5 Best New Restaurants in New Orleans in 2016

Via The Times Picayune, written by Brett Anderson:

Restaurants considered for the Best New Restaurant 2016 list had to have opened after Aug. 1, 2015. They also had to have been fully operational by Oct. 1, 2016, allowing for the grace period Brett Anderson gives restaurants before visiting them for review. They are listed in alphabetical order.

Kenton's

Kenton's is the oldest of this year's crop of best new restaurants. The reason it's here is because it felt old even when it was brand new. Back at the tail end of 2015, when Mani Dawes and Sean Josephs opened Kenton's with chef-partner Kyle Knall, the restaurant already bore features of a mature enterprise. Knall cooks modern American food that nods knowingly toward his native South. He's handy with wood smoke and deep frying without using either as a crutch. His expert, modulating touch strikes precisely the right notes for a restaurant that is respectful of tradition while not presuming its customers are only interested in oldies. Josephs and Dawes, who are married, earned their stripes as restaurateurs in New York City, where they still own properties. But Kenton's is far from the smug, subway-tiled speakeasy many locals fear from coastal transplants. It is, rather, a fine-dining restaurant refreshingly in tune to the folkways of its coordinates at the corner of Nashville Avenue and Magazine Street (near where Dawes grew up). The nerd-heaven bourbon selection and premium oyster bar are welcome additions to the Uptown neighborhood. The warmly professional service and serene, conservatively designed dining room signal an even keel. If Kenton's represents change, it's not of the type longtime locals need to fear.

Meril

Meril is the first New Orleans restaurant opened by Emeril Lagasse in nearly 20 years. That's plenty enough time for a restaurateur's muscles to go slack. Meril is proof that the 57-year-old icon has still got plenty of game. From wood-fire grills and wood-fire ovens to Asian barbecue and Jamaican jerk, from flatbreads, handmade pasta and roasted cauliflower to snack plates, small plates and medium plates, Meril's menu is essentially a collection of trends that have taken hold in this no-longer-that-young century. Lagasse is too smart an operator to try authoring another new culinary style at this stage in his career. Meril finds him playing to his strengths, unleashing chef de cuisine Wilfredo Avelar to juice proven strategies with big flavor and personality. This time it's done in an industrial-chic tavern set in a now so-hot neighborhood (Warehouse District) that Emeril all but invented.

N7

Reasonable people can disagree as to whether N7 is a bar, restaurant or bold new form of interactive sculpture. Same could be said about whether canned fish, an N7 specialty, counts as cooking. My take is that the head-scratching incited by this wine-bar-bistro-urban-retreat is a feature, not a bug. The brainchild of filmmaker Aaron Walker and chef Yuki Yamaguchi is, above all else, a place to be: For drinks that may be unfamiliar to you (like natural wine, or Japanese shochu). For the discordant pleasure of lazing about a rural-feeling compound erected on the deeply urban property of a former tire shop. For the stimulating conversations that are sure to touch on what this all adds up to. Scoff at the scallops rillettes, spiced mackerel pate or smoked sardines, if you must. Canned (and jarred) seafood of this quality -- delicacies in Spain, France and Portugal, to name three of the countries they're imported from -- are to the daily catch what charcuterie is to conventionally prepared mammal meat. They're also not the only things served. From the small bar set with boiled eggs to the pork katsu in beet sauce I ate with frites, N7 is an idiosyncratic expression of Francophilia. New Orleans hasn't seen anything like it before. And I can't imagine finding it anyplace else.

Seaworthy

Seaworthy's opening followed that of Josephine Estelle on one side and Balise on the other, completing a makeover of the block of Carondelet Street dominated by the New Orleans Ace Hotel. The restaurant is a collaboration between the Ace and the New York restaurant Grand Banks, whose well-regarded chef Kerry Heffernanis Seaworthy's executive chef; the drinks program is created by a veteran of the influential, now-closed Manhattan bar Milk & Honey.  So no, it is not a place to abjure the outside influences taking root in New Orleans. What it is, however, is a first-rate oyster bar in what has become a national style. Its soul is a happening bar featuring an array of bivalves, organized by region and priced by the single oyster, along with smartly curated libations to match. Chef de cuisine Daniel Causgrove distills a variety of seafood cooking traditions on the larger menu, with a bias toward local ingredients and Southern flavors. His food is by turns folksy (lobster roll, marinated crab claws) and high-flown (butter-poached sheepshead, whole roasted speckled trout) and consistently very good. The small dining rooms in the handsomely restored building are studies in arrested decay, decorated mainly in melted candle wax, populated by people who 18 months ago couldn't have imagined being this enchanted by this part of town.

Turkey and the Wolf

There are two categories on Turkey and the Wolf's menu: "Sandwiches" and "Not Sandwiches." The headings speak to the modesty of an order-at-the-counter sandwich place built in the onetime home of Finger Lick'N Wings. While factually accurate, the categories also are coy about what chef Mason Hereford delivers. Each of his sandwiches seizes an opportunity to turn a familiar path -- the one-bite journey from crisp-to-soft-to-crisp -- into a brief but memorable voyage. It's not high-minded stuff. We're talking about baloney, smoked ham and chicken-fried steak here. The difference is that Hereford, a former Coquette chef de cuisine, and his staff create this unpretentious food as though they were working with Dover sole. The grab bag of snacks (get the deviled eggs, topped with fried chicken skin) and salads are similarly impressive, and all are complemented by co-owner Lauren Holton's intelligent selection of cocktails and other inebriates.

Seaworthy Sails Smoothly into Town: A New Restaurant in New Orleans

Via The Times Picayune, written by Todd A. Price

Seaworthy is a collaboration between the New Orleans' Ace Hotel and Grand Banks oyster bar, a floating restaurant in New York's Hudson River. Two of Grand Banks owners, Alex and Miles Pincus, were born and raised in New Orleans. At Seaworthy, they tapped Kerry Heffernan, the celebrated chef at Grand Banks, as the executive chef and the well-established New Orleans chef Dan Causgrove, who most recently led the Grill Room at the Windsor Court Hotel, as the chef de cuisine. In this periodic series, we take a look at new restaurants in the New Orleans area:

Seaworthy bills itself as an "oyster bar," an institution we know well in New Orleans. But Seaworthy is something different.

Instead of teams of shuckers methodically tearing through mounds of oysters, the seafood here is laid out on ice like the wares at Mignon Faget. The restaurant's menu features truffle topped brandade, a thick, warm and fabulously old-fashion mix of mashed potatoes and sturgeon that only amplified my longing for colder weather. But at Seaworhty, you'll eat neither a po-boy nor even a fried shrimp. If this is an oyster bar, we need to adjust our local definition.

Seaworthy, like a growing number of local restaurants, also complicates the definition of an oyster.

In New Orleans, "Gulf" used to be the only modifier we added to our oysters, other than a dab of cocktail sauce whipped up at the table. At Seaworthy, the Gulf oyster, like their counterparts from the East and West coasts, are subdivided by poetic brand names, like Murder Point or Massacre Island. These are cultivated oysters, raised above the ocean floor.

Eating Gulf oyster has always been a collective experience. As we devoured bivalves by the dozen, we would debate the current level of our regional oysters' deliciousness.

Cultivated oysters, however, are more intense, complex and consistent. A Murder Point, like a Canadian Malpeque or the West Coast's Kumamoto, will taste about the same with each encounter. The cultivated oysters create connoisseurs and command higher prices ($3 a piece at Seaworthy).

Seaworthy wants us to pay close attention to seafood.

The successful dishes, and on two early visits nearly everything I tasted would count as such, let the fresh sweetness of the seafood shine by adding subtle yet complex counterpoints.

Whole shrimp, which might look like the basic boiled and chilled variety, are cured and then poached. On the side for dipping is a "leche de pantera" sauce, a thick, emulsification made with drippings from the ceviche. The lobster roll is served on a toasted bun. Two parapets of crisp cucumber coins protect the sweet meat, which is mixed with an aioli spike with dulse, a type of kelp that adds savoriness. Lump crab meat, piled on toast, gets a whisper of heat from "Creole" aioli and, with eat bite, a wash of wetness from the ripe cherry tomatoes on top.

Seaworthy delights with details.

The few underwhelming dishes lacked that studied restraint and felt too familiar. The scallops in a shrimp butter sauce, for example, were fine, but the kind of entree you might find elsewhere. Dinner at Seaworthy works best when you steer clear of courses. Instead, order enough shared plates of seafood to turn your table into an improvised plateau de fruits de mer.

As tight as a captain's cabin, Seaworthy's downstairs bar merits a visit just to sip its low-alcohol sippers. The main dining rooms are upstairs at the end of a twisting staircase. A careful makeover accented the building's age and history. Befitting its New York parentage, Seaworthy embraces the romance of the open sea. The rooms could be sets for a screen adaptation of a Melville novel.

Only five weeks into its voyage, Seaworthy already runs like a restaurant with a seasoned crew. Here's hoping its passage in New Orleans will be long.