Mason Hereford grew up in rural Virginia wanting to be a professional rollerblader, and he ended up running Turkey and the Wolf, the sandwich shop that Bon Appétit named America’s Best New Restaurant in 2017.
He moved to New Orleans in 2008 after college and started as a bar doorman before working his way into kitchens. He cooked in San Francisco and Charleston along the way and became chef de cuisine at Coquette, a Garden District bistro, and at Sweet Olive. In 2016 he opened his own place with friends he had met on those fine dining lines. The idea was simple enough to fit on a napkin. People trained in serious kitchens would cook casual food and have a good time doing it.
The shop sits in a small cinderblock building at 739 Jackson Avenue in the Irish Channel. Food arrives on vintage plates printed with Disney characters, Power Rangers, and Ronald McDonald, which Hereford bought on eBay. Diners sit at tables and chairs his mother found at yard sales. Doodles cover the walls around the order counter. The whole setup feels like a friend’s kitchen after a long night, and that is on purpose.
The menu holds about ten items at a time, mostly sandwiches with no theme beyond tasting good. The fried bologna sandwich made the shop famous. The bologna comes from pork raised on a Mississippi farm and gets stacked on specially baked bread with Duke’s mayonnaise, house mustard, melted cheese, shredded lettuce, and potato chips brined in vinegar and fried each morning. Staff will tell you to crush the sandwich flat before eating so it fits in your mouth. The collard green melt tastes like a Reuben built on greens instead of corned beef. Hog’s head cheese tacos come with shredded iceberg and American cheese, and deviled egg tostadas have their own following.
Recognition kept coming after the Bon Appétit nod. Food & Wine and GQ both named Turkey and the Wolf one of the most important restaurants of the decade, and Guy Fieri featured it on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives in 2018. Michelin gave it a Bib Gourmand in 2025.
Hereford has built outward from the original counter. He opened Molly’s Rise and Shine, a breakfast spot named for his sister, in 2019, and Food & Wine listed it among the country’s best new restaurants in 2020. His cookbook, Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans, came out in 2022 after its first shipment spent months lost at sea on a damaged container ship. It still became a New York Times bestseller. The book shares shop favorites alongside home recipes like Cheez-Its and peanuts over ice cream.
Turkey and the Wolf serves lunch only, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day except Tuesday. It runs as a counter-service shop and does not take reservations for any group, so plan on a line at peak lunch hours. The shop also caters and sells a steady run of merchandise, including hats and shirts that sell out quickly. Call (504) 218-7428 with questions.
