US Airways Magazine
Top 10 Taste
Published: January 2007
By John T. Edge

By the side of my desk sits a pasteboard beer flat, stacked with ten years of journals.  At the bottom are the flip-top spirals I was scribbling in when my magazine career began.  Dig midway through the heap and you’ll find evidence of my frou-frou stage, designer digests with gilt-edged pages and leather spines. On top are moleskins, those unobtrusive black rectangles I now carry.

I threat the heap with respect, as if it were a pulp oracle.  It’s where my memories of great meals reside.  So it’s where I turned when compiling the list that follows, sifting through Moleskines, deciphering grease-stained pages that, after pushing back from the table where I wrote them, resembled nothing so much as hieroglyphics of an ancient society that worshipped its gods in restaurants rather than in churches.
Following are the ten tastes that rose from my heap.  They are the eats and drinks that I suggest you seek in 2007.

1.  Black-Eyed-Pea Gumbo
Cochon
930 Tchoupitoulas St.
New Orleans
504.588.2123

Gumbo talk will get you in trouble.  Some believe the presence of mucilaginous okra is defining.  Others declare that file, pulverized sassafras leaves, is the signal thickener.  Donald Lind and Stephen Stryjewski, chefs and co-owners of Cochon, a new country-come-to-town Cajun restaurant on the edge of New Orleans’ Warehouse District, don’t cotton to gumbo dictates.  Their black-eyed-pea and ham-hock gumbo oftentimes contains both.  It’s contrarian and delicious, tasting of smoky pork and earthy peas making it the perfect bowl on a blustery day.

On the same menu at this brick-walled restaurant where the chank-a-chank of zydeco always seem to reverberate from the speakers: wood-roasted Louisiana oysters sluiced with lemon juice, garlic and butter.