Gretna

Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd

One of the most important goals a restaurant must have is a good source of first-class raw materials. Even in the realm of seafood--which you'd think should be very abundant in our part of the world, but isn't--the person who buys food for a restaurant kitchen must either 1) pay top dollar; b) know somebody well-connected to the commercial fishermen; or iii) spend a lot of time on the phone tracking the every-changing seafood markets. Joe Impastato and his brother Sal do all three of those things. At Impastato's, for example, I often find soft-shell crabs when nobody else has them. Live soft-shells, at that. Can't fake that.

Covington

For me, all Italian food falls into two categories. There's the cooking that blows me away every time I go to Italy, or to a few restaurants in this country. And then there's everything else. I like the food in the latter category, but not nearly as much as I like the former. In New Orleans we only occasionally get the memorable stuff. Even when it appears, it has a way of morphing into Category Due. Del Porto is the only restaurant in the New Orleans area that has managed to keep that amazing, herbal, rustic, robust style of cooking over the long term.