As the New Orleans dining scene grows ever more diverse, flavors and cuisines are pouring in from across the globe. One new niche, however, comes to us from just a state or two away — Louisiana’s neighbors around the South.
There’s a distinct dining category gaining ground across the country these days called “modern Southern” and lately it has arrived in New Orleans in a big way at a succession of new, ambitious restaurants.
In the past year alone, outposts for modern Southern cuisine have opened with the Riverbend bistro Carrollton Market; at Oxlot 9, the Covington restaurant located, appropriately enough, inside the new Southern Hotel; it’s at Purloo, the restaurant inside the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, at Angeline, which opened along that relatively quiet end of Chartres Street in the French Quarter, and at Brown Butter, a new example in Mid-City.
These are all very different restaurants, but they’re aligned with the modern Southern style. It’s more broadly based than our indigenous Creole cuisine, it’s more specifically regional than the modern American dining niche, and it takes local flavors and familiar ingredients in different directions.
Some examples: at Angeline it’s the butterbean tortellini in a broth of red eye gravy or sherry-glazed shrimp with greens. At Brown Butter, it might be the rabbit and dumplings, where the dumplings are actually cornbread gnocchi.
Carrollton Market makes its pasta with Creole cream cheese blended right in and stirs smoked drum into a creamy salad over a corn pancake. And at Oxlot 9, its ceviche made from royal red shrimp or black eyed peas and mustard greens worked in a Japanese udon noodle soup.
Obviously, we’re not talking about the same old blue plate specials. But sometimes those old classics wind up in the mix too. You want fried chicken? Modern Southern chefs will give you chicken done to a turn, and perhaps done differently. At Purloo, for instance, the lunchtime chicken plate is an exceptionally tight package, the pieces neat and trim and encased in deeply dark fried shells, which break open for flood of flavor.
Part of what makes modern Southern tick is that old urge to refine and explore the traditional flavors people already know well. And there’s also something like culinary nostalgia in play. Naturally, pimento cheese, fried pickles, grits, ham and cornmeal are in heavy rotation across their menus. But the South is changing, and so too are the ways chefs understand and interpret Southern cooking.
That fuels another part of the modern Southern equation, and what makes it so exciting. The South is full of tradition, but it isn’t static. So, the Vietnamese fishing culture that was transplanted from Southeast Asia to the Gulf coast is now firmly and permanently a part of the South and its influences run through modern Southern cooking too. Mexican and Central American, Middle Eastern, even Creole cuisine itself — these flavors are not just alternatives to Southern cooking now, but new ingredients in a growing melting pot. Add some creative and ambitious chefs, and you have a recipe to change the possibilities of what Southern food can be.
Five new restaurants for modern Southern cuisine:
Angeline
1032 Chartres St., (504) 308-3106; angelinenola.com
Brown Butter
231 N. Carrollton Ave., (504) 609-3871; brownbutterrestaurant.com
Carrollton Market
8132 Hampson St., (504) 252-9928; carrolltonmarket.com
Purloo
1504 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., (504) 324-6020; nolapurloo.com
Oxlot 9
428 E. Boston St., Covington, (985) 400-5663; oxlot9.com
Dinner Tue.-Sat., brunch Sun.
