The first meal I ever ate in New Orleans was not in New Orleans at all. It was in Metairie, a suburb that lies between the New Orleans airport and the city itself. It was my first visit from New York, and I had done my research, which in those still-rudimentary-internet days meant having somebody mail me a physical copy of the Times-Picayune’s annual restaurant guide. In it, I read a description of the charbroiled oysters at Drago’s, the seafood restaurant opened in Metairie by a Croatian immigrant named Drago Cvitanovich and his wife, Klara, in 1971: how fat Gulf oysters were set atop a blazing grill, basted with garlic butter, and then allowed to poach in the mingled fat, smoke, and brine beneath a bubbling crust of Parmesan and Romano. I did not need to read this twice. I stepped off the plane and piloted my rental car not toward the narrow streets and Spanish balconies of the French Quarter, but to the strip-mall-and-chain-restaurant-lined blacktop of Veterans Memorial Boulevard.
I have never regretted that those oysters were my first taste of what would eventually become my home. Even less so over the past decade, when many suburbs, looked down upon for so long as cultural wastelands, have come to be recognized as some of the most exciting places to eat in America. In the South, that’s meant cruising Atlanta’s Buford Highway in search of immigrant cooking from every corner of the globe; it’s meant noshing the length of Nolensville Pike, as it zags appetizingly south from downtown Nashville; it’s meant getting lost in the deliriously sprawling outskirts of Houston.
What it hasn’t generally meant is forsaking the famously abundant culinary pleasures of suburban precincts. There may have been a few destinations alluring enough to draw tourists and locals across the parish line: Drago’s; Mosca’s, the storied Italian restaurant in an unassuming white shack in Westwego, about a thirty-minute drive across the bayou; a handful of famed Vietnamese restaurants; maybe Rocky & Carlo’s, over in Chalmette, with its bricks of baked macaroni and sign reading LADIES INVITED. For the most part, though, New Orleans’ burbs lagged behind those of other cities.
