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Where to Dine<br />
<strong>New</strong> <strong>Orleans</strong> restaurant matriarch Miss Ella Brennan says that<br />
whereas in other places, one eats to live, “In <strong>New</strong> <strong>Orleans</strong>, we live<br />
to eat.” Never was that more apparent than when the first high-profile<br />
restaurant—as it happens, a Brennan family restaurant called<br />
Bacco—reopened in the French Quarter post-Katrina. You can only<br />
imagine what that meant for the spirits and souls of the intrepid<br />
locals. Each returning restaurant is greeted with cries of pleasure and<br />
relief, and the opening of every new place—a startling number, as it<br />
happens—is seen as an act of bold defiance that must be supported.<br />
Together, they indicate that normalcy and good times are returning<br />
to the city. But beyond that, they signify the return of family.<br />
Returning restaurants are often packed. And by nonscientific count,<br />
there are more restaurants in the non-flooded, basic tourist areas<br />
than there were pre-Katrina.<br />
While it’s wonderful when the high-profile folks return, <strong>New</strong><br />
<strong>Orleans</strong> cuisine is not just about old-line fancy-pants places. It’s also<br />
about the corner po’ boy shops, and Miss Willie Mae’s Scotch<br />
House, home to fried chicken so heavenly she was celebrated by a<br />
major culinary organization not long before the floodwaters<br />
destroyed her restaurant. In one of the shows of grace that emerge<br />
from adversity, local restaurateurs and others banded together to<br />
help her rebuild, with one vowing he wouldn’t rest until that first<br />
plate of chicken was served. That’s the kind of dedication to food<br />
and community that makes <strong>New</strong> <strong>Orleans</strong> special.<br />
You are going to want to eat a lot here. And then you are going<br />
to want to talk about it. After being in <strong>New</strong> <strong>Orleans</strong> for just a short<br />
amount of time, you will find yourself talking less about the sights<br />
and more about the food—if not constantly about the food: what<br />
you ate already, what you are going to be eating later, what you wish<br />
you had time to eat. We are going to take a stand and say to heck<br />
with <strong>New</strong> York and San Francisco: <strong>New</strong> <strong>Orleans</strong> has the best food<br />
in the United States. (Some natives will gladly fight you if you say<br />
otherwise.)<br />
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