Whenever I host people visiting New Orleans, a restaurant tour ensues. There will be full meals with reservations planned in advance, and impromptu quick stops. Memories will be made, diets forgotten.
We will talk about the next stop before finishing with the last. We will toggle between the elevated indulgence and the everyday accessible – maybe putting on a jacket for the elegant dining room at Clancy’s, and rolling up our sleeves over crawfish at Frankie & Johnny’s a few blocks away.
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 cultural assets of this city, our food and the food culture that New Orleans people build around it.
In the midst of Super Bowl week, New Orleans is having visitors over on a different scale than normal. That got me thinking about what I want people visiting or watching from afar to know about our city through food.
People are fired up about food everywhere. Cities all over tout their restaurants as prime hooks for travelers.
But what makes New Orleans a great food city isn’t the number of restaurants or awards they garner. It’s the interplay of New Orleans people with this piece of their culture, the way New Orleans people assign a priority to food in their lives and the way restaurants give the framework to explore this.
New Orleanians are not just an audience or a customer base for our local restaurants. We have a relationship. We are active participants, analysts, historians and ambassadors for them. That practice and pursuit builds a common language, a shared identity and reinforces a culture.
Restaurants make it available to visitors, but really they are extensions of a lifestyle and culture that flows through New Orleans families, homes, relationships and neighborhoods.
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.
