Pure Po’Boy Pleasure | Listen

We’re leaving New Orleans to find some of the best po’boys in the Bayou State 

Perhaps no sandwich is more authentic to New Orleans than the po’boy. It was created in the city in 1929: Michael Mizell-Nelson, PhD, a local historian, spent 12 years researching the po’boy and documented its origins as a “poor boy,” so named by Benny and Clovis Martin of Martin Brothers French Market Restaurant and Coffee Stand in solidarity with striking transit workers. With John Gendusa Bakery, still in operation today, the brothers developed a 40-inch loaf of French bread to minimize costs, and the poor boy was “generously filled with whatever one desired, from roast beef to oysters,” according to a 1933 New Orleans States article. 

Second, the po’boy is usually filled with ingredients local to and iconic of the state of Louisiana, from hot links to Gulf shrimp and oysters to crawfish. A loaf of locally made French bread is essential: crusty on the outside to keep the sandwich from getting soggy, and soft on the inside to absorb the flavors of whatever the po’boy is “dressed” with, from the traditional lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, and pickles to hot sauce, gravy, or remoulade. 

In 2017, Louisiana native Chris Borges returned to the city he grew up in after a long stint in California, where he’d graduated from the California Culinary Academy, worked at such esteemed San Francisco restaurants as Roti and Infusion Bar & Restaurant, and reopened Elite Cafe to share New Orleans cuisine with the Bay Area. Now that he’s executive chef of Virgin Hotels New Orleans, his menu at the hotel’s Commons Club restaurant is known for cuisine influenced by his time on the West Coast, but it also celebrates the fact that he’s Louisiana born and bred, with a range from deviled duck eggs and barbecue shrimp to wild mushrooms with gumbo z’herbes. 

We asked Borges for his favorite spots to get New Orleans’ most iconic sandwich, but with an added challenge: These spots have to be worth leaving The Big Easy to taste and enjoy. Here are his four picks.

JED’s Local

Baton Rouge

1 hour, 15 minutes from New Orleans

Husband-and-wife team Russell and Sally Davis relocated to Baton Rouge and opened JED’s after careers in hospitality with Commander’s Palace and Saltwater Grill. On their menu of “high-quality scratch cooking” that features a host of freshly executed and reimagined Southern favorites, Borges’ pick is the shrimp and fried green tomato po’boy with grilled Gulf shrimp, remoulade, lettuce, and a hard-boiled egg. “It’s delightful and delicious,” Borges says.

Crazy Bout Crawfish Café 

Breaux Bridge 

2 hours from New Orleans

Fifteen minutes from the Crawfish Capital of the World, you can get swamp fried crawfish boulettes, crawfish jalapeño cheese cornbread, fried crawfish tails, and of course, boiled crawfish. But don’t miss the po’boy, which gets rave reviews from Borges: “Their free-fried crawfish po’boy is to die for. Why? It’s a whole po’boy of fried crawfish! Nuff said!” (Though it’s worth mentioning that the restaurant itself agrees: The menu tagline says this po’boy is “so good you gonna wanna slap someone.”)

Old Tyme Grocery 

Lafayette

2 hours from New Orleans

Louisianians and tourists from all over travel to eat at this longstanding spot, which refers to its sandwiches the old-school way as “poor boys.” You won’t find any frills, but you won’t need them; according to Borges, “Their fried oyster po’boy is no different than any other in composition, but the person who fries takes special pride in frying their oysters. Perfect dredge every time, fried to the perfect doneness, they select the perfect size for frying. Just a perfectly executed po’boy.”

Suire’s Grocery

Kaplan

2 hours, 40 minutes from New Orleans

Located in Vermillion Parish, known as “The Most Cajun Place on Earth,” Suire’s Grocery has attracted the notice of chefs from Anthony Bourdain (he visited in 2018) to Bryan Roof of America’s Test Kitchen. It’s a second-generation family-run “country cooking” spot, a great place to get gumbo, shrimp étouffée, and pistolette—but also, Borges says, a hot link po’boy. “[It’s] a heart-stopper—a decadent, guilty pleasure. I always make a stop there when I am in that neck of the woods.”

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