At this season, NOMenu takes an appreciative look at the matchless seafood of New Orleans. We take a different angle each year. This year's perspective is a countdown of the thirty-three (one for each weekday in Lent) best restaurants for lovers of oysters, pompano, crawfish, speckled trout, and all the other delicacies that make living here anything but a penance.
Number Fifteen
Katie's
Neighborhood Cafe.
Mid-City: 3701 Iberville. 504-488-6582. Map.
Lunch MO TU WE TH FR SA SU Dinner TU WE TH FR SA
Casual.
AE DC DS MC V
Website
The Mid-City neighborhood has always boasted a larger population of old-style neighborhood restaurants than most other parts of town. Katie's is one of the two or three best of these, with a menu that both recalls the eats of decades ago, and slips in enough innovative cooking to be cool. Almost all the cooking is accomplished with better ingredients than the average at these prices, and to individual order. Fried seafood--the best part of the menu--comes out hot, crisp, and in large volumes. Daily specials are surprising in their ambitions.
It's the standard neighborhood cafe layout: a long, narrow room with a bar that seems too big just inside the corner door, and a semi-open kitchen in the back. Sixties music plays all the time. The service staff is unusually attentive for a corner cafe, better than it was in the old days.
BEST SEAFOOD DISHES
Crawfish beignet, jalapeno aioli
Seafood stuffed mushrooms
»Calamari, garlic butter
»Crab cakes
Fried crawfish or shrimp salad
»Fried green tomato and shrimp remoulade poor boy
Crab cake sandwich
»Oyster poor boy
»Shrimp poor boy
»Catfish poor boy
Fried oysters, bacon, swiss
Penne Alfredo with shrimp or crawfish
»Catfish meuniere
»Seafood platter
