My favourite foodie city: New Orleans by Decatur London's Tom Browne

Victoria Stewart talks to Tom Browne about the foodie scene in New Orleans
Tom Browne
Decatur London
Victoria Stewart8 October 2018

Londoner Tom Browne, creator of the Louisiana-inspired pop-up restaurant Decatur London which he started in 2015, first visited New Orleans eight years ago whilst touring with the band he was playing in. Although he later got a job in New York, after his best friend married a girl from New Orleans, he travelled there regularly to visit them.

“It’s an interesting city,” he says. “It’s a really hard thing to describe unless you’ve been there but as soon as you get out of the airport, you get this familar feeling and you remember the smells and sights and sounds and it all comes rushing back.”

What Browne loves about New Orleans is that there is “a real atmosphere to the city that’s quite hard to put into words, [which] is everything from the weather to the sounds to the food to the people. It’s a city that’s aged and yet noone’s tried to plaster the cracks. I have spent a lot of time there, and I’m still fond of it.”

Here she shares some of his food secrets.

Where do you always return to eat when you visit New Orleans?

My best friend’s wife is from Uptown New Orleans, and the one place we would always visit would be Camellia Grill. It’s a grand-looking building, but inside it’s just a long counter-service diner, and you sit round it and watch the cooks. The food is just classic diner fare, with ridiculously large dishes, and at least among my circle of friends that’s the first place you go to when you get off the plane - head in for a grilled cheese, or a burger, or an omelette, then get on with your day.

Where would you get a quick bite to eat in New Orleans?

Tom Browne eats a sandwich in New Orleans
Decatur London

The cafe and casual dining culture in New Orleans are ingrained in a lot of people and there is a tonne of places to go, but there are also corner stores in the Marigny Area where you can get a great Po’boy sandwich, or something probably delicious and relatively cheap. Outside of the main city confines, there’s a place called St Roch Market which is over in the Bywater area, and that has about eight or nine mini concepts in it, and you can go and get a drink from the central bar too.

Where would you go for a beignet and coffee in New Orleans?

Cafe du Monde for beignets and chicory coffee, which is probably the first stop on anyone’s itinerary. It’s on Decatur Street, in the heart of the French quarter, and it’s an institution, with simple service - in the same way that Brick Lane Beigel Bake in London is. There are loads of people waiting to get a table, there’s a kind of brusqueness to the staff, which is brilliant, and you’re right in the middle of the French quarter so you have everything going on around you. Another place that does beignets is Morning Call, which I think started out very nearby to Cafe du Monde, but they also have one in the middle of City Park where the surroundings - this enormous park with big old oak trees and Spanish moss, and botanical gardens - are brilliant.

Where would you go in New Orleans to find the food that you cook in London?

The food that we have is more broadly Louisiana-influenced, although some of the dishes are definitely New Orleans-influenced, and based on things you might get in the big fancy restaurants where you’d go wearing a dinner jacket - places like Galatoires, Brennan's, Commanders Palace. There you might get things like egg sardou (poached eggs, artichokes and creamed spinach) and barbecue shrimp. A lot of the other dishes that we do are more country-inspired. For example, within a couple of hours you can drive out to a town called Lafayette, which is in Cajun country where nose-to-tail eating is popular. There are all these meat markets which you drive up to, pick up a pound of boudin or $5 worth of crackling and just sit in the car and eat it all.

Where would you go for a drink and a bite?

If I could go anywhere in the world to just have a board of food and a beer to share with a mate, it would probably be Toups Meatery. The guy who runs it is originally from Cajun Country so there’s a lot of nose-to-tail stuff on his menu, and a lot of the dishes are quite robust and meaty. One particularly good thing that they do is called the Toups Meatery board, full of everything like crackling and boudin or duck bacon, duck pastrami, pickles, and whatever sausage they’re making that day.

Where should someone go for good beer?

Abita is the big one that everyone knows and it’s on the opposite site of Lake Pontchartrain. It has a lot of seasonal beers [and] New Orleans is famous for having amazing strawberries so it does a great strawberry wheat beer during the season, and everyone’s pumped about getting that each year, because it’s really delicious.

Where would you go for specialist food products in New Orleans?

There are a few spots. A place called Rouses is the big one, with branches all over New Orleans, and it has everything - it’s kind of like my dream supermarket. You can go there and buy, say, potatoes that have been boiled in a crawfish boil, or a crab that’s just been boiled they're all over New Orleans. More of a specialist place, with stuff from smaller producers, is the Central City grocer called Dryades.

Ace Hotel, New Orleans - in pictures

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Do you have any other final food and drink tips for New Orleans?

There’s a place in Mid-City called Kitchen Witch, which is a cookbook shop with a massive sections on New Orleans food and lots of historical cookbooks from all over the U.S. and further afield. It’s owned by the sweetest couple who have been running it for 15-20 years, who have this encyclopedic knowledge of how the food culture has changed over that time. Commanders Palace is famous for its weekend jazz brunch - you go with your jacket on and it’s about $60 but you get so much food. It’s a real Creole restaurant in the sense that the palate is Creole-heavy but it’s very technique-heavy, and very old-school, with masses of French influence. It’s a serious place if you want to go and eat and listen to live jazz. Otherwise, the music is ever present, and you’ll find it wandering around the neighbourhoods, espsecially in the Marigny area.

Decatur is a pop-up restaurant, currently looking for a permanent site to open at the end of 2017. Follow @decaturlondon on Twitter to hear of where it’s appearing this summer

Follow Victoria on Twitter @vicstewart and Instagram @victoriastewartpics

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