On Sunday mornings in early New Orleans, the streets near the French Market filled with the voices of women selling sweet rice fritters from covered baskets, calling out “Belle calas, tout chaud!” Beautiful calas, still hot. That tradition nearly vanished from the city entirely. Brandan Pellerin is working to change that.
Pellerin opened Calas Café at 1010 Treme Street in 2023, anchoring a permanent home for one of New Orleans’ most culturally significant dishes. Calas are fried rice fritters with roots in West African foodways, brought to Louisiana by enslaved people and developed into a street food that Creole women sold throughout the city on Sundays, their only day off from forced labor. The money some of them earned selling calas was used, over the years, to buy their own freedom. The dish is tied to Black ingenuity and economic survival in a way that makes eating one feel like something more than breakfast.
The calas at Pellerin’s café are gluten-free, fried in coconut oil, dusted in confectioner’s sugar, and served with a pistachio or lemon curd alongside. The texture lands somewhere between a beignet and a rice pudding fritter: soft inside, lightly crisp outside, with a sweetness that isn’t aggressive.
The coffee program honors Rose Nicaud, documented as New Orleans’ first famous coffee vendor, a woman who sold coffee near the French Market while enslaved and used her earnings to buy her freedom. The Rose Nicaud Café au Lait is dairy-free, made with vanilla-infused oat cream, and dark enough to cut through the sugar on the plate.
On January 1, 2026, Calas Café launched a residency at the Cabildo on Jackson Square, one of the most historically significant buildings in Louisiana. That residency has since been extended. The Cabildo location puts the café at the entrance of the museum, within sight of Congo Square, where enslaved people once gathered on Sundays to maintain cultural traditions from their homelands. The geographic weight of that placement is not accidental.
The Treme location serves Thursday through Sunday from 11 am to 4 pm. The Cabildo residency runs during museum hours. For current scheduling on both, visit calascafe.com.
