The best seat in a New Orleans restaurant isn’t always the one with the best view of the room. Sometimes it’s the one closest to the fire, or the one where the chef hands you a dish personally and explains what’s in it. These three restaurants offer that kind of access, each in a different way, and none of them requires a jacket.
Saint-Germain
The sign on the building at 3054 St. Claude Avenue in the Bywater says “natural wines and garden patio.” That is technically true and almost entirely beside the point. Saint-Germain is a Michelin-starred, reservation-only, ten-course tasting experience run by chefs Blake Aguillard and Trey Smith inside a converted double shotgun house, and it is among the most talked-about restaurants in the country right now. GQ named it one of the best new restaurants in America. The Michelin inspectors called it one of their favorites in the city.
The meal starts at the bar, intentionally, where the first few courses arrive as you settle in. Then the room opens, and you move to the dining room for the rest. The menu changes constantly and is kept secret until each course lands in front of you, but expect fermented in-house butter on griddled cornbread, Carolina Gold rice with crab and ginger, squab with creamed greens, and a cheese soufflé with brûléed sugar.
Every technique in the kitchen, fermenting, braising, smoking, and poaching, exists to get the most out of whatever is seasonal and local that week. The wine list is natural, the atmosphere is casual, and the whole thing runs about two and a half hours. Reservations are throughTock and book out fast. Dinner runs Thursday through Saturday and Sunday; call (504) 218-8729 for availability.
Compere Lapin
Nina Compton grew up in St. Lucia reading Caribbean folktales about a mischievous rabbit named Compère Lapin, and that character’s spirit of play runs through every dish at her restaurant inside the Old No. 77 Hotel at 535 Tchoupitoulas Street. Compton trained in classical French technique at the Culinary Institute of America, worked at Daniel Boulud’s New York flagship and at Scarpetta in Miami, placed second on Top Chef Season 11, and then returned to New Orleans in 2015 to open the restaurant that made her the first Black woman to win the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South in 2018.
The open kitchen at Compère Lapin means you can watch the line from parts of the dining room, and the food rewards that attention. The curried goat with sweet plantain gnocchi has been on the menu since day one and goes through 300 pounds of goat a week. The snapper collar with carrot ginger puree and spicy hot honey uses a cut most restaurants discard.
The black-eyed peas with bacon and crispy shallots are Compton’s nod to New Orleans home cooking, presented with the same care as everything else on the menu. The restaurant blends Caribbean spice, Gulf seafood, and classical European technique in a way that still sounds improbable and tastes completely right. Reserve at comperelapin.com or call (504) 599-2119.
Saba
Saba means grandfather in Hebrew, and Chef Alon Shaya named his Magazine Street restaurant for his own grandfather, hanging portraits of him by the front door. The wood-fired oven sits where you can see it from the dining room, turning out puffy, charred pita throughout the night, and watching the bread inflate and blister before it lands on your table is one of the more quietly satisfying things you can witness at a New Orleans restaurant. Shaya draws on Israeli culinary traditions and on the flavors of the wider Mediterranean, Bulgaria, Yemen, Syria, Morocco, Turkey, and Greece, threading them together with Gulf seafood and produce from local farms.
The hummus arrives in several forms: classic tahini, Tunisian tomato, blue crab, and spicy lamb ragu, all built to be scooped with that pita. The salatim spread of dips and salads can be a full meal on its own. Larger plates include harissa roasted chicken with charred onion and caramelized lemon, Gulf red snapper with tahini and Moroccan chraime sauce, and lamb chops with pecan tabbouleh and pomegranate. The brunch latkes have their own following. Saba is at 5757 Magazine Street, Suite A, in Uptown. Book through OpenTable or call ahead. Dinner runs nightly; brunch on weekends.
