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NOLA.com

Top 10 New Orleans restaurants for 2019

By Brett Anderson | Posted November 01, 2018 at 06:05 AM | Updated November 21, 2018 at 02:19 PM
Comment
Beef carpaccio with fried oysters from Paladar 511.

 


Every fall since 2003, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson selects the Top 10 Restaurants in New Orleans. (Hurricane Katrina interrupted business as usual in 2005.) Only fine-dining restaurants with table service are considered for the honor. Restaurants eligible for the 2018 Best New Restaurants list are not eligible for this year’s Top 10.


The restaurants in the Top 10 have been evaluated over the past year, with visits that are not announced in advance and are paid for by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Every restaurant in the metro area that can reasonably expect to be considered for such a list — 30-plus restaurants, give or take, every year — is revisited at least once annually. Top contenders are visited more than once, almost all within three months of the Top 10’s unveiling.


This year’s class follows below, in alphabetical order. It includes four restaurants that were not on last year’s list and two that are making their first appearance. Commander's Palace, the 2018 New Orleans Restaurant of the Year, is not included in the Top 10.



BAYONA

Grilled ribeye cap with Bayona kimchi fried rice.

BAYONA

  


What is required for a New Orleans restaurant to ascend to the status of an institution? The restaurant that chef Susan Spicer opened with business partner Regina Keever in 1990 has certainly passed the test of time. Few local restaurants can claim to have had a more lasting impact on the city’s fine dining culture. What’s unique about Bayona is the nature of Spicer’s influence. As a young chef, she bet that diners would embrace a New Orleans restaurant that didn’t serve New Orleans-identified food – an untimely idea in Bayona’s early years, when Spicer’s contemporary Emeril Lagasse was about to make New Orleans-identified food even more bankable than it already was. Spicer stayed true to her vision of a Southern restaurant strongly influenced by the cooking of the Mediterranean and beyond, where tables are set with small dishes of Indian-spiced pickles, and where house signatures include peppered lamb loin served with herbed goat cheese and salmon fillets riding beds of choucroute in Gewurztraminer sauce. A raft of prominent New Orleans chefs, including Aaron Burgau, Megan Forman, John Harris and Donald Link, cut their teeth in Bayona’s cramped kitchen. Current chef de cuisine Eason Barksdale is among a new generation following Spicer’s example, churning out dishes that keep Bayona fresh and prove a maxim that his mentor has been market-testing for nearly three decades: the best recipe is a curious mind mixed with excellent taste.


430 Dauphine St., New Orleans, 504.525.4455

Open: Dinner M-Sa, lunch W-Sa. Parking: Street, pay lots.

Dinner entrée prices: $26-$42. Reservations: Yes. 

Standout dishes: P & J oyster gratin, goat cheese crouton, veal sweetbreads, sautéed redfish, peppered lamb, apple hazelnut tart.


 Affiliated restaurants: Mondo and Rosedale.



Susan Spicer in 1990, the year that Bayona opened.
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