The Best Places to Eat and Drink in New Orleans

The dark blue corner building on Magazine Street turns heads before you even walk in, and the sleek dining room inside keeps the promise. This is a Garden District tasting menu spot where the chef pulls from across Asian cuisines, packaging the whole thing at a price that doesn't require a deep breath. Cocktails lean into Thai tea and lychee; the wine list chases small producers and back vintages. The Michelin Guide has it listed.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Fried chicken so deeply embedded in New Orleans lore that the Seaton family has been running this Southern lunch counter since before most food writers were born. The downtown dining room is sunny and spacious, a long way from the original Treme spot, but the bird hasn't changed. Order the gumbo with shrimp and blue crab first, then stay focused. First-timers who wander into the rest of the menu do so at their own risk.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. James Beard Awards 2025 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Bakery

1. James Beard Awards 2026 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Bakery

1. Eater Bouillabaisse and Bread Basket · The 8 Best Meals I Ate This Year, 2024

1. Bon Appétit The Very Best Bagels in the US (Yes, Outside New York)

1. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 10 Nominee · Best New U.S. Cocktail Bar

1. Wine Enthusiast Top 50 New Restaurants

New York-style slices in New Orleans, served at a counter in a room of concrete floors and no-frills tables, with a shaded outdoor bench area that feels like someone's backyard party got very serious about pizza. The crust holds up, the sauce has some tang to it, and whole pies outperform the slices even if most people never find that out. Ranked in the 50 Top Pizza USA, which for a Bywater slice shop is not nothing.

1. 50 Top Pizza #27 · 50 Top Pizza USA

1. James Beard Awards 2025 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program

A New York-style slice shop in Metairie where the crust comes out thin and crackling the way it's supposed to. The room is small and colorful, more take-out counter than sit-down spot, and the vibe is easygoing and no-fuss. Fresh pasta shows up alongside the pizza, which keeps things interesting. If you're planning ahead, call a day in advance or you'll be waiting, and the waiting is not the fun part.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza USA Excellent Pizzerias

AJ's Jazzy Grill is a casual Creole counter in Tremé that began as a food truck under the Claiborne bridge, which explains why everything tastes faintly like a backyard cookout. There are a few tables and some TVs, but the real business is takeout and delivery. Come in sweatpants, order the sweet potato pie the chef's mom bakes, and don't bother pretending you're stopping by for the atmosphere.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Ba Mien is a big, casual Vietnamese dining room out on Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans East, where the menu goes well past the phở-and-spring-rolls starter pack. You can build your own rolls from grilled pork paste, fresh herbs, and crunchy vegetables, or order steamed rice rolls with peanut sauce. Come for breakfast and pair either one with French-dripped coffee and condensed milk, which is how most of the room seems to do it.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Bar Brine is what the vegetarian cafe Sneaky Pickle becomes after dark, a neighborhood cocktail bar in the Bywater that swaps the daytime tofu crowd for people who care about shrubs. The drinks lean on housemade cordials, including a rum, passion fruit, and absinthe punch and a coconut-and-cognac answer to the espresso martini. The kitchen keeps going too, with meat and fish alongside the plant-based menu, so nobody has to eat a cocktail onion for dinner.

1. The Infatuation The Best Bars In New Orleans

Bayona is a Creole restaurant in a French Quarter cottage, and the courtyard out back is the move. It's all plants and cobblestones, enough of them to make a Roman side street feel underpaved. Tables here are for lingering, not turning, so you can take your time with a friend or two without being swept along by a tourist parade. Expect a proper sit-down dinner, so dress like someone who's about to be served duck liver pâté.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

1. The Infatuation The Best Bars In New Orleans

Budsi's is a sit-down Thai restaurant on a brick corner in the Marigny, a long way from the pop-up it started as. It's built for splitting things, so bring friends and let the table fill with wings, satays, and dumplings. Everyone gets their own curry or noodle dish, because sharing has limits. Going solo for a cocktail and larb is allowed, but the table does the real work here. The Infatuation includes it on its list of the city's best restaurants.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Castnet is a casual seafood counter in New Orleans East, where the fried shrimp po'boy comes dressed on Leidenheimer bread and the sausage version is made with Patton's. There's also boiled seafood, gumbo, and plate lunches for anyone with a different plan. A snowball stand sits on one side and a barbecue joint on the other, so the parking lot doubles as a very low-stakes tasting menu. The Infatuation lists it among the city's best.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

Chapter IV is a modern Creole restaurant from the family behind Dooky Chase, which means the gumbo arrives with a dark roux and a full cast of sausage, shrimp, chicken, and crab. The menu is long enough to stall a first-timer, though the squid ink linguine is a good place to start. Dress like you might run into someone, because by all accounts your ex, your old coworker, and half your high school class are already inside.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

There's no menu at this old-school New Orleans steakhouse, just a cut, a dressing, a starch, and the implicit social contract that you say yes to the onion rings. No leather booths, no cowboy kitsch, no performance of steakhouse-ness whatsoever. The room has been left mostly untouched by its current owners, which is the right call. The New York Times named it among the 25 best restaurants in New Orleans.

1. The New York Times The 25 Best Restaurants in New Orleans Right Now

Cherry Coffee Roasters started as a pop-up inside a deli and somehow ended up with a roastery across the river in Gretna. The Uptown cafe sits in a sunny old building on a quiet stretch of Laurel Street, and it's the sort of place where laptops outnumber conversations. Over in Gretna, the cafe is attached to the roasting floor, so your pastry comes with a free lesson in what you're drinking if you catch a cupping.

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Cooter Brown's is a sprawling Carrollton beer bar where the tap list runs long enough to need a study guide, and the game is always on somewhere. There's a front bar for cocktails, a back bar for local experimental pours, and an oyster counter for people who ordered beer and then had ideas. Boudin balls and shots keep things moving. It's been the place to gather a group for a very long time.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The Infatuation The Best Bars In New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Deanie's on Hayne is a casual, family-run seafood house out in the Lakeview-adjacent stretch, far from any Bourbon Street souvenir shop with a daiquiri machine. The platters arrive heaped with fried shrimp, catfish, stuffed crab, and oyster patties, and they're built for sharing, though nobody will fault you for not. The daily specials run around twenty dollars. On Thursdays, the original owner, Maw Maw Deanie, sometimes stops by your table to chat.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

1. Eater These Are the Very Best Bars in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. The Infatuation The Best Bars In New Orleans

Justini's is a cocktail bar on Dauphine Street that nods to Seal's and Bertha's, two Black woman-owned New Orleans bars, with a courtyard mural to prove the lineage. It's dressier than those, with chandeliers and little alcoves built for being noticed in. The drinks are colorful, including a berry martini and a purple champagne cocktail, and the kitchen turns out hot sausage tacos and a jerk BBQ burger.

1. The Infatuation The Best Bars In New Orleans

1. Difford's Guide 2.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Eater These Are the Very Best Bars in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Gravel crunches under your tires before you've even opened the car door, which sets the tone for this family-run Creole-Italian roadhouse across the river from New Orleans. The menu is short but the portions are not, and the table fills fast with baked oysters, housemade sausage, and crab salad. The house rule, learned the hard way by everyone, is to order more than you think you need and split everything.

1. The New York Times The 25 Best Restaurants in New Orleans Right Now

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Pal's Lounge is a neighborhood bar on North Rendon, and the front door comes with a small welcoming committee of smokers, vapers, and dogs you'll have to politely wade through. Beer-and-shot specials and cocktails stay cheap, so the Selfish Lover, a floral vodka sipper, won't drain your wallet. There's no kitchen to speak of, but food pop-ups drift through serving sandwiches and stir-fried noodles. The Infatuation lists it among New Orleans' best bars.

1. The Infatuation The Best Bars In New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater These Are the Very Best Bars in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

Two Tony's is a big Creole Italian dining room in Lakeview where everyone ends up glancing at the next table's plates, and the portions guarantee you'll be carrying leftovers out to the car. The seeded bread arrives in baskets and does a lot of the damage before the entrees show up. Fried artichoke hearts, stuffed mushrooms, tiramisu, and a limoncello to close, in the manner of a last supper with a reservation.

1. The Infatuation The 27 Best Restaurants In New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Eater The Best Coffee Shops in New Orleans

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

1. James Beard Awards 2024 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Restaurateur · Itai Ben Eli and Itamar Levy - Sof Hospitality Group

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

1. James Beard Awards 2024 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Restaurateur · Robert LeBlanc - LeBlanc + Smith

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

Fried corn arepitas topped with pork cracklings set the tone at this Venezuelan bistro tucked into Bywater. The chef spent years cooking other people's food across town before opening a place rooted in family recipes from home, and the menu reads like the argument he was building the whole time. Cachapa, tiradito, good cocktails, warm room. The kind of neighborhood spot that makes you feel like you found something before everyone else did.

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

Susan Spicer's Mid City neighborhood restaurant is the kind of place where the shrimp creole does all the talking. A casual Cajun and Creole spot, Rosedale keeps the cooking steeped in New Orleans tradition without any of the ceremony that follows a celebrated chef around town. The room is low-key, the food is direct, and the whole operation runs like it was built for the people on the block, not the people writing about it.

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

1. James Beard Awards 2024 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Restaurateur · Robert LeBlanc - LeBlanc + Smith

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

1. Eater 38 Essential Restaurants in New Orleans

The bartender here is a fourth-generation New Orleanian who will mix your Ramos Gin Fizz while narrating its entire biography. Bar Uncommon is a cocktail bar tucked into the Renaissance Pere Marquette, with the spare, hotel-adjacent look you'd expect, but Chris McMillian, one of the founders of the Museum of the American Cocktail, is the reason regulars overlook the lobby entrance. Classics, made the old way, with a history lecture included at no extra charge.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A black and white marble floor runs from the front door all the way back through the bar, past the restaurant, and out into a quiet courtyard, putting a lot of physical distance between you and Bourbon Street without much effort. The cocktail bar leans into New Orleans classics like the Vieux Carré and Ramos gin fizz alongside bottled punches and house recipes built on acid phosphate and champagne vinegar, which is not a sentence you read every day.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The name comes from Aristophanes: "Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine so I may wet my mind and say something clever." An intimate neighborhood wine bar connected by a knocked-through wall to the Cork & Bottle shop next door, Clever leans into its origins without being precious about them. The list is serious, the cocktails are well made, and the beers are worth a look too, which is either scope creep or just good sense.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Frenchmen Street runs on live music, but D.B.A. is there for the beer, the spirits, and the wine, with bands as a bonus rather than the point. Two redwood-lined rooms share a central bar, one leaning lounge, one leaning jazz club, both dim and ceiling-fan slow. The New York sister bar genes show a little, which gives this New Orleans dive a slightly unlikely polish that the regulars seem happy to ignore.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The building is roughly the size and shape of a railway car, wedged next to a gas station on Saint Charles with fairy lights strung through the overhanging trees. Delachaise is a wine and beer bar where the front terrace somehow becomes exactly where you want to be, watching the street roll by. Over 40 wines by the glass keep the options interesting without the prices getting precious about it.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Three blocks from Bourbon Street and operating at a different frequency entirely, The Black Penny is a low-key craft beer bar with more than 70 canned options and the kind of room that actually makes you want to stay. One side runs plush leather banquettes against distressed plaster walls; the other is all dark wood and salvaged barge boards behind the bar. The crowd tends to know exactly why they came, and it isn't the tourists.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

A square dark-oak bar juts from the wall of this candlelit room on the edge of the French Quarter, just opposite the Louis Armstrong Park arch, which tells you the tourists haven't found it yet. Tonique is a neighborhood cocktail bar that takes its drinks seriously without taking itself seriously, a combination rarer than it sounds. The wine and beer lists hold their own alongside the cocktails, and the vibe is exactly as low-pretense as the place promises.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The shattered-glass bar-top with a built-in refrigerator for fresh produce is a good sign you're in a proper cocktail bar, not just somewhere with a drinks menu. The room is moody and low-lit, with funky music competing gently with classic films on a flat screen, Gone with the Wind one moment, Indiana Jones the next. The polystyrene ceiling tiles are a Quiznos inheritance, which gives the whole effort a certain scrappy charm.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. VinePair Drinks Professional of the Year · The Next Wave Awards · Neal Bodenheimer

1. VinePair Drinks Professional of the Year · The Next Wave Awards · Neal Bodenheimer
2. James Beard Awards 2024 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Restaurateur · Robert LeBlanc - LeBlanc + Smith
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. VinePair Drinks Professional of the Year · The Next Wave Awards · Neal Bodenheimer

The log-cabin feel is no accident: red wood ceiling, timber-clad walls, and a long solid bar give this neighborhood pub on Magazine Street the warmth of somewhere that's been broken in properly. It draws locals and Tulane students rather than tourists, with around fifty taps pouring everything from Abita Andygator to Belgian ales and American microbrews. A good place to disappear into a beer and feel like a regular by the second round.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A Mid City corner bar in an otherwise residential stretch, Crescent Sausage and Pie is the kind of neighborhood spot that keeps the lights a little too bright and doesn't apologize for it. Fragments of the original building, lost to Katrina, are worked into the walls, which gives the place a quiet history lesson you weren't expecting. The cocktail list is short; come for the atmosphere, not the mixology.

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

Cold Amber beer, live jazz, and a room that looks like nothing has been touched since the Nixon administration. Fritzel's is a no-frills jazz pub on Bourbon Street that skips cocktails, skips mood lighting, and skips any pretense of being a bar that cares about its wine list. What it has instead is the music, which is the whole point, and an atmosphere that feels less performed than almost anything else on the block.

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

The bar where the Absinthe Frappé was invented, back when this corner of Bourbon Street was still a serious place to drink. The original bar counter survived Prohibition by getting auctioned off and exiled down the block; it's back now, in a back room, which feels about right. A French Quarter institution that pulls tourists, locals, and everyone in between through the same swinging door, trading on history that most bars would kill for.

1. Difford's Guide 2.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The Hurricane, that tall, rum-soaked fruit bomb, is said to have been born here, though New York City has lodged a competing claim. Either way, Pat O'Brien's is where it became a phenomenon, and five bars spread across several rooms and a sprawling courtyard ensure you have ample space to test that theory. The carriageway entrance, lined with crossed muskets, sets the tone before you even order.

1. Difford's Guide 2.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

A cocktail bar off the lobby of the Loews Hotel, run by the Brennan family, the Commander's Palace dynasty that makes hospitality feel like a genetic condition. The signature Adelaide Swizzle comes with a "secret ingredient" the bartender will strongly imply is Falernum, plus a couple of theatrical pours he'll perform on request if you ask nicely and look like you mean it.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. James Beard Awards 2022 · Semifinalist · Outstanding Bar Program

1. James Beard Awards 2022 · Semifinalist · Best Chef: South · Allison Richard

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Esquire #20 · The Best New Restaurants in America

1. Bon Appétit America's Best New Restaurants