Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0393061671
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Average Customer Review: (From 11 total reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description:
Celebrating New Orleans’ food culture, one specialty at a time.

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.

Customer Reviews

If you read nothing else . . . by Robert Holland
If you read only one book about New Orleans, it should be this one. Sara Roahen’s love of the the city’s food is exceeded only by her love of the people who make it and their creation of a unique culture. Her love of the food is the more convincing by being hard-won — a struggle against mid-Western roots and west coast vegetarianism. But her natural curiosity (and the exigencies of being thrust into the role of restaurant reviewer) leads her far beyond the cliches of gumbo and crawfish into the exotic realms of the mirliton and turducken, to name just a couple. For those who fuss about the absence of jambalaya and bread pudding in these pages, I too would like to read her treatment of other local specialties, but I’m thankful she has saved something for another book!

Read Gumbo Tales if you miss New Orleans by E. L. Smith
I’m always searching for books about and related to New Orleans which can put me in a New Orleans state of mind even from the Northeast. It was fortuitous, then, that I selected Gumbo Tales as my most recent reading material.

I fell in love with the city of New Orleans on my first visit four years ago, and I try to visit as often as possible. When I can’t, a book or a movie is the next best thing, and I eventually plan to call New Orleans my home. Gumbo Tales provides the perfect window into the culture of New Orleans, and I was sad the book was over when I finished.

One of the things I liked most about the book is that it’s from the perspective of a non-native New Orleanian such as myself. That I could really identify with, moreso than I can with books and stories written by people who were born and raised. I identified with the process of coming from the outside, becoming enchanted, and wanting desperately to be part of the culture. I identified with Roahan’s first experiences of New Orleans traditions as a newbie. I cackled out loud reading about her crawfish mishap. I cried several times because of the book, especially when she wrote about the city’s struggling spirit in the wake of the events of 2005.

Besides the sentimental feelings the book gives you about the city, the descriptions of food are really the main ingredient here- and they are brilliant.

Roahan’s book was the perfect find for leaving-town-reading, for keeping the feeling of NOLA going even when you’re far away. Gumbo Takes made me feel not alone in my New Orleans experience and stubborn love for the place. I recommend this book to anyone who calls New Orleans home, once called it home, plans to call it home, or just wishes they did.

Much more than gumbo! by Richard Sokolnicki
Gumbo Tales is a passionate, expansive, and highly personal look at the food culture of New Orleans. And it’s this food culture that makes New Orleans like no other place in America.

Sara Roahen has gone well beyond the superficial descriptions of restaurants and recipes, and she features both the famous and less known in equal helpings. Best of all, she has added the most important element - the people who make New Orleans and its food extraordinary. This book should inspire any reader to want to follow some of her footsteps and get to know the city on its own terms.

Sara’s observations are wonderful and have great depth. I found every page to be “delicious” and thank her for a brilliant presentation. I highly recommend Gumbo Tales!!!

Pass the hot sauce! by i4abuy
I learned of this book from Jonathan Yardley’s review in the Washington Post. We were out of ideas for our son’s Spring Break and we hit on New Orleans: an eating vacation with Sara Roahen as our guide. I studied the book on a stationery bicycle as I tried to lose 15 pounds to get into shape for six great meals at Commander’s Palace, Herbsaint, Bayona, Palace Cafe, Antoine’s, and Galatoire’s (listed in order, from greatest to merely great). Plus a few lesser meals and snacks, constrained only by our appetites.

This is a delightful and worthy book. It is organized around New Orleans’ principal food groups with chapters on gumbo, red beans and rice, po’ boys, etc. For each she researched vintage cookbooks to trace origins and variations. She uses this framework to interweave stories of her life in New Orleans and her experiences with the food and the people who make it, eat it, and live by it. She is a good writer, and her book served my purpose well. Every meal tasted better because of the context she provided.

That said her “menu-item framework” is awkward for the story she is telling. The book needs introductory chapters to describe New Orleans cuisine today, its evolution, and why it is unique (and superior!)

The introduction should follow easily from her careful research, but she doesn’t even take up the fundamental distinction between Cajun and Creole until a chapter about poisson meuniere amandine, 159 pages into the book. The introduction should lay out the basic taxonomy of New Orleans food purveyors from the traditional five star restaurants, through contemporary innovators, to cafes and po’ boy shops and street vendors. It would be a logical place for some of the personal vignettes of people who influenced her life in New Orleans which are awkwardly shoe-horned into chapters about food (e.g., the restaurant critic, Tom Fitzmorris in le boeuf gras) to which they only a passing association.

Finally, I question her choice of menu items. There is a boring chapter on Vietnamese cuisine and another on a Mardi Gras coconut-trinket that I would gladly have traded for some missing chapters on traditional New Orleans cuisine: hot sauce, jambalaya, bread pudding. What is New Orleans without hot sauce?

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