Where Y'Eat

Plenty of us plan our days around food, fixating on that upcoming lunch or what’s for dinner. Since I cover dining and food culture for a living, this is actually part of my job description. Still, for anyone, sometimes the workday gets away from the plan. You didn’t pack a lunch, you need to eat and wherever you land must be fast, and it must be close by.

The wood-burning oven at the Uptown eatery Pizza Domenica turns out pizzas that are thin-crusted, char-marked and round. These days though, the same oven is also producing bigger, thicker, square-shaped pizzas. They spread a terrain of sauce and cheese and darkened ridges across the length of a baking pan. They look distinctive. But the shape is just the tip of the slice for what makes these pizzas different.

The chicken wing rules the roost when it comes to football food, and this year I’m on the chicken wing bandwagon too. I mean, could there be any food more appropriate for a Falcons Super Bowl appearance than wings?

If a restaurant can feel like it’s on the fringe and right in the thick of things at the same time, it's Fharmacy. This is a bar and grill on Banks Street in Mid-City. It’s in a narrow shotgun house that looks like you could load the whole thing onto a flatbed and deliver it somewhere. It feels a bit like a clubhouse with a diner counter and it serves some international ideas for comfort food.

When you hear me talking about restaurants, it’s usually good news, like new picks from the latest additions to the New Orleans dining scene, or sizing up a delicious new trend or revisiting the classics that are so beloved in our restaurant community. After all, this is the way New Orleans talks about its restaurants -- incessantly and with anticipation. In this town, we really do talk about dinner while we’re having lunch. But, I’ve also been listening, and what many people in the restaurant

King cakes have been popular in New Orleans for a long time. But not this popular. Something has changed. King cake has become a cultural statement, one of those emblems of pride that New Orleans uses to celebrate itself. King cake is the Saints fleur-de-lis of food. You live it, you wear it, you rally around it.

Fried catfish cut as thin as a dime, a view of the water that ends with the sky and a regular crowd coming from the north shore and the south shore to meet in the middle - these are hallmarks of a trip to Middendorf's , the vintage Louisiana seafood house just off the highway on the marshy edge of Manchac. No one wants it to change, least not the people who now run Middendorf’s.

My name is Ian McNulty and I write about restaurants for a living. It probably comes as no big surprise that a job description like this brings with it a great deal of pleasure. It's true, of course. But the longer I pursue this line of work, especially here in New Orleans, the more clear it becomes that the real pleasure of the job extends beyond all the delicious food at the table.

There's an old adage that New Orleans food doesn't travel well. But it will take a lot more than an adage to keep people from trying, especially during the holidays.

The stirrings of home and feelings of homecoming are strong this time of year. Anything can trigger it – that song playing in the background as you shop, those photos from the 80s that your clever aunt rebooted on Facebook, even what’s on your plate or the food cravings on your mind. Around here, no type of restaurant dials into that quite like the New Orleans neighborhood joint.