You know, for 300 years it's been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn't changed in 125 years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
New Orleans has a lot of good food.
In '71 or '72 I returned to New Orleans and stayed there. I started cooking Louisiana food. Of all the things I had cooked, it was the best-and it was my heritage.
New Orleans has a unique history as a great melting pot of all kinds of cultures, and that manifests itself now through the food, the music, and the kinds of people who live there.
It all comes back to the basics. Serve customers the best-tasting food at a good value in a clean, comfortable restaurant, and they'll keep coming back.
I'm not asking any of you to make drastic changes to every single one of your recipes or to totally change the way you do business. But what I am asking is that you consider reformulating your menu in pragmatic and incremental ways to create healthier versions of the foods that we all love.
New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.
Food trends don't just drive the obvious things, like cupcakes or cronuts, but something as elemental as your daily cup of coffee. The way you have that coffee now is probably very different from the way you had it ten years ago, and it'll probably be very different in ten years. That has a huge impact, culturally and economically.
I've experienced all the food and restaurants in New Orleans. I've been doing a bit of touristing when I have the day off, just walking in the French Quarter. To me, it's very, very surprising how people are so friendly. But no, it's very different from Paris.
Food is ever-changing and ever moving forward and getting more and more complex.
In a city, it's very hard to do a restaurant, an avant-garde-cuisine restaurant, where each year you need to change the whole menu.