This time of year, if you haven’t seen a Creole tomato it’s probably right behind you. Summer is revving up, so these ultra-seasonal beauties are everywhere, big red orbs tumbling from bins at farmers markets and fruit stands and grocery stores.

In the weeks ahead, you may start seeing a different side of local food, one that might include the innovative, the overlooked or underutilized, and even the invasive.

Give any restaurant enough time and an institutional history will accrue. Give it as much time as Tujague's has on the clock, and it can develop its own lore and legends and even some dichotomies that might seem like contradictions but end up defining the place.

Look around the streets of New Orleans these days and it's impossible to miss that more people are traversing the city on bicycles. Some restaurants and bars are noticing too, and nowhere more than a part of Mid-City that's becoming a crossroads of bike paths, a destination for in-town outings and, on nice days, a hub for people making the rounds by pedal power.

Is New Orleans a barbecue town? For a long time, the answer was generally, even if grudgingly, no. But times are changing.

This one is about mothers who work hard, have to juggle, still get dinner on the table, and the kids who don't really get it at the time but end up loving them even more once they finally do.

The food served up around the Fair Grounds each year at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival isn’t typical event food. It is specifically Jazz Fest food. It rarely changes and as a result Jazz Fest regulars anticipate and crave certain dishes each year as part of their festival experience.

Prosciutto and salami, pate and terrines, tasso and jerky and cracklin’. These are the staples of meat boards and charcuterie platters now so popular in the restaurant world. But lately, we're also finding seafood versions of all of this, often presented together as creative seafood charcuterie spreads.

The restaurant Primitivo is turning heads with some very old techniques in the kitchen, making this restaurant writer reassess some assumptions and, along the way, drawing more attention to a long-neglected business district in New Orleans.