San Sifton has an article in The New York Times about the resurgence of New Orleans:

It is the siren call of a magnificent, broken city: “This, here, is the real New Orleans.” Spend any time sweating through a shirt and walking slow and purposeful along Magazine Street toward a Sazerac before dinner, and you’ll hear the cry, in this bar or that one. You’ll hear it on the radio, driving the high-rise bridge over the Industrial Canal, someone spinning funk on WWOZ and talking about New Orleans soul. You’ll see it in the defiant eyes of a man lurching out of a second line in Pigeon Town.
You can see it on stages all over town this week, as the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival packs the city with visitors for ten days of music and celebration. And you can see it on television, in David Simon’s new HBO series, Treme. Finding the true, authentic New Orleans is that show’s essential mission, its quest:



It may be the city’s, too. Particularly since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina scattered the city’s population, the question of what defines New Orleans in the minds of its remaining citizens and the world beyond has been a central question here.
I spent a week here earlier this month, seeing how restaurants are answering that question, eating high and low, new and old along the bends in the Mississippi River. I walked through crowds in the French Quarter to a meal of oysters Rockefeller and crab Yvonne at Galatoire’s, and along the barren streets south of Lake Pontchartrain to another of po’ boys amid crowds at the Parkway Bakery.
There were breakfast pho across the Mississippi in Gretna, Louisiana, where a large Vietnamese community has settled, and dinner of speckled trout with lump crab, mushrooms, and hollandaise sauce at August, John Besh’s magnificent Southern internationalist restaurant downtown. There was caviar and vodka at Stella!, Scott Boswell’s elegant, deeply European restaurant in the French Quarter, where duck five ways follows the foie gras, and leads to trios of crème brûlée. And at midnight, there were red beans and rice out at Vaughan’s in Bywater, as Kermit Ruffins played his horn before red-eyed supplicants, tourists, and New Orleans natives alike.
There was plenty to sample; there are roughly 1,000 restaurants in New Orleans now, up a couple of hundred from before the storm, according to The New Orleans Menu, a website dedicated to the subject that is run by Tom Fitzmorris.
And, for a critic on the prowl for an authentic taste of the city in full springtime bloom, surprises abounded. One of the most purely joyful and purely New Orleans restaurants of the moment is Emeril’s, a place run by a television chef who was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and lives mostly in New York City. Another, Cochon, is devoted not to the Creole cosmopolitanism of the city center, but to the Cajun traditions of the bayous and backwaters outside of town, in the tidal soup of southern Louisiana.
And a third group of genuine, true-to-type New Orleans restaurants that sit near this city’s culinary heart is not Southern at all, but Vietnamese.
At nearly every restaurant, still, there was evidence of the toll the storm exacted. Before lunch at Mandina’s, an elegant old Creole Italian restaurant in mid-city where the rich, buttery trout amandine would show a Martian what constitutes a classic New Orleans lunch, the crowd was drinking old-fashioneds at the bar. (Drink up, Martian!)
Pableaux Johnson, a child of Louisiana with prodigious knowledge of this city’s food scene, was among the crowd. His Eating New Orleans, a guide to the city’s restaurants that was released just after Katrina, is still indispensable for anyone interested in the culture of New Orleans food.
“There’s a marker around here somewhere that shows how high the water was during the flood,” Mr. Johnson said. It took a few minutes to find it, high up on a column in the rebuilt dining room. A man of average height and abilities could not touch it if he jumped.
Against this background, most meals in New Orleans seem celebratory.
At Mr. Lagasse’s flagship, the festivity is commemorative: Emeril’s turned twenty this year, a standard-bearing, warehouse-district pioneer that has remained a constant in its owner’s increasingly peripatetic life. In the early days, before television came calling, when he was just a breakout chef who’d cut his teeth at Commander’s Palace and gone on to open his own shop, Mr. Lagasse worked in the kitchen at this loft-like space on Tchoupitoulas Street. Now he has restaurants in Orlando and Miami in Florida, and Las Vegas, among others, as well as two more here in New Orleans: NOLA, a less formal version of Emeril’s; and Delmonico (photo above), a steakhouse in the Garden District where a Ramos gin fizz in the bar leads pleasantly enough toward rabbit crepes and a thick steak. Some four hundred people work for Mr. Lagasse in this city, and nearly a thousand more at his other properties. His name and visage are on salad dressings in your supermarket. He sells knives, pots, pans, clogs, and toothpaste. The Emeril Lagasse Show had its debut on the Ion network on 18 April. And in late March, when he came to the restaurant to celebrate the anniversary, it was to broadcast a satellite radio program from the dining room.
By the laws of restaurant physics, Emeril’s should be terrible, a food mill for tourists. It isn’t. It is excellent, neither raucous nor stuffy, cheery and high-ceilinged, with warm lighting. It is also one of the few high-end dining establishments in the city to exhibit more than simply a hint of the city’s racial and ethnic diversity in both its staff and its patronage. The food is remarkably good. Exemplary barbecue shrimp— sautéed in a dark and fiery cream that carries with it hints of lemon and Worcestershire sauce— introduce the restaurant’s abilities. Then a sweet and salty grilled Niman Ranch pork chop with caramelized sweet potatoes on the side doubles the bet. A shockingly good banana cream pie with a graham-cracker crust takes the evening’s winnings. David Slater, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine, is a more-than-able manager of Mr. Lagasse’s culinary estate.
Some in New Orleans have held Mr. Lagasse in bad odor since Katrina, when he evacuated his family to Las Vegas. Some said he appeared insufficiently concerned for the welfare of his local staff and restaurants. In a telephone interview, Mr. Lagasse vigorously denied the charges: “They were taking potshots at me because I wasn’t wearing waders and crying in front of the restaurant,” he said. “But I was being a businessman, working on saving the business.” New refrigeration units for all the kitchens had to be fabricated, he said, and extensive renovation done to the restaurants themselves, particularly Delmonico. “You can’t buy this stuff at Home Depot,” Mr. Lagasse said. “I couldn’t reopen with a bunch of coolers and propane stoves.”
Mr. Johnson had been one of those who had grumbled, at least privately. After all, other restaurateurs had done exactly that. “I stopped following him after the storm,” he wrote in an email message. “I guess I’m eating my words right now,” he said in the restaurant, stabbing at the last of the banana cream pie. “This place is all damn right.”
For those interested in the big flavors that lie at the intersection of urban New Orleans and rustic Cajun country, Cochon, a few blocks upriver from Emeril’s, is a can’t-miss stop. The chefs and owners— Donald Link, who also owns the well-regarded Herbsaint in the Central Business District, and Stephen Stryjewski, a sous chef at that restaurant— opened Cochon in 2006, a few months after Katrina. The dining room looks out through walls of windows, and its brick walls and bare wooden furniture glow in soft light. It is a highbrow roadhouse, a juke joint near Neil Young University.
The food is head-shakingly good: delicate fried rabbit livers on toast points with a fiery pepper jelly; oysters roasted in the heat of a wood fire; fried cauliflower with a chili vinegar sauce; a gumbo of shrimp and deviled eggs.
This is not bad for starter plates, with a glass of bourbon from Black Maple Hill and a chaser of Miller High Life. Afterward matters get serious.
Main dishes include a marvelous soft Louisiana cochon, a kind of Cajun version of suckling pig, slow-cooked and then crisped, served with turnips, cabbage, and crackling skin, as well as a perfect sandwich of deep-fried oysters and house-made bacon on white Pullman bread, with a chili-spiked mayonnaise. A fellow could eat that for days.
And there is a simple salad: cucumber and herbs in vinegar, lightly pickled. It will be familiar to anyone who has ever eaten a banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwich.
They may be Cajun in impulse, but Cochon’s cucumbers explain in one bite how these Vietnamese po’ boys have taken their place alongside roast beef and Italian ones, and how pho can walk with gumbo in the night.
The Vietnamese came to New Orleans after the fall of Saigon, in 1975, having escaped the ravages of one city to establish themselves in a new one. Like the Cajuns before them, the Vietnamese took to the Gulf to net shrimp, and in doing so angered those who had preceded them on the water. In time, however, their poverty and French-inflected history, not to mention their interest in food, allowed them to make inroads, first into Cajun Louisiana and then New Orleans itself.
By the early 1990s, Mr. Lagasse said, he had incorporated a Vietnamese stuffed chicken wing onto his menu at NOLA, where it originated as a staff meal cooked by a Vietnamese employee. Miss Hay’s chicken wings are still on the menu. There are a few Vietnamese accents at Mr. Besh’s restaurants, too.
If you’ve had a banh mi in New Orleans, chances are the bread came from Dong Phuong, on an undistinguished stretch of Chef Menteur Highway east of the city, near the Church of Mary, Queen of Vietnam. The bakery is on the right, a related restaurant on the left.
A banh mi from the bakery— meatballs with pâté and vegetables, and plenty of hot peppers— makes a parking-lot lunch at Dong Phuong one of the signal pleasures of the American South.
In the dining room, which draws a crowd from 11 a.m. on, there isn’t much of note aesthetically. But the food is worth driving for: dark, peppery, shaking beef with onions and rice, say, or pork over vermicelli and a cold duck salad to eat with sweet tea.
Closer to the city’s center, just across the bridge from downtown in a grim, low-slung concrete building in Gretna, is Pho Tau Bay. Here gather hung-over artists and college kids under ceiling fans in the heat, with Vietnamese laborers and truck-driving Cajuns sharing tables and hot sauce, everyone slurping bowls of rich broth with beef tendon, with pork, with piles of vegetables.
Others go to Nine Roses, also in Gretna, for egg rolls and stewed mustard greens with ground pork and shrimp; or to Tan Dinh, for roast quail with a lemony salt and pepper dipping sauce and a superior banh mi.
Only one banh mi I tasted came close to Tan Dinh’s for flavor and texture. It was served at Butcher, a new Cajun-style grocery that the Cochon team opened behind their restaurant. What constitutes the real New Orleans is always in flux.
But if all that leaves you hungry, here are some of the better restaurants in New Orleans and nearby.

August 301 Tchoupitoulas Street (Gravier Street), 504.299.9777
Cochon 930 Tchoupitoulas Street (Andrew Higgins Drive), 504.588.2123
Dong Phuong Oriental Bakery 14207 Chef Menteur Highway, 504.254.0214
Emeril's 800 Tchoupitoulas Street (Julia Street), 504.528.9393
Emeril's Delmonico 1300 St. Charles Avenue (Erato Street), 504.525.4937
Galatoire's 209 Bourbon Street (Iberville Street), 504.525.2021
Mandina's 3800 Canal Street (South Cortez Street), 504.482.9179
Parkway Bakery 538 Hagan Avenue (Toulouse Street), 504.482.3047
Pho Tau Bay 113 Westbank Expressway, Gretna, La., 504.368.9846
Stella! 1032 Chartres Street (Ursulines Street), 504.587-0091
Tan Dinh 1705 Lafayette Street, Gretna, 504.361.8008

Rico says this article made him hungry...

In a related article in The New York Times by John Edge, he talks more about the Vietnamese invasion, this time in Atlanta, Georgia:

Hieu Pham serves about a ton of Louisiana crayfish each week here at the Crawfish Shack Seafood, boiling them in a slurry of commercial seasoning mix, garlic cloves, orange wedges and lemon grass stalks. Cast nets hang from the acoustical-tile ceiling of the strip-mall restaurant, located behind his father’s auto-repair shop along a multiethnic corridor north of downtown. Cans of Café Du Monde coffee sit by the register, and Louis Armstrong plays in heavy rotation.
His father was raised in Vietnam, his mother in Cambodia. Mr. Pham, born 27 years ago in Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta, calls himself a “real Georgia peach.” But, like an increasing number of Vietnamese restaurateurs across the country, he sells his customers a vision of Louisiana culture, accessorized by heaping bowls of crayfish. (Or, as they are called regionally, crawfish.) At least two other counter-service crayfish cafes in Atlanta are owned by Vietnamese or Cambodian families. Vietnamese-owned crayfish restaurants, built around liberal interpretations of Louisiana, are now suburban fixtures in Texas, California, and elsewhere.
When thousands fled Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War, many ended up in Louisiana. Now, for the children of those refugees, the Gulf Coast, fringed by seafood-rich wetlands, can be a kind of second homeland. Crayfish are not commonly consumed in Vietnam, said Andrea Nguyen, a California author of books on Southeast Asian food, but eating boiled shellfish “is a social activity among Vietnamese people. Crawfish eating is visceral,” she said. “Vietnamese people like to pick at their food, to peel and eat with their fingers.”
In California, some crayfish restaurants advertise themselves as quan nhau, or casual restaurants. In southwestern Louisiana, restaurants that specialize in crayfish are often known as boiling points. Many rural boiling points, which have existed since the 1950s, are rudimentary, with concrete floors and bare wood or laminate tables. The crayfish, which are cooked in giant pots over propane flames along with potatoes and ears of corn, arrive on plastic or metal trays. Waiters and waitresses tally orders by weight. Beer is the drink of choice. Rolls of paper towels anchor each table.
A similar, but more expansive, ethic applies at the Vietnamese-owned crayfish restaurants that began opening in Houston around 2000, and a few years later in Southern California. Hank’s Cajun Crawfish, on Bellaire Boulevard on the west side of Houston, in a storefront with tinted windows and glaring neon, is one of a half-dozen or more Vietnamese-owned urban boiling points in that Gulf Coast city. The frills are few. Hot sauces from three continents crowd the tables. Mardi Gras beads drape the refrigerator. Its owner, Tony Bu, learned the trade from relatives with New Orleans roots. His boil is a traditional concoction, flavored with a commercial Cajun seasoning mix. But Mr. Bu drenches some of his crayfish in garlicky margarine and serves them in clear plastic bags. He dishes up crayfish fried rice, too. A margarine drench and bag service are not characteristic of boiling points in Louisiana; nor is a make-your-own swab of lime juice, black pepper and salt, which recalls the traditional Vietnamese dip called muoi tieu chanh. While flavored butter or margarine is sometimes an option in Houston, at Los Angeles-area crayfish restaurants owned by Vietnamese, it’s usually standard. Boiling Crab in Garden Grove, California, which Dada Ngo and her husband, Sinh Nguyen, opened in 2003, now has eight locations in the state and beyond. All tout their finishing sauces, including a buttery blend of garlic, lemon pepper, and Cajun spice mix, known as the Whole Sha-Bang. The ethnic background of the owners is downplayed. The Boiling Crab website portrays Mr. Nguyen as a beer-drinking good ol’ boy from Seadrift, Texas. Ms. Ngo, his Kansas-born bride, goes by the handle Yo’ Mama. Boiling Crab was a pioneer. In the years since it opened, its success has inspired a dozen or more competing businesses, including Claws, also in Garden Grove. A pirate-themed restaurant owned by a Vietnamese family and decorated with life-size swashbuckler mannequins, Claws serves a sauce-smothered style of crayfish as well as nontraditional dishes like periwinkle snails simmered in coconut-basil sauce.Mr. Pham, of Atlanta, is not a fan of margarine- or butter-slicked crayfish. “I want my flavor to be in the crawfish meat,” he said, sounding like a third-generation Cajun purist. “Not on the shell. You’re not supposed to get the flavor when you lick your fingers.” He learned to love crayfish in Louisiana. Like many Christian youths there, Mr. Pham spent long summer stretches at church camps, including an annual Vietnamese Baptist gathering, often held in New Orleans. Following the lead of Vietnamese campers from Louisiana, he learned how to clean crayfish, and how to season the water in which they cook. Mr. Pham, who once studied to be an interior designer, sets the scene well. He stocks his shelves with Louisiana-produced étouffée and beignet mixes and emphasizes the Cajun Country origins of his crayfish. But his efforts don’t amount to gimmickry. The foods that emerge from this small kitchen staffed by his family, including his mother, Hoe Pham, taste like honest tributes to Louisiana, filtered through the life experiences and cooking repertories of Southeast Asian immigrants. Nuoc mia, sugar-cane juice pressed to order from Louisiana cane, is on the menu. So are spring rolls threaded with Louisiana shrimp. Mr. Pham gets his oysters, crabss and shrimp from Gulf Coast waters. “We don’t believe in imported stuff,” he said. Mr. Pham is not, however, beholden to Vietnamese or Louisianan measures of authenticity. He respects the New Orleans bread-baking traditions that make possible the po’ boy. But he prefers Amoroso brand bread from Philadelphia, loaves more often associated with cheese-steak sandwiches. “I’m not trying to do it just like them,” Mr. Pham said, speaking of his friends back in Louisiana. “I’ve got to find my own way, too.” Customers recognize the link between Vietnam and Louisiana even as they make sport of it. For Jeff Cook, a music promoter, Mr. Pham’s fried crayfish po’ boys brought to mind the raucous processions behind New Orleans’s brass band parades. Using the local name for those celebrations, tongue planted firmly in cheek, Mr. Cook gave a nod and a wink to tradition. “Not many people know it,” he said, “but the Vietnamese are very famous for their ‘second lines’.”

Rico says he never would have expected Vietnamese sandwiches on Amoroso bread, but (as a Philly resident now) what's good is good...