The New New Orleans | Listen

By: The Local Palate

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These five women are behind the concepts pushing the Big Easy forward

Despite more than 300 years of hospitality, New Orleans is a tough town to succeed in as a restaurant. Buildings crumble and molder while the ground settles and shifts. Parking sucks. Break-ins are frequent. Utility bills vary wildly for no apparent reason. Insurance is astronomical. Summers are sweltering and everyone leaves. We haven’t even murmured the word hurricane.

Who in their right mind would open a restaurant in New Orleans? Women.

The new face of New Orleans is female. The Big Easy is not easy at all, and it is women who are gutsy enough—or maybe stubborn enough—to serve guests in ever-inspiring ways.

From cocktails to bagels, breakfast to fine dining to seafood, these five women in food and beverage in New Orleans are showing up with grit in a place known for its well-connected, male-run restaurant groups. These women are steering where we will eat and drink in spaces we will long remember.

5 Women Shaping the Restaurant Scene in New Orleans

Melissa Araujo

Alma
Alma Café, owned by chef Melissa Araujo, offers chef-driven cuisine for breakfast and lunch in a town known for late-night revelry. The Honduran café sits on a prominent corner in the Historic Bywater neighborhood, a postcard of technicolor Creole cottages peopled with discriminating diners.

The original restaurant was a pandemic baby, and Araujo took advantage of the quiet opening. She hired immigrant women who could cook; some were looking for a path to
citizenship, while others wanted to break into the restaurant world. Araujo is an exacting chef, and only those who could handle the learning curve would stay. But it’s those people, a well-paid staff offered benefits, who make her concept a success, Araujo says: She is in the restaurant every day but knows the kitchen can replicate every dish without her.

Word spread quickly about the Honduran cuisine utilizing locally grown ingredients. Alma is decidedly not Tex-Mex, nor is there a whiff of Cajun seasoning. Coffee is single origin and double strength, and a second cup costs the same as the first. There’s a fried whole bass with escabeche and tostones, and citrus ricotta pancakes that will never leave the menu. Plates are garnished with herbs from the chef’s urban farm a few miles away.

“Quality above all else. Quality ingredients, quality people,” says the chef, who opened a second location in Mid-City New Orleans in February. “I know what it takes to succeed here. Once you disappoint New Orleans, they don’t come back. PR can’t make up for that. You have to be authentic. You have to know who you are and who to hire to represent your food.”

Effie Richardson

Dakar NOLA
At Dakar NOLA in the Garden District, chef Serigne Mbaye has been heralded for connecting the foodways of Senegal to coastal Louisiana. A 40-person dining room offers an intimate experience with a pescatarian tasting menu. And the service is warm and inviting in no small part to Mbaye’s business partner, restaurateur Effie Richardson. Richardson’s ancestors also originate from West Africa, and Dakar NOLA conveys her vision in a modern dining setting: Eating together creates connection.

Richardson was an early advocate of Mbaye’s pop-ups and knew it would take an investor to advance the concept to a restaurant. Richardson decided it could be her next chapter as well. She sold her pediatric dentistry practice to help make Dakar NOLA a reality, and this past year, the dentist stood beside the chef wearing her own James Beard Award medal for Best New Restaurant on stage.

Dinner begins with handwashing followed by tea service. A series of courses moves diners from historical journey to technical acuity. Jollof rice arrives in a kettle, while head-on Gulf shrimp with tamarind wows in complexity. Richardson’s grace and guidance at the front of house forms a collective experience.

“People are not used to seeing non-European food plated in an artistic way. West African food has always been complex and sophisticated but not presented at the table as fine dining,” she says. “Food is culture in New Orleans; there’s music, there’s dance, there’s art, and there’s food. There was no other food space for us to express our shared identity but New Orleans.”

Caitlin Carney

Porgy’s Seafood Market
Part fish market, part lunch counter, part neighborhood bar, Porgy’s is the brainchild of Caitlin Carney and Marcus Jacobs. The duo is known for past concepts like Marjie’s Grill and Seafood Sally’s, but Porgy’s succeeds as a Mid-City corner store that can cook—and was recognized as a Best New Restaurant semifinalist in the 2025 James Beard lineup.

Carney is Porgy’s ladymonger, a term she gave herself, and her commitment to the enterprise is clear. The market sells what’s hyper fresh and in season. Each species at Porgy’s is housed individually since oysters, shrimp, fish, and crab need different climate schemas to remain optimal. Fish arrives whole, often delivered by the person who caught it. Carney is emphatic about what’s not available, too: seafood from anywhere other than the Louisiana coast. There is no Alaskan salmon or redfish from Texas.

The menu utilizes every morsel of what’s not sold. A BBQ fish plate is the ladymonger’s choice of parts and pieces, grilled upon order by Jacobs and basted with a sauce that expertly straddles marinade and glaze. Served with slaw, house pickles, and sliced bread, it’s hard to imagine a more satisfying New Orleans lunch.

“The city is about soul. It has a creative feminine side that’s apparent,” Carney says. “I came to New Orleans and decided I’m never leaving. Is it so crazy that I have a girly fish
market? This is my place, and I will give back to what’s given me so much.”

Erika Flowers

Compère Lapin
The bar at chef Nina Compton’s restaurant, Compère Lapin, is an essential stop. It sits in the heart of the Warehouse District, New Orleans’ second-oldest neighborhood. Centuries of shipping trade left its mark, and the beverage program, led by Erika Flowers, is unmistakenly Caribbean.

Flowers has pushed the cocktail menu toward the spirits, fruited flavors, and baking spice of the West Indies. Her parents immigrated from Belize, and she spent summers there with her grandmother. Flowers considers herself a Caribbean Black woman and is less familiar with the Black American experience, she says. And though she studied music, art, and design, it is with drink that she feels able to share her upbringing with a wide audience.

Flowers’ drinks are crafted with intention: beautiful in a glass, composed, and sustainably made. The Mai Carib-bean Queen utilizes an avocado pit orgeat, which imparts a mild nuttiness to the rum cocktail. The idea for it stemmed from the quantity of avocado arriving at the kitchen for tuna ceviche. Flowers says there are unique ways to add flavor to a cocktail, if you’re paying attention to what’s at hand.

“The power of the tongue is something that I’ve always honored,” Flowers says. “I use my voice to interact with guests, to advocate with people that look like me, and to tell the stories of the cocktails. The menu right now is a reflection of where chef Nina and I come from, the flavors we’re most familiar with.”

Breanne Kostyk

Flour Moon Bagels
A line past the Lafitte Greenway means there’s a 40-minute wait to the counter at Flour Moon Bagels. Breanne Kostyk admits she and her co-owner, husband Jeff Hinson, sell a lot of frozen Aperol cocktails on warm weekends at their bakery café in Upper Treme.

Kostyk’s resumé reads like a who’s who of fine-dining pastry chefs in the deep South. She dabbled with bagels while cheffing at the ACE Hotel, sometimes adding them to the brunch menu. She even joked about opening a little bagel shop one day. A year later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and as she finished chemo, Covid landed.

She recalls selling her first 18 bagels from her front porch, bald, during the shutdown. It was the maximum number she could produce from her home kitchen, and they were gone in a flash. What started as a series of pop-ups led to the couple opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Today, they’ve expanded the footprint to include a dedicated production kitchen.

The bagels at Flour Moon are hand-rolled; a hybrid of yeast and sourdough adds a depth of flavor that enthusiasts consider essential. They are crafted by a devoted staff who can produce up to 80 dozen a day. The finished texture is fluffy with a significant crust. It’s helped along with the addition of Louisianna cane syrup instead of barley malt. Flour Moon bagels also enjoy a long, cold, slow fermentation overnight before boiling and baking. Sometimes Kostyk lets them go even longer, giving her craft the time it needs to be truly excellent.

“Jeff and I are really big on fate,” she says, “on things aligning. It’s why we named our business what we did. We started our business under the Flower Moon, signed our lease a year later. If I had tried to do this in another city, would it have been the same level of success? It’s here that it works. New Orleans is the place.”