Best Cajun & Creole Restaurants Around the World

The best-scored Cajun & Creole place in each of 12 cities.

Regional variations

Cajun (southwest Louisiana: Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, Mamou, Eunice, the prairie country)

The Acadian country tradition. Crawfish etouffee, boudin (the unique Louisiana rice-and-pork sausage), andouille, cracklins, gumbo (often without tomato), fried catfish, gateau sirop. Music (Cajun fiddle and Zydeco) is tied to the cooking culture.

Creole (New Orleans)

The urban, multi-ethnic tradition. Gumbo (with or without tomato), jambalaya (rouge with tomato is the Creole standard), shrimp creole, oysters Rockefeller, oysters Bienville, bananas Foster, bread pudding with whiskey sauce, the Sazerac cocktail. The great old restaurants (Antoine's, Galatoire's, Commander's Palace, Brennan's, Arnaud's) are the Creole canon.

Yat / New Orleans Italian Creole

The Sicilian-Creole overlap of the late 19th and early 20th centuries gave New Orleans the muffuletta (the Sicilian olive-salad sandwich from Central Grocery), red gravy Italian-Creole pasta, and a distinct neighborhood food culture.

Coastal / Cajun seafood

The seafood-heavy Cajun coast (Houma, Morgan City, Grand Isle) produces the boil and blackened-fish tradition: crawfish boil, shrimp boil, blackened redfish (Paul Prudhomme's 1980s invention), oyster po-boys.

Defining Cajun & Creole dishes

Gumbo

The Louisiana stew: a dark roux base (flour and oil cooked to a chocolate-brown color, taking 30 to 45 minutes of constant stirring), the holy trinity, andouille and chicken or seafood, and either okra or file powder (sassafras leaf powder, added at the end) as thickener. Served over rice. Cajun gumbo often omits tomato; Creole gumbo often includes it.

Jambalaya

Rice cooked in stock with chicken, andouille, shrimp, and the holy trinity. Two main versions: Creole (red, with tomato, often called rouge) and Cajun (brown, without tomato). One of the great Louisiana rice dishes.

Crawfish etouffee

Crawfish tails in a blond-to-medium roux sauce with the holy trinity and stock, served over rice. The Cajun springtime dish (crawfish season is roughly February to June).

Boudin

Cajun sausage of rice, pork (often including liver and other organ meats), onion, and spices, in a natural casing. Sold from gas stations and butcher shops across south Louisiana. Squeezed out of the casing and eaten as a snack, or grilled.

Andouille

Cajun smoked pork sausage with garlic, pepper, and other spices. The base of gumbo, jambalaya, and red beans and rice. LaPlace, Louisiana, claims to be the andouille capital.

Red beans and rice

Slow-cooked kidney beans with andouille, ham hock, and the holy trinity, served over rice. Traditionally a Monday dish in New Orleans (using the ham bone from Sunday dinner). Louis Armstrong signed his letters 'red beans and ricely yours.'

Po-boy

The New Orleans sandwich: French bread (the local light, crisp version) filled with fried shrimp, fried oyster, roast beef with debris (gravy), or fried catfish. 'Dressed' means with lettuce, tomato, mayo, and pickle.

Muffuletta

Sicilian-Creole round bread filled with mortadella, salami, ham, provolone, and olive salad. Central Grocery in the French Quarter is the originator (1906); a quarter feeds one person.

Crawfish boil

Spring-and-summer outdoor gathering: live crawfish boiled in heavily seasoned water with corn, potatoes, sausage, and lemon, dumped on a newspaper-covered table. Eaten by hand, peeling each crawfish.

Blackened fish

Paul Prudhomme's 1980 invention: redfish coated with a paprika-cayenne-thyme spice rub and seared in a screaming-hot cast iron pan until the spices form a black crust. Sparked a national 'blackened' trend.

Beignets

Square deep-fried dough pillows dusted with powdered sugar. Cafe du Monde (1862) and Cafe Beignet are the New Orleans institutions, served with chicory coffee.

Oysters Rockefeller

Baked oysters with a green sauce of spinach, herbs, butter, and breadcrumbs. Invented at Antoine's in 1899.

How to order

A New Orleans Creole meal starts with raw oysters or a gumbo, then a main of fish, shrimp creole, jambalaya, or a steak (Creole steakhouses are their own subgenre), with sides of green beans, potato gratin, or red beans. Bread pudding with whiskey sauce or bananas Foster closes the meal. At a Cajun restaurant in Lafayette or Breaux Bridge, the meal is more direct: a gumbo or boudin starter, an etouffee or fried fish main, with potato salad on the side (the Cajun side that gets dropped into the gumbo bowl) and a King Cake during Mardi Gras season.

The rookie mistakes: confusing Cajun and Creole (they are related but distinct, and a serious restaurant identifies which tradition it is cooking in), asking for a margarita at a New Orleans cocktail bar (sazerac, French 75, vieux carre, ramos gin fizz are the local cocktails), missing the crawfish boil season (the late winter and spring is the peak), and skipping the chicory coffee at Cafe du Monde (it is the New Orleans coffee tradition). Tipping is 20 percent.

What to drink with it

New Orleans is one of the great American cocktail cities: the Sazerac (rye, absinthe, Peychaud's bitters), the French 75 (gin, champagne, lemon, sugar), the Vieux Carre, the Hurricane (Pat O'Brien's). With Creole food, a Sazerac as an aperitif and a Sauvignon Blanc or light red with the meal is the move. With Cajun food, beer (Abita Amber, Dixie) is more common. Chicory coffee (the New Orleans tradition of mixing coffee with chicory root, popularized during the Civil War when coffee was scarce) closes the meal, especially with beignets at Cafe du Monde. With crawfish boil, beer is the only acceptable drink.

Where to eat it

New Orleans for Creole: Commander's Palace, Galatoire's, Antoine's, Brennan's, August (modern Creole), Cochon (Cajun-Creole hybrid), Cafe du Monde for beignets, Central Grocery for muffulettas. Lafayette and the prairie country for Cajun: Prejean's, Cafe des Amis, Best Stop Supermarket in Scott (boudin), Hawk's Crawfish in Rayne. Outside Louisiana, Houston has the strongest Cajun-Creole diaspora scene; New York and LA hold a handful of serious places (Cochon Butcher's siblings, Susan Spicer projects). The cuisines have not exported widely; the trip to south Louisiana is the essential one.

A short history

Cajun cuisine descends from the French-Acadian settlers expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755 (the Grand Derangement) and resettled in the swamps and prairies of southwest Louisiana, where they adapted to crawfish, alligator, and rice while preserving French country technique. Creole cuisine emerged from the multi-ethnic colonial population of New Orleans (French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Native American) from the 18th century onward, with Italian-Sicilian and German immigration adding layers in the 19th century. The two cuisines have been in conversation for over two centuries.

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