When it comes to where to eat in New Orleans, food is the primary language. A bowl of gumbo is not a recipe; it’s a novel of history, migration, and survival. This is a city that communicates its deepest truths – about joy, resilience, community, and conflict – through what it cooks. To eat here is to participate in a conversation that has been going on for 300 years. An essential New Orleans restaurant does more than serve a great meal. It provides a kind of spiritual and cultural nourishment, reminding the city of who it is, where it came from, and where it’s going. Our aim here is not simply to point you to good food, but to share with you places both close to our heart and our hope for the future of the city. They might not always be glamorous – the best booze can come in a plastic to-go cup and life-altering crawfish from a folding table in a parking lot. But they are all honest: neighborhood anchors, family legacies, or community hubs.

When it comes to where to eat in New Orleans, food is the primary language. A bowl of gumbo is not a recipe; it’s a novel of history, migration, and survival. This is a city that communicates its deepest truths – about joy, resilience, community, and conflict – through what it cooks. To eat here is to participate in a conversation that has been going on for 300 years. An essential New Orleans restaurant does more than serve a great meal. It provides a kind of spiritual and cultural nourishment, reminding the city of who it is, where it came from, and where it’s going. Our aim here is not simply to point you to good food, but to share with you places both close to our heart and our hope for the future of the city. They might not always be glamorous – the best booze can come in a plastic to-go cup and life-altering crawfish from a folding table in a parking lot. But they are all honest: neighborhood anchors, family legacies, or community hubs.

New Orleans is full of surprises, but the beauty of Domilise’s is that it’s exactly what you’d expect from a po’boy joint. Located uptown on Annunciation Street, the yellow house on the corner has been serving up food for the neighborhood along the Mississippi Riverbend for over a hundred years. We watch as customers line up below the hand-painted wood sign to get a taste of straightforward sustenance. There are no shortcuts here: tasty “debris” – the tender bits of meat that fall off a roast beef – are cooked for hours into gravy before Mary Lou and her team generously ladle it atop crisp loaves of Leidenheimer (a local brand of French bread that’s been around even longer than Domilise’s).

In April 1965, Rocky Tommaseo and his brother, Tommy, teamed with Carlo Gioe and his two brothers, Mario and Giuseppe. Together, they opened Rocky & Carlo’s, a restaurant that would become an institution in Chalmette – a town about 10 miles east of New Orleans. But the partnership between these two families was already solidified by the time they arrived in southeastern Louisiana. “Our story began in Sicily,” said a younger Tommy Tommaseo, who everyone calls “Mr. Tommy.” He is the son of Rocky and nephew of the older Tommy. At 75 years old, Mr. Tommy is part of the second generation of Rocky & Carlo’s ownership. Two families merged, he said, in the coastal town of Alcamo.

Kirk and Kerry, brother and sister, are the heart and soul of Frady’s One Stop Food Store, a Bywater neighborhood institution that has been around in some shape or form since 1889. After a typically busy lunch rush, the duo sit at a table outside the yellow-painted shop, watching over their quiet corner of New Orleans. They shout hello to an older neighbor as he totters by. Kerry notices his limp and asks Kirk about it.

New Orleans’s king cake is a culinary symbol of Mardi Gras and the festive, months-long lead-up known as Carnival season. Beginning on January 6 and continuing until the season’s culmination on Fat Tuesday – this year taking place on March 4 – revelers across the region enjoy slice after slice of this traditional, cinnamon-flavored cake. Whoever finds the small, plastic baby figurine hidden inside is said to receive good luck, but must also purchase the next king cake.

I know it sounds like a cliché – New Orleans and gumbo – but no other dish so genuinely represents the food culture and the food love of this city. It’s a dish you’ll find on countless menus, from the most upscale to backstreet joints. You will also find it in most New Orleans homes. It’s the dish we make at Thanksgiving and at Christmas. It’s the dish we make when it gets cold and we need comfort food and the dish we make when we have company over and we want to give them a taste of New Orleans. So eating gumbo, a really good gumbo, at a restaurant is a very true New Orleans experience. As a visitor, you are doing exactly what locals do.

In New Orleans, everything is rich… the soil, the architecture, the music, the revelry, as well as the food. Ignatius J. Reilly, the city’s great fictitious antihero in John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces, reflected, “When I go to lunch, I must have something substantial. This business of having a light lunch is a thoroughly alien concept to me. My being recoils at the thought of a salad or any other such abomination. I am a medievalist, not a Calvinist. Lunch must be rich, satisfying, and caloric to sustain me through the afternoon.” When we went out for a New Orleans meal over this past year, we heeded the words of Ignatius. It's best you do the same. - Lev Thibodeaux

Casamento’s does not accept reservations, credit cards, or checks. Simply walk under the restaurant’s green neon sign and through the white door and you instantly know you’ve entered a special place, somewhere between Italy and Louisiana; the interior a cross between a shotgun house and the bottom of a public pool. The narrow series of rooms, lined from floor to ceiling in imported tiles, leads in a straight line from the front door to the bathroom in the back of the kitchen. The seafood joint makes for a physical, communal experience, an offer of what was and what remains in New Orleans. Don’t worry, you are in good hands.

Looking at the menu at Small Mart Cafe, it can be hard to make sense of the variety. First there are the bagels, led by the “New Yorker,” filled with smoked salmon, tomato, onion, capers, and cream cheese. Soon, you’ll come to the curry and chaat bowls, leaning into the flavors of India and Pakistan and including sides like samosas and crispy pakoras. Near the bottom of the menu, you’ll find po’boys – this is New Orleans, after all. The local sandwiches traditionally are filled with proteins like fried shrimp, oysters, or roast beef. At Small Mart, however, tradition isn’t much of a constraint.

Jambalaya, the rice dish that stands at the crossroads of culture and cuisine, is a staple of celebration, mourning and everything in between in Louisiana. From tailgates to Mardi Gras to repasts and backyard cookouts, it is a ubiquitous food that can be a main or a side dish. The roots of the dish can be traced to West African jollof rice, as well as Spanish paella. At its essence, jambalaya is an odds-and-ends dish that feeds a multitude, a humble rice dish with some meat and/or seafood cooked into it by way of a flavorful broth. As for the origins of the name jambalaya, there are as many theories as the grains of rice contained within. Some believe it to come from the Provençal word jambalaia, which means a mishmash.

The tall French doors and brightly colored murals that greet you upon entering LUFU NOLA are a dramatic departure from its early days as a pop-up restaurant, when Chefs Sarthak Samantray and Aman Kota were dishing out their regional Indian fare at bars and breweries across the city. The sleek, modern bar and simple, elegant dining room echo the themes of arrival, as what was once an itinerant restaurant has found a home in New Orleans’s Central Business District. And the surroundings aren’t the only thing that’s new for LUFU – a full-scale restaurant has allowed their team to showcase an even broader array of dishes that represent the culinary heritage of India.

When you walk into Sammy’s Food Service & Deli at lunchtime, it might look like you’ve entered the scene of an emergency. The atmosphere is buzzing as a collection of police officers, firemen, and military personnel fill the modestly-sized dining area. “There are post office workers, too!” added Sammy Schloegel, who has co-owned this Gentilly eatery with his wife, Gina, since the early 1990s. “We give all government employees twenty percent off,” he laughed, “so that probably helps bring them in.”

It’s Friday at Little People’s Place in the Tremé, and that means fried fish. Rodney Thomas carries a tray laden with freshly battered shrimp and catfish fillets out the bar door to his provisional fry station, a well-worn propane burner with a heavily seasoned cast-iron dutch oven on top. The oil inside the dutch oven begins to shimmer and circulate, and Thomas drops a pinch of the seasoned fish fry into the cauldron-like pot to see if the oil is hot enough. A quick sizzle confirms it is, and Thomas begins to nimbly slip the shrimp and catfish into the hot oil, which bubbles vigorously. A few feet away under the plywood awning that covers the entrance to the bar, a group of men are watching daytime television on a small flatscreen TV sitting on an outdoor table – today it’s Divorce Court – while slowly sipping beers.

We all have that friend. A friend we should probably call more often. One who is always there for us, but we don’t see often enough. A friend who we can pick up where we left off with, no matter how much time has elapsed between conversations. A friend whose company always leaves you satisfied and wondering: Why didn’t we do this sooner? Buffa’s Bar and Restaurant is that friend. An outpost in the Marigny neighborhood on Esplanade Avenue, divided from the French Quarter by a neutral ground (which is New Orleanian for “street median”). A few blocks away, the classic dive bar Port of Call draws tourists and locals in a line that stretches around the block for their potent drinks and hearty burgers.