New Orleans is in close proximity to many Ends Of The World. Restaurant des Familles is not quite that remote, but well down the road to a place that is: Barataria, the hangout of Jean Lafitte and his pirates. The surroundings of the restaurant are primordial enough that there are swamp tours nearby. Yet it's close enough to town that if you have a visiting client or friend who wants to eyeball the unique Louisiana environment, it's not too long a trip to come here. And eat some gumbo, oysters, crabmeat, and all the other comestibles for which our town is celebrated.
Lafitte and the communities around it abound in fishing camps and charter fishing boats. It makes sense that a restaurant should tap into the bounty. This is a good-looking restaurant whose windows gaze into the bayou. The menu ranges from the casual to the more elaborate, with a logical emphasis on seafood.
Restaurant des Familles is named for the bayou outside its windows. At one time in the dim past, that was the Mississippi River. Pat Morrow opened the restaurant in 1993. It was washed out by Hurricane Katrina, but dried out and reopened just in time to be flooded again by Hurricane Rita. It came back quickly after that, too. In 2009, Morrow sold the restaurant to Bryan Zar, one of her early employees. He began as a teenage busboy with no plans to stay in the business, but it grabbed him.
A large wall of glass that gives onto the lazy old bayou creates most of the atmosphere. Alligators have been known to appear in the winding backwater. The visual is almost laughably typical of South Louisiana. The dining room is spacious and airy. Sometimes there's live music.
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Turtle soup[/caption]
Des Familles serves the best alligator dishes anywhere in the area. If you've never been this way before, check the map. The restaurant isn't hard to find, but easy to zoom past.
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