“Say hello to your new best friends,” says a guy in a blue suit with a lanyard around his neck. Just past noon, the front bar at Pêche, set in a mansard-roofed corner building walking distance from the New Orleans convention center, is packed tighter than a barrel of herring. As he squeezes his foursome into a three-stool space, light cuts through high-arched windows, bouncing off a beautifully patinated mirror rescued from a Bourbon Street gentlemen’s club.
Charcoal studies of redfish line the walls. Oyster watercolors, too. Rendered in clean lines, they broadcast the surety of this kitchen. Above
