Best of The Hit List New Orleans
The 10 Restaurants That Defined New Orleans Dining in 2025
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We asked our contributors to the Resy Hit List to share their top dining experiences in their cities this year — to choose 10 restaurants that define the state of great dining right now. Welcome back our Best of The Hit List for 2025.
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In 2025, dining in New Orleans felt like a homecoming. The best restaurant experiences served as a reminder of the city’s essence in a variety of ways: cuisine, hospitality, emphasis on neighborhood, and substance over concept. Restaurants like Emeril’s and Saint Claire found new pathways to explore Louisiana cuisine, with cutting-edge tasting menus and picturesque platings that showed the full depth and potential of locally-inspired cuisine. Newcomer Evviva focused on meeting its neighbors’ needs and wants in satisfying and special ways, and, along with Seiji’s, created intimate experiences that reinforced relationships during a time of potential isolation. Global influences flourished, woven through beautiful baked goods, joyful brunches, modern prix-fixe menus, and familiar seafood staples. And perhaps most importantly, the city’s foundational restaurants were celebrated.
Here are 10 restaurants that showed the best of New Orleans dining this year, from cherished icons to experimental debuts, in a range of prices, cuisines, and styles. But one thing they all had in common: heart.
1. Emeril's Warehouse District
How does a 35-year-old restaurant emerge as one of the buzziest in the nation in 2025? The secret lies with E.J. Lagasse, son of star chef Emeril Lagasse, who took over in the kitchen at the esteemed fine-dining destination in 2023. His — and the restaurant’s — star power has exploded since then, thanks to a total reimagining of dishes that, on their face, sound simple: oyster stew, trout amandine, and banana cream pie, to name a few. These versions are so bold, delicate, and intricate that they are nearly unrecognizable from their inspiration. The oyster stew, for example, is frothy with anise-tinged Herbsaint cream, bursting with bright green herb oil, dotted with nutty honshimeji mushrooms, and topped with crisped foie gras. Of all of New Orleans’ world-class restaurants, this one draws the most influence from its Louisiana roots while building something altogether new.
2. Evviva Marigny District
With the feel of a wine bar and the food of a coastal Italian cafe, this Marigny restaurant was one of 2025’s most exciting openings. It fits so well into the neighborhood, one of New Orleans’ best for dining, while offering something entirely new. It’s both low-key and elegant, perfect for a weeknight catch-up with friends over happy-hour martinis, or a dreamy date night with a bottle of wine and a shared chocolate hazelnut budino. It also marks the return of Rebecca Wilcomb, a talented local chef who won an award from the Beard Foundation while cooking at Herbsaint. Her menu feels so fresh, with simple tomato-rubbed focaccia topped with anchovies, surprising betel-leaf dolmas, and comforting chicken liver rigatoni with country ham. Don’t bank on certain dishes, however — with the exception of a few staples, this menu is far from stagnant. Expect new happy hour specials every day, another touch that makes it completely neighborhood-friendly.
3. SEIJI's OMAKASE by LITTLE TOKYO Metairie
This backroom sushi bar embodied two of the year’s important dining trends: The intimate, chef-curated beauty of Japanese omakase, and a return to substance over flash. Instagram-centric sushi lounges have had their moment, but who in 2025 wants to pay for overpriced fish masquerading as high-quality, well-executed omakase? Seiji’s is the opposite — friendly, accessible, and worth every penny. The delightful chef Seiji Nakano himself is central to the experience, which can be either four ($85) or seven ($140) courses typically consisting of an appetizer, many pieces of sushi and nigiri, soup, and dessert. That warm interaction and connectivity feels so important right now, when it’s easy to feel isolated from others, and personifies the heart of New Orleans dining. It gets our vote for the top omakase in New Orleans.
4. Ayu Bakehouse Marigny
New Orleans has always been a bakery town: Dong Phuong, Haydel’s, and Angelo Brocato’s are famous well beyond city limits. But in the last few years, a new wave of modern bakehouses has elevated New Orleans’s reputation for viennoiserie in particular. If 2024 was rightfully the year of Lagniappe Bakehouse, 2025 was the year Ayu got its much-deserved recognition. For one, its croissant-esque king cake emerged as one of New Orleans’ favorites, competing closely with Dong Phuong’s legendary version. Kelly Jacques, Ayu’s head chef and co-owner, was named one of Food & Wine’s 2025 best new chefs for original creations like muffuletta breadsticks; a boudin and soft-boiled egg croissant; and the kaya bun, filled with coconut-pandan custard. But Ayu is not just about sweet and savory pastries — it also bakes up some of the city’s best bread, and popping into the stylish corner spot on Frenchmen Street for a baguette is one of New Orleans’s great pleasures.
Find more info here.
5. Addis NOLA Treme
This Bayou Road restaurant, and its ongoing popularity, is one of the best representations of New Orleans’s embrace of global cuisines — beyond the European variety — in recent years. Despite the clear influence of West African, East African, and Caribbean cuisines on the formation of the city’s own, they’re being more widely celebrated in recent years, with the ascension of spots like Queen Trini Lisa, Fritai, and Dakar NOLA. What made Addis, with its top-notch Ethiopian cuisine and embrace of cultural traditions like the coffee ceremony, stand out in 2025 was its emphasis on fun, marking a return to a once-fundamental aspect of New Orleans dining. During its weekend brunch, Ethiopian flavors meld with midday meal favorites for a menu of dishes like shrimp tibs and grits and jollof rice and fried egg to a backdrop of DJ music and bottomless mimosas. It’s pure happiness in a meal.
6. Saint-Germain Bywater
A surprise awaits behind the doors of this humble Bywater shotgun that’s identified only by the kitschy neon sign for its prior restaurant (Sugar Park): a level of dining found in Paris, New York, or Copenhagen, but virtually unheard of in New Orleans prior to its 2018 opening. In 2025, it’s still the most exciting restaurant in the city, with a revamped format for a 10-course tasting menu that takes diners throughout the physical space, beginning at the bar. Chefs Trey Smith and Blake Aguillard amaze with their complex use of rarely-seen ingredients like Norwegian red king crab, geoduck, white asparagus, and guinea fowl, but also with their use of common ingredients to create dishes like caviar and potato ice cream. Perhaps the most refreshing part of the experience is its relative casualness — there’s no stuffiness here, just a warm, cozy atmosphere that’s as convivial as it is chic.
Book now on Tock.
7. Fives Bar French Quarter
The opening and subsequent success of this French Quarter oyster bar represented two important New Orleans dining trends in 2025: a celebration of what has helped make New Orleans a world-class destination — namely oysters and cocktails — and a move towards simple sophistication and away from traditional white-tablecloth fussiness. Everything about Fives outwardly, from its Jackson Square location to its marble horseshoe bar under a gorgeous antique chandelier, is throwback New Orleans. But its food and drinks menus are decidedly new-school: Upscale drinking food like beef tartare, foie gras torchon, tuna crudo, and caviar is trend-driven, while intricate versions of global and local cocktails are served alongside striking original creations. Then there are the oysters, one of the best selections of Gulf Coast and East Coast varieties currently available in town. Though accessible at every turn, everything Fives serves is refined, precise, and done extremely well.
8. Saint Claire Algiers
When chef Melissa Martin opens a restaurant, it’s major news. Ten years after opening her Beard Foundation award-nominated restaurant, Mosquito Supper Club, Martin debuted its Westbank follow-up in spring 2025 to massive acclaim. The bayou-born Louisiana chef has a knack for food that is as comforting as it is elegant, and Saint Claire takes that combination to a picture-perfect new level. The seasonal menu is simple and artistic, like the smoked beets with creme fraiche and trout roe or tuna paillard with pickled peach, shishito peppers, and tarragon — even the bread service is beautiful. This gorgeous yet homey food in combination with its antiquey, romantic setting along the levee among the oaks makes for a wholly transportive dining experience. Brunch provides an opportunity to taste a perfectly-cooked French omelette, this one topped with crab.
Book now on Tock.
9. Dooky Chase Tremé
It’s not every year that 80-year-old restaurants feel like part of the zeitgeist. But in 2025, New Orleans was again reminded of this foundational establishment’s ongoing impact. Named as a James Beard America’s Classic, which recognizes the places that have helped build the culinary culture of its community, the honor shone a fresh spotlight on Leah Chae’s iconic spot. And who could be more deserving than a restaurant that defined Creole cuisine as we understand it today, and altered the course of history as a gathering place for civil rights leaders in the 1960s? The world was given the opportunity to learn more about the latter this year when the restaurant reopened its Civil Rights Room, a small upstairs dining room where those very leaders once strategized. As a city, we’ll take any reason to celebrate this important place alongside a bowl of gumbo, side of stewed okra, or plate of shrimp Clemenceau.
10. Pêche Downtown
Peche’s 15th year might have been its finest. Chef Nicole Cabrera Mills gained national attention for the personal cuisine identity she’s brought to this beloved seafood hub over the years, adding a level of depth and integrity that can’t be feigned. It retained its origins as a classic oyster bar offering the best of the Gulf while also revealing itself as a dynamic, ever-evolving destination for modern cuisine. Filipino and Southeast Asian flavors are woven throughout the menu, sometimes subtly and sometimes boldly — dishes like catfish with pickled greens in chile broth, fried oysters with papaya and kimchi, and crab cappellini with chile butter and basil. But coastal Southern classics also are done exceptionally well, paired with peak seasonal vegetables: okra, field peas, Creole tomatoes, and Louisiana zucchini. It’s a bright, graceful menu that manages to excite week after week.
