and certainly to potential future visitors.

Here’s what I want people visiting or watching from afar to know about our city through food.

NOLA is not just about dishes, but a cuisine

New Orleans has a cuisine all our own, which is obvious to locals but not always so to visitors.

Most cities and regions have some specialties, the famous dishes for travelers to hunt down like foodie scavenger hunts. But New Orleans food is not about having a collection of items, it’s about having a cuisine unto itself, in the way other countries have a national cuisine, one that arches above trends and moves through generations.

It starts with a common history, an essential palette of ingredients and shared knowledge of technique. Its richness comes from how that’s expressed in countless individualistic ways that still relate to the people and place of New Orleans.

NOLA food gives a shared identity

People are fired up about food everywhere, and the easy, engaging content it provides on social media has only propelled its currency further. Many cities now promote their restaurants as a hook for visitors. 

But what makes New Orleans a truly great food city (and more than a city with just a lot of good restaurants) is the interplay of what was created here and endures, and what this bedrock keeps inspiring next.

The key ingredient is the local community, people who assign a priority to food in their lives. They are active participants, analysts, historians and ambassadors, for not just their favorite restaurants but for the idea of New Orleans as a city where food matters. That practice and pursuit builds a common language, a shared identity and reinforces a culture.

NOLA food is a mosaic of common threads

One of my restaurant itineraries for guests could include a lunch of gumbo and fried chicken at Li’l Dizzy’s, the Treme lunch spot that continues a generations-old story of Creole cooking from the Baquet family. This is New Orleans flavor as it has always been.

The next stop, for dinner, could be MaMou, a French Quarter jewel box that shows one direction Creole cuisine can take. Here, chef Tom Branighan has created an upscale showpiece for an inventive interpretation of Creole cuisine with modern French style.

The two restaurants, so disparate on the surface, are located about half a mile apart. But they’re closer than that, because they’re connected by a thread stitched across the cultural landscape of New Orleans.

You can draw the same thread between the historic Arnaud’s and the modern Palm & Pine three blocks apart in the French Quarter, or the Garden District landmark Commander’s Palace and the pioneering Coquette down the street. They make New Orleans cuisine.

NOLA is both culinary incubator and magnet for talent

Having a culinary identity and food culture inspires people to make their mark and it also draws people from elsewhere who value such. This is the engine of next-generation innovation in our restaurant scene.

The way GW Fins presents Gulf seafood is innovative (try the dry-aged tuna). The way Dakar NOLA weaves the foodways of Senegal through its chef’s experience in high-end American cuisine is innovative. The idea of Acamaya, a modern Mexican seafood restaurant nestled into the Baywater neighborhood, is innovative (go on a Monday and see all the other local restaurant people dining there on their night off).

The creation of Saffron NOLA as a world-class Indian restaurant built around Creole New Orleans influence is innovative. The mining of New Orleans’ own foundational role in cocktail culture to come up with the very modern tavern Jewel of the South is innovative.

NOLA food is evolving, but rooted

What supports all this is a community that is not just out to find a good meal, but which respects cuisine and brings unbridled excitement to the pursuit of it. They were raised that way, or (like me) they spent enough time absorbing the culture here that it became second nature.

That common ground is set by the idea of red bean Mondays and fried seafood Fridays at neighborhood joints, by Creole tradition at the old grande dame restaurants and by successive generations that keep bringing the story forward.

After this Super Bowl is in the books, I hope our visitors return home with the sense of that. And maybe we locals will appreciate it a bit more from the opportunity to show it off on such a scale.