[title type="h3"]15 Best Red Beans And Rice.[/title] Near the top of any list of famous New Orleans dishes, red beans and rice is served by hundreds of New Orleans restaurants. I've personally sampled some two to three of those hundreds. My status as a walking New Orleans cliche (born on Mardi Gras, etc.) all but requires me to eat red beans every Monday--as I did until I left home at nineteen. (My mother cooked her "good old red beans and rice" every week without fail until there was nobody left in the house to eat them.) Even without that resource at hand, I kept on eating my red beans--joyfully, not from a sense of duty. I'm now down to maybe twice a month, but they're always on my mind on Mondays.
Despite the wealth of data collected by doing that, I find it difficult to compile a list of the best beans in town. Enough so that I haven't made one in over a decade. The problem is one of consistency. Few among even the best cooks of the dish make it the same way twice. I suspect this may be due to the length of time needed to make a pot of beans. That encourages many cooks to keep a batch around for days after it was originally made. Not necessarily a bad thing--a strong case could be made that red beans taste best the second day--but it does inject a lot of fluctuation.
For this reason, some of the best red beans come from chain restaurants, who buy such things from outside commissaries. The advantage there is that the product is pretty much the same all the time. The Acme is a great example of this effect. Its beans improved and became consistent when they stopped cooking them in house, and began buying them all cooked and ready to go from the outside.
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Red beans with hot sausage and cornbread[/caption]
Everybody has a different list of criteria for great red beans. The widest divergence concerns the thickness of the matrix. I prefer my beans cooked just to the end of firmness, when the beans are still in one piece and the gravy is on the soupy side. That style is out of vogue these days, in the same way that gumbos have become much thicker in the past few decades.
Next is the source of the fat in the pot. You need some. Fortunately, red beans are such an excellent source of soluble fiber that we need not worry about this. The healthiest fat for cooking down the onions and celery at the beginning of the cooking process is olive oil. Much more popular--tastier, too--are all the many forms of pork fat. Ham fat, bacon fat, pickled pork, pork belly, and the fat rendered from smoked sausage are the most common. I enjoy all of those, and can't say there's an uncontested best.
Finally, we come to the matter of what you garnish your beans with. Once a year, we take a survey of this on the radio show. Sausages and ham products lead the league by quite a way, followed by fried chicken, panneed veal or pork, and (a recent development) fried seafood. Chopped onions are very popular. But then come the people who add pickle relish, barbecue sauce or ketchup, and (hold onto something solid) mayonnaise (!) (yes, really) (!!!!) (good Lord!) over their beans.
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New Orleans Food & Spirits, with pork chop.[/caption]
The way I make beans for myself at home is to start with onions, lots of celery (three ribs per pound of beans, one of the best ideas I've ever received from a radio listener) and bacon or ham fat. I cook them with a teaspoon of summer savory (an herb that has become hard to find, but Zuppardo's has it), a teaspoon of curry powder (another idea from another listener), and hot sauce. My favorite topper is spicy hot pork sausage patties, chaurice or a spicy Italian sausage, with a bit of the rendered fat drizzled over the top.
My favorite beans outside my own kitchen (I can make those exactly the way I like them, which is why I like them so much) come from the kitchen at Manresa Retreat House every Saturday during my annual retreat there. But that's private. Here are my favorite beans from open restaurants.
1. 
Pontchartrain Po-Boys. Mandeville: 318 Dalwill Dr. 985-626-8188. Pontchartrain Po-Boys is a Katrina refugee from St. Bernard Parish. From its first day in its tiny original digs, it had great beans of all colors, but especially the Monday kind. I nominate it as serving the best red beans on the North Shore.
2. Peppermill. Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 3524 Severn Ave. 504-455-2266. The most consistent and best plate of red beans in town shouldn't come from a thirty-five-year-old restaurant in Metairie with a predominantly older, well-dressed clientele. But there it is, every Monday.
3. Mandina's. Mid-City: 3800 Canal. 504-482-9179. Mandeville: 4240 La 22. 985-674-9883. The memorable aspect of Mandina's red beans is that one of the meat options is Italian sausage. That's so good with red beans that it's a wonder while it isn't more common. The portion is enough for two.
4. Joey K's. Uptown 2: Washington To Napoleon: 3001 Magazine. 504-891-0997. The original restaurant in the Great Neighborhood Cafe Renaissance of the 1990s, Joey K's always has its medium-thick, overly generous, smoky red beans on the menu.
5. New Orleans Food & Spirits. Covington: 208 Lee Lane. 985-875-0432. Harvey: 2330 Lapalco Blvd. 504-362-0800. West End & Bucktown: 210 Hammond Hwy. 504-828-2220. This is predominantly a seafood place, but they make excellent red beans on Monday. And you can have them with fried oysters, shrimp, or catfish on top. Not traditional, but beans and seafood have strong flavor affinities. I wish they'd add hot sausage to the selection.
6. Cafe Reconcile. Warehouse District & Center City: 1631 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. 504-568-1157. Here is a place where everybody in the house fully understands the force of red beans in holding our community together. They take the dish seriously and turn out deliciously. Monday lunch.
7. Cafe 615 (Da Wabbit). Gretna: 615 Kepler. 504-365-1225. This place takes an old-style approach to most of its cooking, and that's true of the beans, too. Smoked sausage or pork chop comes. Fried chicken is hard to resist. Mondays.
8. Katie's. Mid-City: 3701 Iberville. 504-488-6582. The original restaurant in the Great Neighborhood Cafe Renaissance of the 1990s, Joey K's always has its medium-thick, overly generous, smoky red beans on the menu.
9. Dooky Chase. Mid-City: 2301 Orleans Ave. 504-821-0600. The Queen of Creole Cooking, Leah Chase, still at it in her nineties, will not countenance anything but superb red beans. Available on the buffet daily.
10. 
Mena's Palace. French Quarter: 200 Chartres. 504-525-0217. Mena's is a relic of an older time, when lots of people worked downtown and would enter the first three or four blocks of the French Quarter looking for a cheap, good lunch. Mena's has always had that, and the marker dish for the genre: a great plate of beans with the biggest sausage you may have ever pit your appetite against.
11. Mother's. CBD: 401 Poydras. 504-523-9656. Thick and smoky, this great concoction begins with rendered ham fat and goes from there. Available every day.
12. Parran's Po-Boys. Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 3939 Veterans Blvd. 504-885-3416. Kenner: 2321 W Esplanade Ave. 504-885-3416. Parran's is better known for its sandwiches than its plate specials, but they make a big pot of beans every day of the week, and it's always great eating. Recommended: red beans with hot sausage.
13. Fury's. Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 724 Martin Behrman Ave. 504-834-5646. Fury's doesn't season its food as heavily as you may be accustomed to, but that's how its customers like it. This is easily remediated with a special request to the kitchen. One of the many sides for the beans are fried chicken drummettes--fried to order.
14. Acme Oyster House. French Quarter: 724 Iberville. 504-522-5973. Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 3000 Veterans Blvd. 504-309-4056. Covington: 1202 US 190 (Causeway Blvd). 985-246-6155. On the thicker side, with a fine flavor and nearly perfect record of consistency. Comes with smoked sausage standard, available with a big, oily patty of hot sausage right off the grill, or with fried oysters. Available all the time.
15. Coffee Pot. French Quarter: 714 St Peter. 504-524-3500. Although a predominance of the business here these days is from out of town, we can feel good that those visitors will get beans as good as they've always heard about. Available every day since the 1940s.
