Mother's owner Jerry Amato talked about expanding the restaurant almost from the day he bought it, over a decade ago. With good reason: Mother's may be the city's busiest restaurant in terms of customers served per square foot.
Mother's food has a heaviness that creeps up on you and weighs you down before you even finish. Some of that comes from the enormous portions. Even if you order half a sandwich (at three-fourths the price), you'd have to have a very empty stomach indeed to get it all down without feeling some pressure. But the cooking itself is heavy. Many dishes involve ham fat, for example. That's a spectacular taste in things like red beans or omelettes. But there's only so much of this anybody can eat. I limit myself to one visit every three or four months. But I look forward to them with gusto.
The city's longest-running poor boy shop is famous nationwide, and rightly so. Everything is cooked in house from scratch to create a menu of all the New Orleans everyday-dining specialties. Locals decry the fact that visitors have jammed the place and that prices are about a quarter higher than in similar restaurants. But the goodness cannot be denied.
Simon Landry (whose wife was the restaurant's namesake) opened Mother's in the 1930s. He ran it hands-on for decades, and then his sons Jack and Ed took over and kept the style. Their recipes are links to a bygone era of eating in New Orleans. The recipes were designed to be made anew daily. When they ran out of that day's meats and platters, the restaurant closed. In 1986, Jerry and John Amato brought Mother's from the Landrys, expanded it and extended its hours. This created a firestorm among the local regulars, who insist that it's not as good as it once was. It tastes exactly the same to me, and I've been eating there since the mid-1960s.
The old brick building with its worn concrete floors was duplicated next door in the 1990s, making tables a little easier to come by. A cafeteria-style counter is where you order and pick up your food, although a waitress might ask to be allowed to fetch your food for you. Cooks are forever breaking through the never-ending line of customers to deliver pots and piles of food to the front line.
Mother's is so famous that it attracts an ungodly number of visitors. But it's too good to write off as a tourist joint. Just don't go when the line runs halfway down the block. If you're up early, Mother's breakfast is terrific, and until nine on weekdays they have a generous combo for about five bucks.
| Attitude | 1 |
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| Environment | 0 |
| Hipness | 0 |
| Local Color | 3 |
| Service | 0 |
| Value | 1 |
| Wine | 0 |
