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Our weekly blog on the New Orleans fine dining scene
Haute Plates

January 2012

Bizarre Louisiana Eats and Questions About Restaurant Openings

01/25/12

Bizarre Louisiana Eats and Questions About Restaurant Openings

This Thursday Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel's "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern," will appear with Poppy Tooker from 3 to 5 at the Thursday afternoon edition of the Crescent City Farmer's Market in Mid-City. Tooker is, among other things, the host of the "Louisiana Eats" radio show on public radio stations WWNO and KTLN, and an ardent supporter of locally produced foods. Together they'll shop at the market and prepare shrimp étouffée.

I have not always been kind to television food personalities. There was a time when I cared about food television, but that ended...

Posted at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments: 3
The Borgne Identity

01/19/12

The Borgne Identity

When I started writing about food and restaurants, John Besh had only one restaurant. I still consider August his best, but in the years since he opened his Tchoupitoulas Street flagship he's opened seven others in New Orleans, including his latest – Borgne.

Named after the body of water to the east of New Orleans, seafood is the specialty at Borgne, a fact that is readily apparent when you see the large column covered in oyster shells that stands near the entrance. It's a large restaurant, clearly designed to take advantage of conventioneers and tourists staying at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, in which it is housed. But if that makes it sound like a cash-in, it's...

Posted at 04:45 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0
Chefs and Casual Food

01/12/12

Chefs and Casual Food

It is a black letter rule of law that truth is a defense to defamation or libel. It follows logically from that rule that if what you say or write is not susceptible to being proven true or false, it cannot be defamatory or libelous. Opinions, for example, cannot be proven true or false. If I say that I think McDonald's makes the best hamburger in town, you cannot prove it's not true. You may disagree, and you may list a dozen reasons why I should change my opinion, but you can't prove that it's not my opinion.

As it happens, I don't think that McDonald's makes the best hamburger in town. My favorite at the moment is made at trūburger. It's one of a number of restaurants that have opened in the last year...

Posted at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments: 4
Tropical Dining and Wedding Bells

01/05/12

Tropical Dining and Wedding Bells

I'm getting married tomorrow. It is an indication of my dedication to you, my readers, that instead of phoning this edition of Haute Plates in with a quick cut and paste from a press release, I'm giving you 800 or so words on an interesting new restaurant in the Warehouse District. To wit:

Carmo's owners describe the food served at their restaurant as tropical. One of those owners, Dana Honn, told me this meant that “basically anything in the torrid zone is fair game.” The idea for Carmo was worked out while Dana and his wife Christine were living in San Francisco, where Christine had worked in a few organic restaurants. The...

Posted at 04:45 AM | Permalink | Comments: 0

About This Blog


Robert D. Peyton was born at Ochsner Hospital and, apart from four years in Tennessee for college and three years in Baton Rouge for law school, has lived here his entire life. He is a strong believer in the importance of food to our local culture and in the importance of our local food culture, generally. He is a partner at the law firm Christovich & Kearney LLP and began writing about food on his website, www.appetites.us, in 1997. That is approximately 72 Internet years, for anyone counting.

In 2006, New Orleans Magazine named Appetites the best food blog in New Orleans. The choice was made relatively easy due to the fact that Appetites was, at the time, the only food blog in New Orleans.

Robert has gills, but they are nonfunctional.

He began writing the Restaurant Insider column for New Orleans Magazine in 2007 and has been published in St. Charles Avenue magazine and on the website www.slashfood.com. He is the only person he knows who has been interviewed in GQ magazine, albeit for calling Alan Richman a penis. He is not proud of that, incidentally. (Yes, he is.)

Robert’s maternal grandmother is responsible for his love of good food, and he has never since had fried chicken or homemade biscuits as good as hers.

Robert once ate an entire goat, but it was very small, and he didn’t feel too good about it afterward. He did, however, feel better than the goat.

He developed his curiosity about restaurant cooking in part from the venerable PBS cooking show Great Chefs and has an extensive collection of cookbooks, many of which do not require coloring. 

Certain parts of the above are exaggerations, but one thing is true: Robert appreciates your comments and e-mails, so keep them coming.

If you find that you need a more constant source of Robert in your life, you can follow him on Twitter.

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