Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table

My first job in New Orleans was in the bakery of a catering company, where we made king cakes and bread pudding and candied pecan everything. My second job was as a restaurant review columnist for Gambit Weekly, and it was through this work that I really got intimate with the city. Gambit was a free newsweekly, and my limited budget reflected it. For every fine dining restaurant I reviewed, I covered four economical places: po-boy shops, pizza joints, neighborhood bars serving gumbo, pho outlets deep in the suburbs, seafood markets on Lake Pontchartrain. What an education!

I made all my notes on yellow legal pads in those days. After four years as a restaurant critic, I realized that at least half of my notes never made it into my restaurant reviews because the details I found most interesting about eating in New Orleans had more to do with people and culture than with the food itself (though, of course, I’d also come to adore the food). The idea for Gumbo Tales arose from everything I’d left behind on those legal pads.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, just as my writing was gaining steam, and it altered the book’s tone and my focus. Pre-Katrina, my intended audience was tourists and armchair travelers. Post-Katrina, I also wrote for all the New Orleanians the hurricane had displaced. I wrote for everyone with flooded homes, nonfunctioning kitchens, and broken hearts.

Terrible as that time was for the city, I feel lucky to have lived through it, to have had the opportunity document the before and the after of one of the world’s greatest food cultures. The city and its gumbo survive.

Gumbo Tales was published in 2008 by W. W. Norton.

From the back cover:

A cocktail is more than a segue to dinner when it’s a Sazerac, an anise-laced drink of rye whiskey and bitters indigenous to New Orleans. For Wisconsin native Sara Roahen, a Sazerac is also a fine accompaniment to raw oysters, a looking glass into the cocktail culture of her own family—and one more way to gain a foothold in her beloved adopted city. Roahen’s stories of personal discovery introduce readers to New Orleans’ well-known signatures—gumbo, po-boys, red beans and rice—and its lesser-known gems: the pho of its Vietnamese immigrants, the braciolone of its Sicilians, and the ya-ka-mein of its street culture. By eating and cooking her way through a place as unique and unexpected as its infamous turducken, Roahen finds a home. And then Katrina. With humor, poignancy, and hope, she conjures up a city that reveled in its food traditions before the storm—and in many ways has been saved by them since.

“Gumbo Tales can be read, profitably and pleasurably, at several levels.” –Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“This culinary tour succeeds repeatedly in defining the indefinable with grace, wit and passion-especially in regards to the city's alluring, complex flavors and aromas.” – Publishers Weekly

“Makes you want to spend a week―immediately―in New Orleans.” ―Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal