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"FacebookPinterest\n\nAlan Richman hits the streets of New Orleans to see how the country's most distinctive cuisine has fared after Katrina\n\n\n\nI've never had much luck eating in New Orleans. I might be the only person who disliked Uglesich's, a beloved seafood joint where I once stood in line for an hour in wretched early October heat for a po'boy containing a miserly quantity of oysters so overcooked they were like marbles. I believe most of the profits made by that establishment came about because of its periodic threats to close, which inevitably brought a rush of business. Uglesich's finally shut down last year, to everybody's dismay but my own.\n\nOn a trip to New Orleans in the early '90s, I made it my business to eat at the restaurant of Frank Brigtsen, then coming into prominence as one of the acclaimed new masters of Creole cuisine. I didn't enjoy my meal. Brigtsen puts so many miscellaneous items on every plate that a fellow has to be pretty picky not to like anything, but it was that way for me. I gave up on the twin tourist standbys, Antoine's and Arnaud's, decades ago, just like everybody else. I will concede that the one spot that never disappoints me is Caf\u00E9 du Monde, where the beignets\u2014doughnuts to you and me\u2014are made seconds before they arrive at your table.\n\nI think people either take to the city or they do not. They buy into the romance, or they abhor the decadence. I know where I stand.\n\nNew Orleans was always a three-day stubble of a city, and now, courtesy of Katrina, it's more like ve. The situation is worse, of course, in the devastated areas, where the floodwaters and the winds did their work. I know we are supposed to salvage what's left of the city, but what exactly is it that we're trying to cherish and preserve? I hope it's not the French Quarter, which has evolved into a illogical mix of characterless housing, elegant antiques stores, and scuzzy bars, a destination for tourists seeking the worst possible experience. The entertainment values are only marginally superior to those of Tijuana, Mexico.\n\nOf course, there's the food. I'm not certain the cuisine was ever as good as its reputation, in part because the people who have consumed, evaluated, and admired it likely weren't sober enough at the time of ingestion to know what they were eating. The food can be praised for distinctiveness and historical significance, both noteworthy, but the restaurants were going in the wrong direction before the hurricane\u2014think, if you are old enough, of French-hotel food of the '50s. Too many luxurious restaurants were desperately trying to attract business by serving meals that fulfilled some illusory idea of what traditional cuisine should be. A local joke says it well: New Orleans has a thousand restaurants but only one menu.\n\nIt's impossible to know whether the restaurants started moving in that direction because they were sentimentalizing the past or because they hoped to profit from it, but the results were less than inspirational. Food should not taste as though it belongs in a museum.\n\nNew Orleans has always been about food and music, with parades added to the mix. (In the North, where I come from, we like to think we're about jobs and education, with sports thrown in.) Vulnerability goes along with loving the dinner table too much\u2014think again of our old friends the French. It might sound harmless for a civilization to focus on food, but it's enormously indulgent. Name a society that cherishes tasting menus and I'll show you a people too portly to mount up and repel invaders.\n\nSomething like that occurred with Katrina. It was never the best idea, building a subterranean city on a defenseless coastline. Residents could have responded to that miscalculation in any number of conscientious ways, but they chose endless revelry. New Orleans fell in love with itself and acted accordingly, becoming a festival of narcissism, indolence, and corruption. Tragedy could not have come to a place more incapable of dealing with it.\n\nI'm not saying we shouldn't rescue the city. We have no choice, because of all those displaced citizens living in motels in Houston or wherever desperation has taken them. It's for them that we should participate in the rehabilitation of New Orleans. I can't think of a great deal more that moves me. We could, as an alternative, transform the city into a gastronomic habitat. The goal would be to save the crawfish \u00E9tou\u00AC\u00E9e, much as land in other locales is being set aside for whooping cranes and elderberry longhorn beetles. New Orleans, to me, is a city of crooks and cooks. When I went down there for a week in July, I made a point of going to most of the important restaurants that had reopened. Also on my list was every small spot that I knew about or friends recommended. Not many were unknown to me. New Orleans is one of the best-promoted destinations, and it has few restaurants that aren't famous.\n\nWherever I went, I asked for a definition of the food being served. I wanted to figure out once and for all what people think they're getting\u2014Cajun or Creole or something from the chef's imagination.\n\nYou've heard about the cuisine, of course, but you've probably heard wrong. Meals are rarely accompanied by washboard thumping and zydeco bands. That ritual goes along with Cajun food, fundamental and spicy, brought down from Canada\u2014good Lord, are we trying to save food from Canada? \u2014by Acadian farmers and their spokesmodel, Longfellow's Evangeline. What has been said about one-pot Cajun cooking being tasty is true, except nobody goes to New Orleans to eat it. It's best appreciated in Lafayette Parish, a three-hour drive west. Folks out there call themselves Cajuns, and I promise you they do not behave like the rest of us.\n\nSupposedly, Creoles can be found in and around New Orleans. I have never met one and suspect they are a faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race. The myth is that once, long ago, Creoles existed. Certainly there was a Creole cuisine, a fancified amalgamation of French (mainly), Spanish (just a little), Italian (even less), and African-Caribbean (unavoidable). The African-Caribbean influence was the kind of fortuitous culinary accident that occurs when the swells eating the food don't come from the same background as the workers cooking the food.\n\nThe idea that you might today eat an authentic Creole dish is a fantasy. Turtle soup, crawfish bisque, and fried speckled trout are unlikely to be made precisely as they once were, and the one dish that is faithfully replicated\u2014gumbo\u2014might be Cajun and it might be Creole, depending on whom you favor. I side with the Cajuns, who, unlike the Creoles, appear to be real. Barbecued shrimp, another standard, possesses Cajun straightforwardness, but it was thought up by an Italian about fifty years ago. The po'boy, the great submarine sandwich of Louisiana, was invented by kindhearted brothers who wanted to feed striking streetcar drivers. It's likely the original po'boy consisted of French fries and beef gravy on long rolls, a concoction with eerie similarities to Quebec's poutine (fries, gravy, cheese curds on a plate). If that makes po'boys Cajun, then I guess I'll have to concede that New Orleans does one Cajun dish particularly well.\n\nI would happily have excluded the French Quarter from my culinary explorations, but it does retain some culinary significance. That district gives me the creeps in a way that New Orleans's famous aboveground cemeteries\u2014the cities of the dead\u2014do not. I made it a point to hurry past the bars where tourists were big-gulping Hurricanes while listening to tattooed Bourbon Street bands screech \"Proud Mary\" at levels high enough to shatter empties scattered in the streets. (The city has never gotten around to mandating bottle deposits.)\n\nI started one evening of eating at the French Quarter's Central Grocery, which looks like an Italian specialty shop but in reality exists to sell one product, the mu\u00ACuletta, a sandwich thought to have been invented there exactly one hundred years ago. If you ask the owner, Frank Tusa, he says otherwise: \"People here weren't making sandwiches a hundred years ago.\" Okay, make it seventy.\n\nThe prewrapped (but just-made) sandwich consists of salami, ham, cheese, and mortadella on focaccia-like bread slathered with a crunchy homemade olive-and-vegetable spread. The cuisine? \"Sicilian,\" said the counterman. If the quality of the meats and cheeses had been anything other than ordinary, it would have been an unusually interesting sandwich. Since they were not, it was merely a good sandwich.\n\nBetween the French Quarter and the shattered Lower Ninth Ward is a two-dish spot, Vaughan's Lounge. It's a roadhouse in a neighborhood that has lost many of its roads, courtesy of flood damage. The building where you can find Vaughan's Lounge doesn't look so great, either, but I was told it had started to crumble long before Katrina. Mostly, people go to Vaughan's for the music, in particular Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers, appearing Thursday nights. The co-owner, Chris Songy, puts out a pot of red beans, usually around 1 a.m., but that's not the dish that dazzled me. On Friday nights he also boils up seafood.\n\nHis oversize fresh shrimp, the kind that come about ten to a pound, were freshly caught and freshly boiled, stacked up in Styrofoam containers behind the bar. I ate mine with Abita Restoration Ale, which I strongly believe should replace Barq's root beer as the city's signature bottled drink. I paid $7 for nearly two pounds of shrimp, although Songy put a slight damper on my enthusiasm when he told me, \"My boiled shrimp make me nauseated. I can eat other people's but not mine. The fumes get in my nose.\" From what I'm told, New Orleans once had innumerable cooks like Songy, perfectionists without pretense, and Songy admitted not many were left. \"We're pretty scattered now,\" he said.\n\nI'm not going to claim that Liuzza's by the Track is the best restaurant in New Orleans, but I'd put it second. It's an old bar with mismatched stools located in what I'd call a mid neighborhood\u2014about half the houses are occupied and about half are deserted. Garbage remains in the streets and on the sidewalks, and in one pile, just down the block from the restaurant, I came upon a trash heap containing a broken 78-rpm Capitol record of Margaret Whiting singing \"Till We Meet Again.\" Some of the garbage in New Orleans is evocative of past lives, akin to the detritus of an architectural dig. I'm trying to be unstintingly hard-bitten here, but that kind of broke my heart.\n\nI ate a lot of good food at Liuzza's by the Track\u2014which shouldn't be confused with Liuzza's, a di\u00ACfferent place with di\u00ACfferent owners. I also ate two dishes that no other restaurant I tried made nearly as well: barbecued shrimp and gumbo. The shrimp were about five inches long (including heads) and came in a simple butter-lemon-pepper sauce that everybody should have been able to make well but for some reason nobody else could. The gumbo was stunning, texturally similar to a Kentucky burgoo, which is a slow-cooked half-stew, half-soup m\u00E9lange. The gumbo at Liuzza's by the Track was thinner and yet more flavorful than any other version I ate during my visit. It had a tang of tomato and contained plenty of chicken, sausage, and shrimp. It was a revelation, easily the best old-time dish I tasted. I asked the waitress to describe the cuisine, and she looked at me kind of funny, like I was too dumb to figure it out for myself. \"It's seafood,\" she said.\n\nMy boycott of po'boys ended at Liuzza's by the Track. I figured it was time to reengage and get over the Uglesich's debacle of years ago. I had a fine plan\u2014to concentrate on the oyster and roast beef versions\u2014and excellent intentions, but I immediately o\u00ACffended two New Orleans residents with me by describing the bread as terrible. It seems that New Orleanians feel intense affection for their so-called French bread, which isn't French and is barely bread. It's cotton encased in an extra-thin crust.\n\nI was told this particular style of bread is responsible for New Orleans's bread pudding, a renowned dessert that I am predisposed to abhor. I sometimes wonder if French Quarter revelers sitting with their heads between their legs have drunk excessively or if they've eaten a hearty portion of bread pudding swimming in warm, buttery whiskey sauce.\n\nI got hooked on po'boys, despite their carbohydrate packaging. My plan was to eat at least two a day, telling myself that they were mere nibbles between meals. Zimmer's Seafood, a retail fish store, reopened in the truly shattered neighborhood of Gentilly while I was there, and I got in line for an overstuff\u00ACed oyster po'boy that I ate standing on the curb, looking out over blocks and blocks of abandoned, nearly destroyed houses. You try to eat under those conditions, your sandwich has got to be great. By then I had figured out that the ideal way to order a po'boy is \"dressed,\" which means with lettuce, tomato, \"my-naise,\" and pickles, although I didn't much care for pickles with oysters. Zimmer's held the lead for best po'boy until I was taken to Parkway Bakery, which isn't overly famous but should be.\n\nA lot of New Orleans restaurants aren't as good as they used to be, but nobody says that about Parkway, because by all accounts it used to be a dump. It also used to be a bakery, until earlier floodwaters came along and cracked the brick ovens. The bar manager, Derek Guth, proudly told me that the Katrina floodwaters rose so high in Parkway that a photo of the damage was on exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art. (Maybe the residents of Pompeii had the same macabre sense of fulfillment, pleased that they were being buried in hot ash like none before them.)\n\nAs Guth told the story, the original owners closed Parkway in 1995, and it stayed shut for eight years. He said the old place was so filthy that men would drive up with their dates but leave them in the car while they got po'boys to go, because any woman who walked inside would be too disgusted to eat. \"What I heard,\" said Guth, \"is that the board of health gave them a long list of violations and said they'd close the place up if they weren't fid. The owner said, &#145;How long we got?' The inspector said, &#145;Until Labor Day.' That was the day they closed.\"\n\nParkway reopened less than three years ago, to deserved acclaim. The po'boys come on that customary bread, but here it's been warmed, which helps considerably. The oyster version, monstrously long, was overflowing with oysters, as though oysters cost so little that the quantity of the serving was of no financial concern. (We northerners pay $3 apiece in restaurants, and that's without anybody going to the trouble of cooking them for us.) The oysters were masterful, but then, I've never had badly fried oysters in New Orleans, except at Uglesich's. The roast-beef po'boy was even better and, to my amazement, more overstuff\u00ACed. The meat tasted a little like the Italian roast beef found in Chicago and a little like the braised beef in fancy French restaurants.\n\nThe way to eat at Parkway is to order a sandwich, grab a Barq's root beer from the back of the cooler to make certain you get a cold one, take a seat in the dining area (but not in the path of the hot air blowing from the ice-making machine), wait patiently to hear your name, and dig in, getting beef juices all over yourself. By the way, should your Barq's not be cold enough, do not think about pouring it into a cup and adding ice. Drinking from the bottle is how it's done. (If you're wondering what the ice machine is for, I have no idea.) You'll ask yourself if New Orleans food gets better than this. Sometimes it gets much worse.\n\n\n\nI was first in line for lunch at Bayona, where I'd estimate 90 percent of the wall art consists of framed press clippings heralding the accomplishments of chef Susan Spicer. The hostess led me past twenty-four empty tables until she reached a cramped one, back in a dark, airless corner. I didn't mind the worst table in the house. I'm used to that. It's just never happened to me when every other table was unoccupied.\n\nMy waitress described the cuisine as \"a little bit of everything,\" so I ordered a little bit of everything. Before eating, I decided to wash up, a compulsory pre-meal ercise in this damp, brooding climate. Instead of towels, normal in fancy restaurants, there was a hand-dryer, an international-airport touch. While walking back through the rapidly filling room, I shook my wet hands over the heads of people sitting at tables nicer than mine.\n\nSpicer's famous garlic soup was reddish brown as well as plenty thick, two attributes that almost certainly derived from one source, a long-cooked roux. (We've all heard of roux, the legendary Louisiana fat-and-flour mixture, but I can't say I've ever seen it so visibly in action.) The \"crab and Creole\" salad wasn't as interesting as its name\u2014I was expecting a composition that included chopped up Creoles, allowing me finally to glimpse one of them. Alas, the salad consisted of hard supermarket-grade tomato wedges surrounding a concoction of crabmeat (not much), endive, and onion.\n\nA note here on crabmeat, a product that we Yankees consider luxurious. During my stay in New Orleans, it was the best local ingredient available, and every restaurant but Bayona piled it on. At Brennan's, my Eggs Nouvelle Orl\u00E9ans, described as poached eggs on a bed of crabmeat, was more like poached eggs on a barge of crabmeat. I could barely finish it. At Bayona, I could barely find it.\n\nFor the pi\u00E8ce de r\u00E9sistance, I ordered a sandwich that locals and the Bayona waitstaff advised me not to miss: smoked duck, cashew butter, and pepper jelly. It was warm and leaden, as though it had been compressed with car-crushing equipment. It glistened with fat. It had that creepy jelly and that weird butter plus a few chunks of duck and a lot of oily cooked onions. It was moist. It also was reddish brown, like the soup and, come to think of it, the walls.\n\nSpicer's second establishment is Herbsaint, where Donald Link is the chef and co-owner. A few years ago, the food was notably good. A waitress on the occasion of my latest visit informed me that the cuisine was \"French with a southern twist.\" She then brought me a glass of corked Italian wine\u2014maybe I had it coming for not ordering a French or a southern wine.\n\nI started my meal with mediocre-tasting but great-looking gumbo that had chopped scallions, a scoop of rice, and a crustacean carcass suspended on top. Its major attribute was massive density, required to keep all the floating tidbits from breaking the surface tension and sinking. I can't say I took a liking to most New Orleans gumbo, finding it dull and one-dimensional, lacking high notes. Maybe roux is magic to locals, but as a thickener, I don't see that it's much di\u00ACfferent from cornstarch. I next attempted fried frogs' legs, a bad idea. Frogs' legs are subtle, sort of like flounder on a stick, and the taste of the delicate meat was obliterated by a spicy fried-chicken-style coating. The frogs' legs were French with a Colonel Sanders's twist. For my final savory, I ordered chicken and dumplings. Don't blame me. I'm not the one who decided this was a southern restaurant. The dish was a chicken casserole with negligible chicken topped with dumplings cleverly disguised as a crust, making it a sort of potpie. I'd describe it as southern with a Stou\u00ACffer's twist.\n\nI don't know of another city that o\u00ACffers such consistently second-rate desserts as New Orleans (although if you come upon bananas Foster, it's worth a try). I ordered coconut-cream pie with a macadamia-nut crust and pushed it away after two bites. A waiter seemed concerned, so I said to him, \"Ask when it was made.\" He returned with a disgusted look on his face, confirmed it was two days old, and took it o\u00AC my check. What do I think of Bayona and Herbsaint? The food was miserable, but that didn't matter. At least they were both up and running. In New Orleans these days, any working enterprise deserves praise.\n\n\n\nI stumbled upon exactly one civilian tidying up. I knew I wouldn't find many residents in the neighborhoods. I was aware that the citizenry of New Orleans tends not to be civically engaged, but I expected more volunteers than that. The woman was at the curb across the street from Willie Mae's Scotch House, a local fried-chicken institution being renovated, and she was removing muck from a gutter simply because she and the Catholic church she belonged to thought it was good work for God-fearing folks to do.\n\nI asked her where I could find the best fried chicken in town, inasmuch as Willie Mae's was a few months from reopening. She suggested McHardy's. Then she remembered that McHardy's had burned down after reopening. For the people of New Orleans, more bad luck.\n\nLess than a half mile away, I discovered Leah Chase, 83, living in a FEMA trailer\u2014think of these as one-piece modular homes that leak formaldehyde gas. She is the owner of the restaurant Dooky Chase, which was named after her father-in-law and was undergoing post-Katrina renovations a few months ago. I told her of my despair with New Orleans and that it needed some kind of supreme commander, a Dwight Eisenhower, to take over and tell everybody to get to work. She said, \"Or a George Patton. Somebody to go at it. Somebody to push hard.\"\n\nSmall restaurants like hers, many of them black-owned, were harder hit by Katrina than large restaurants, most of them white-owned. Chase's reaction to her misfortune has been optimism rather than despair. She told me the small restaurants were fortunate to have saviors in important chefs such as Frank Brigtsen and Paul Prudhomme of K-Paul's. \"The big fancy places uplift us,\" she said. \"We can't uplift the big ones, but the big ones can uplift us. Some think that God was prejudiced, he saved so many of the big ones, but I think he knew what he was doing. If we were saved and they were lost, we couldn't replace them. They can make us better, but we can't make them better.\"\n\nOnly a few of the famous dining rooms remained closed in July. Commander's Palace was expecting to reopen as soon as it could count on enough help and enough tourists. A now hiring sign was posted outside the restaurant when I drove past. Commander's must return to business for no other reason than to safeguard its Creole bread-pudding sou\u00ACl\u00E9. I doubt that it's Creole, but it's one of the few variations of that dish worth eating.\n\nGabrielle was closed. Chef-owner Greg Sonnier told me that he and his wife, Mary, came back to New Orleans as soon as they could. At first they couldn't get to their restaurant, so deep were the surrounding floodwaters. They had only six inches in the building, but they also had roof damage and a missing back door. Although they were trying to open in a new location, he said they couldn't get approval because New Orleans politics were worse than ever.\n\nI went to Brigtsen's, home of \"modern Louisiana cuisine,\" according to a waitress, and found it precisely as it was a dozen years ago. The tiny rooms were cramped. The tiny tables were cramped. The tiny wine list was cramped, although the 1996 Dom P\u00E9rignon for $140 was a bargain. Eating there felt like dinner at an earnest bed-and-breakfast. One of my guests said, \"I feel like I should be coming downstairs in the morning for Belgian waffles.\" The menu was fussy, the plates were overloaded, and every entr\u00E9e was finished off with snap peas, summer squash, and vinegary coleslaw. It's hard to fault the concept of giving customers a lot, but what was set down in front of us could have been assembled by a fat guy going through a buff\u00ACet line.\n\nThe beloved Galatoire's, once nearly forgotten, has been overrated since winning the James Beard Award for outstanding restaurant in America in 2005. Nevertheless, it remains a mandatory stop. I wouldn't miss a place this charming, and neither should you. The waiters wear well-pressed tudoes, and the busboys look like admirals in dress whites. Our waiter had a Cajun accent so pure I wanted to tape it for the Smithsonian.\n\nThe ground-floor dining room is a triumph of understated old-restaurant decor, with a tile floor, bright lights, cloth napkins, mirrored walls, and brass coat hooks. I never thought New Orleans got cold enough for outerwear, but my luncheon guests assured me that a sixty-degree cold snap still brings out ladies in furs. Not much about Galatoire's changes, although the ice for drinks is no longer chipped off\u00AC huge blocks.\n\nThe \"French-Creole\" food, as the waiter labeled it, is uninspired, except for the irresistible crabmeat maison, which is really a mayonnaise-based ravigote. I don't like many fish preparations better than trout meuni\u00E8re amandine, but what I got for lunch looked and tasted fried rather than saut\u00E9ed. I'm also reasonably sure the thick, fresh fillet of fish wasn't trout, unless somebody had landed a fifteen-pounder that morning.\n\nLilette is everything you hope to find in a small, chef-owned-and-operated restaurant. It looks decidedly New Orleans, with a tile floor, high ceiling, tin roof, and overhead fans, but I thought the menu\u2014described to me as \"French with Italian influences\" \u2014suggested New York. (It included Kurobuta pork belly, which no stylish East Village bo\u00EEte dare be without.)\n\nLilette is located on Magazine Street, where floodwaters never rose, and chef-owner John Harris told me he prospered from October 2005, when his restaurant reopened, until the end of last year. He credited FEMA checks. People in the neighborhood received two checks, an immediate $2,000 disbursement and $2,358 in rental assistance, and they were dining o\u00ACff the windfall. \"Everybody got $4,358 from FEMA and didn't have to pay any bills,\" Harris said. \"And nobody had a refrigerator. Guess what? They went out to eat. Business was unbelievable.\"\n\nUpperline is a sweet-looking, yellow-brick spot that manages to pull o\u00AC what few other restaurants have accomplished\u2014honoring culinary history without becoming trite. Maybe that's because it doesn't try to be haute. The local art on display, collected by owner JoAnn Clevenger, is moving, and Upperline's interpretations of famous dishes seem charming rather than hackneyed. It's the place to go if you want fried green tomatoes, shrimp r\u00E9moulade, or, if you must, honey-pecan bread pudding. The desserts weren't distinguished, but they were warm, homespun, and comforting, always a successful concept.\n\nJacques-Imo's is a Creole Bar Mitzvah, fine dining for people who have no idea what fine dining should be. It's loud and absurd, inappropriate for anybody over the age of 17. I was led through an open kitchen, where I saw waitresses picking up fried oysters with their bare hands and dropping them into salads. (Unfortunately, that very salad comes with every entr\u00E9e.) There are a couple of dining rooms, and I got the one overlaid with a creepy mural, a swamp scene that M. Night Shyamalan might have painted.\n\nMy waitress informed me the food was \"traditional New Orleans\" and suggested I begin with shrimp-and-alligator-sausage cheesecake, similar to the ludicrous food I remember from road trips through Florida with my parents fifty years ago. (Maybe they were lying and we were in Louisiana.) For my entr\u00E9e, she suggested the carpetbagger steak with caramelized onions, blue cheese, and oyster-tasso hollandaise. Carpetbagger steak is a tenderloin sliced open and stu\u00ACffed with oysters, one of those famous foods that nobody has ever actually eaten. The Jacques-Imo spin, adding all those extras, seemed insane, but the dish was splendid, thanks to the butteriness of the steak and the freshness of the expertly poached oysters.\n\nI've eaten at August three times, and I'm certain it's the best restaurant in the city. It serves what I'd call modern Louisiana food, although our waiter claimed it was \"not necessarily regional but what's best and freshest in the market.\" That statement wrapped up my investigation into Creole and Cajun food, and this is what I learned: There isn't much sense in putting an all-purpose label on New Orleans food. If you go to fancy restaurants to seek out Cajun or Creole food, you almost certainly won't eat well. To their credit, residents value independent chefs who cook in their own kitchens, and only a good dining experience can come of that.\n\nOn this visit to August, the ma\u00EEtre d' led me to the undesirable back room, which appears to be paneled in milk chocolate. If you think that sounds dreary, it is. Adding to the absence of a pleasing ambience was a knob marked Musak, set in the wall above my head. Any dish you order at August makes sense, and I include the ones that shouldn't. I had a salad of heirloom beets, crabmeat, bacon, quail eggs, dill, mustard greens, and black-eyed-pea croutons, all in a light, sweet dressing. It was ridiculous sounding, but the ingredients were in exquisite proportion. A special of \"cowboy rib eye\" with truffle butter was something of a miracle\u2014I tend to feel that way whenever I get a beefy, satisfying steak. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, since chef John Besh operates a steak house in the casino a couple of blocks away.\n\n\n\nDuring my time in New Orleans, I sought to keep some perspective. For example, when the sommelier at August brought me an incorrect vintage of the wine I'd ordered, I tried not to be too distressed, knowing that somewhere in the Lower Ninth Ward a house was sitting atop a car. Yet it's important to come to a tough decision about New Orleans, because it's going to cost Iraq-magnitude money to get this place back to where it was or, better yet, where it should have been.\n\nI do admire much about the restaurants, even if their desserts survived Katrina because they were too heavy to float away. Restaurants could be the saviors of New Orleans, providing they produce innovative rather than repetitive food. They risk becoming meaningless if restoration means transforming the city into a low-density Creole theme park where food is one component of a commemoration of the past.\n\nBesides becoming stultified, they would su\u00ACffer mightily without neighborhood regulars. The citizens of New Orleans might not be the most energetic Americans\u2014I believe their morning ercise regimen consists of stumbling out of bars\u2014but they are joyful, expressive eaters. No restaurant can flourish if the only people who knock on its doors are tourists who bring little to the table besides credit cards.\n\nI don't mean to imply that classic dishes can't be pleasing. I admired Liuzza's by the Track precisely because its barbecued shrimp and its gumbo were magnificent renditions of old standards. If other New Orleans restaurants also strived for superior versions of these dishes, in the same way that southern barbecue joints battle over the best ribs or the best brisket, that alone would be a reason to admire the current state of the cuisine. Unfortunately, the restaurants don't have that competitive drive. Faux orthodoxy is no virtue, even if it results in tour buses double-parked outside.\n\nAugust should be the model for New Orleans restaurants. John Besh appreciates local ingredients (but doesn't limit himself to them), understands the flavors of Louisiana, and invariably chooses modern methods of food preparation over old-fashioned ones. He's got it sorted out. I have no idea whether New Orleans cooking was better a hundred years ago than it is today, but I do know that restaurants cannot be successful imitating what they don't know.\n\nI can't think of many cities more identified with cuisine than New Orleans, or one more dependent on its restaurants. They can help save the city, but first they have to save themselves.\n\nAlan Richman is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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