The 15 Best Restaurants in New Orleans

For thirty-five years, Emeril's was the restaurant that turned a local chef into a television brand. In 2022, E.J. Lagasse — Emeril's son, then barely out of culinary school — inherited the kitchen and did something almost nobody saw coming. He stripped the dining room to its studs, killed the à la carte menu, installed a seasonally rotating chef's tasting, and rebuilt the restaurant as a restrained, almost austere temple to refined Louisiana cooking. The inspectors noticed. In the inaugural 2025 Michelin Guide American South, Emeril's was the only two-star in the entire seven-state region, and at 22 E.J. became the youngest chef ever to helm a two-star kitchen. Expect reimagined Lagasse classics — the BBQ shrimp reborn as a tartlet, a gumbo so deeply lacquered it drinks like a consommé, cornbread with brown butter that leaves a mark. The service is precise, the pacing patient, the wine program unfussy but deep. This is the meal that re-announced New Orleans as fine-dining country.

From the sidewalk, Saint-Germain reads like any other shotgun house on St. Claude Avenue — natural wine bar out front, string lights, maybe a dog tied to a porch post. Walk through to the back, though, and twelve seats and a courtyard garden open into what is probably the most ambitious tasting menu in the city. Chefs Trey Smith and Blake Aguillard, who cooked at the two-Michelin-star Corton in New York before opening in 2018, pour every obsession they have into a ten-course progression built around aged butters, house ferments, Carolina Gold rice, and whatever the Gulf is giving them that week. A griddled cornbread cake with cultured butter opens the meal like a signature. Somewhere around course six, a warm cheese soufflé finished with brûléed sugar reframes what cornbread country cooking can be. The Michelin inspectors awarded a star in 2025 and called the place a dissertation on creative culinary technique. They weren't wrong.

Sue Zemanick won a James Beard Foundation Rising Star award at 29, ran Gautreau's for a decade, and then quietly opened Zasu in a corner Mid-City bungalow on New Year's Eve 2018. The name is Slovak — a nod to her grandmother's kitchen — and the cooking is a genuinely strange and wonderful fusion nobody else in town is attempting: Gulf seafood and Louisiana pantry staples filtered through an Eastern European sensibility. Lentil-and-potato pierogi arrive with a pan sauce that tastes like Creole gravy and borscht had a good conversation. Roasted Gulf fish comes with dill, sour cream, and paprika butter that recontextualizes the whole dish. When the Michelin inspectors handed Zasu a star in 2025, Zemanick spent that evening prepping for dinner service — she hadn't even known she was in the running. Locals had known for seven years.

Commander's opened in 1893, and the list of chefs who have run its kitchen — Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Jamie Shannon, Tory McPhail, and now Meg Bickford, the first woman to hold the title — is essentially a short history of modern American cooking. It would be easy for a 130-year-old restaurant in a turquoise Victorian to coast on nostalgia. Commander's does not. Bickford's menu keeps the institutional pillars intact — the turtle soup au sherry, finished tableside and served since opening day; the pecan-crusted Gulf fish; the bread pudding soufflé that arrives in a puff of brown-sugar steam — but she's quietly modernized sourcing and technique in a way that keeps regulars happy and critics awake. Jazz brunch on Saturday and Sunday is still the most New Orleans meal a person can eat, and the $0.25 weekday lunch martinis (three per person, entrée required) remain one of the city's great civic jokes.

Serigne Mbaye grew up in Dakar and Harlem, cooked at Commander's Palace, L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York, and Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, and returned to New Orleans in 2018 with a simple idea: serve Senegalese food at the level the technique deserves. Dakar NOLA opened on Magazine Street in 2022 as a seven-course tasting, and within two years it had won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant, cracked the top ten of North America's 50 Best, and landed Mbaye as a 2026 Best Chef South finalist. The cooking moves between West Africa and Louisiana without forcing the connection — a thiéboudienne clarifies what jambalaya's cousins look like, a millet crepe and Gulf crab course quietly rewires a dish you thought you understood. Mbaye plates much of it himself. The room seats fewer than forty. This is one of the most important restaurants opened in the American South in the last decade.

Ana Castro ran Lengua Madre in the Lower Garden District, earned a James Beard finalist nod, closed the restaurant on her own terms, and opened Acamaya in July 2024 with her sister Lydia running the front of house. The Bywater corner space is breezy and plant-filled; the cooking is not gentle. Acamaya means 'freshwater crayfish' in Nahuatl, and the menu orbits around Mexican Gulf seafood with a confidence that never tips into gimmick. Masa-based chochoyotes arrive in a crab-rich broth that reads like a Veracruz gumbo. Aguachile gets a Gulf shrimp treatment, dressed with a chile-and-lime sharpness that cleaves through the humidity. The New York Times gave Acamaya two stars. Bon Appétit put it on the 2025 Best New Restaurants list. Michelin handed it a Bib Gourmand in 2025, and by early 2026 Ana Castro was a Best Chef South finalist — the rare distinction a year removed from opening.

Leah Chase turned a Tremé sandwich shop into the dining room where Freedom Riders strategized, where Thurgood Marshall ate between Supreme Court cases, where Barack Obama and Ray Charles both sat for the same gumbo. She cooked there until she was in her nineties and passed in 2019 — and her granddaughter Stella Chase Reese now runs the room, carrying the menu forward with the same hand. The gumbo z'herbes, a once-a-year Holy Thursday preparation of nine greens and meats that Leah made sacred, is a pilgrimage for people who understand what it means. The rest of the year, it's the fried chicken, the shrimp Clemenceau, the stuffed shrimp, and a white-tablecloth lunch buffet that operates as the civic heart of Black New Orleans. Michelin awarded a Bib Gourmand in 2025. It is one of the few restaurants on this list where that accolade almost seems beside the point.

Galatoire's has served French Creole food on Bourbon Street since 1905, and the downstairs dining room — mirrored walls, white tile, ceiling fans, brass coat hooks where old-timers still hang jackets — has not meaningfully changed since. Friday Lunch is the ritual: a capitalized event in New Orleans, a midday affair that runs until the early evening, fueled by bourbon milk punches, long-standing table rivalries, and the occasional serenade. Reservations were only introduced in 2015 — before that, you lined up on Bourbon before eight in the morning. Order the Gulf trout amandine (whole speckled trout, brown butter, toasted almonds, lemon), the shrimp rémoulade, the soufflé potatoes, a bottle of something cold, and do not rush. This is not innovation; this is maintenance at the highest level. In an era where cities lose their landmark restaurants to turnover and real estate, Galatoire's endures because New Orleans still knows what it's worth.

Nina Compton grew up in St. Lucia, staged at Scarpetta, finished second on Top Chef New Orleans in 2014, and stayed. Compère Lapin — named for the trickster rabbit of Caribbean folktale — opened in 2015 in the Old No. 77 Hotel and immediately felt like a restaurant that had always been there. Her cooking braids Caribbean spice, Italian pasta technique, and Louisiana bounty with zero seams. The curried goat with sweet potato gnocchi has become one of the city's genuinely iconic dishes of the last decade. The conch croquettes, the jerk rabbit, the cold smoked tuna — Compton cooks with a confidence rooted in specific memories, not in trendspotting. She won the James Beard Best Chef South in 2018, and in 2026 the restaurant still reads as modern without ever feeling like it's chasing. The bar pours some of the best rum drinks in town. The dining room has the kind of easy glamour that takes decades to build elsewhere.

Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski already had Herbsaint and Cochon when they opened Pêche in 2013 with Ryan Prewitt — their former chef de cuisine — as chef-partner. It won the James Beard Best New Restaurant award within a year, Prewitt won Best Chef South soon after, and more than a decade later Pêche is still the place in New Orleans where Gulf seafood gets the best treatment without getting fussy about it. The open hearth is the heart of the place: whole fish grilled over wood and split tableside, fat Gulf oysters on the half shell, a smoked tuna dip that's become cult, and ground fish collar tacos that are as good as anything on the menu. The Warehouse District dining room is handsome and loud, the wine list is built for seafood, and the staff — genuinely — cares whether you order the amberjack or the redfish. It is a master class in what a modern Southern seafood restaurant can be.

Herbsaint turned twenty-five in 2025, and Donald Link's original restaurant still feels like the best French-Southern bistro in the country. The dining room on St. Charles Avenue is narrow, warm, and loud in exactly the right ways. The cooking leans Cajun and Gascon — a spaghetti carbonara with fried egg and guanciale that has been on the menu for two decades and still shows up on every critic's list, a muscovy duck leg confit over dirty rice that is basically the argument for the restaurant, a gumbo that splits the difference between country and refined. Link and his partner Stephen Stryjewski are 2026 James Beard finalists for Outstanding Restaurateur — recognition for building the Link Restaurant Group (Herbsaint, Cochon, Pêche, Gianna, Cochon Butcher) into one of the most influential restaurant families in the South. Start with a Sazerac at the bar. Stay for the duck. This is the restaurant every other bistro in the South is quietly trying to be.

Willie Mae Seaton opened a bar in Tremé in 1957, turned it into a restaurant in the early '70s, and over the next half-century convinced the world her fried chicken was the best in America. The James Beard Foundation formally agreed in 2006 with an America's Classic designation. Then, in April 2023, a fire gutted the original St. Ann Street location. The family — led by Willie Mae's great-granddaughter Kerry Seaton Stewart — rebuilt, reopening a downtown flagship in late 2024 that carries the same recipe forward without losing the soul. The chicken remains the point: a wet spicy batter, deep-fried to a crackling lacquered crust, impossibly juicy underneath. The red beans and rice, the butter beans, the cornbread — all essential. Lines still form at lunch. This is not nostalgia cooking. It is a family recipe that has been refined for seventy years and tastes like it.

Justin Devillier bought La Petite Grocery in 2004 when it was still trading on being an 1800s-era neighborhood market, and over twenty years he's turned it into one of the most quietly beloved restaurants on Magazine Street. The wood-paneled corner room, the pressed-tin ceiling, the banquettes by the window — it all feels like it was always there. The cooking is contemporary Creole that honors the form without being imprisoned by it. The blue crab beignets with malt vinegar aioli are the dish every first-time visitor orders and every local still orders anyway. The turtle bolognese over pappardelle is a quiet masterpiece. The panéed rabbit, the Gulf fish, the weekly blackboard specials — all of it lands. Devillier won the James Beard Best Chef South in 2016, and in 2026 La Petite still feels like a chef's restaurant run by a chef who cares about exactly this room, exactly this block, exactly these regulars.

Every great banh mi in New Orleans sits on a Dong Phuong baguette — including the ones served at places twenty miles away. De and Huong Tran opened the bakery in 1982 in Eastern New Orleans's Little Vietnam, baking the miniature French-Vietnamese loaf that the post-war Vietnamese community needed. Forty years later, Dong Phuong supplies much of the city's po'boy bread, pours out mooncakes in fall, and produces the king cake that has become the king cake — the single pastry most New Orleanians agree on. Lines form around the block during Carnival. The James Beard Foundation named Dong Phuong an America's Classic in 2018, and the banh mi counter — pâté, Chinese sausage, barbecue chicken, aioli, pickled daikon, cilantro — is what keeps locals coming all year. This is not a quick detour; New Orleans East is a twenty-minute drive from the French Quarter. Go anyway. It is one of the most important Vietnamese bakeries in the United States.

Parkway has been on the corner of Hagan and Toulouse since 1911 — a 114-year-old tavern that stayed a working po'boy shop through Prohibition, Katrina, and the long New Orleans diaspora. The roast beef po'boy is the point: over a thousand pounds of beef a week, slow-cooked until every strand shreds, drowned in fifty gallons of house gravy, piled into a Leidenheimer loaf that sags the instant you pick it up, and served with napkins because pretending otherwise is absurd. Michelin handed Parkway a Bib Gourmand in 2025 — the institutional recognition locals had been waiting on. But the real proof is the lunch line out the door, every day, a mix of judges, plumbers, tourists, and neighborhood kids holding a ten-dollar bill. Other po'boys exist. A lot of them are excellent. None of them are Parkway.