Big Apple vs. Big Easy

I've been thinking quite a bit about the differences between New York and New Orleans food cultures, and I'd like to share my thoughts. The two cities are so different in so many ways that this might be a bit of an apples/oranges comparison, but I think it's an interesting one nonetheless and one that helps to explain Cochon's success and popularity as a restaurant.
New York food, like New York City itself, is defined less by a particular regional tradition than by the elaborate patchwork of ethnic enclaves that exists within the city. In the week before I left for New Orleans alone, I enjoyed Szechuan food in Flushing, Vietnamese sandwiches in Sunset Park, El Salvadoran food in Yonkers, smoked fish on the Upper West Side, and tacos tacos tacos anywhere I could find them. This access to authentic food from virtually anywhere on the globe is one of the great luxuries of living in a city as diverse as New York. Then, alongside the vast range of ethnic food, there is the ever-growing focus on farmer's market-driven cooking, where restaurants partner with local farms to source high-quality and in-season raw ingredients for their menus. This attention to the source and quality of ingredients seems to be becoming the norm among high-end restaurants in New York, and I realize now that I've left that I was beginning to take such practices for granted. These two aspects of New York's food culture--the range of types and the quality of ingredients--are what I love most about eating out in New York, and they are often quite separate from each other (I don't go to most taquerias hoping to dine on pasture-raised carnitas), but I think sometimes the real magic happens at the intersection of the two. Chefs like Michael Psilakis or, especially, David Chang, whose menus have distinct ethnic identities but also heed the local/sustainable movement's emphasis on high-quality ingredients, have captured the current zeitgeist of New York food with particular success and have enjoyed plenty of critical acclaim as a result.
In New Orleans, something very different is going on. The food culture here centers almost entirely upon a particular set of regional cooking traditions: the Creole cuisine from within New Orleans itself, and the Cajun cuisine of surrounding Acadian Louisiana. Creole food is fascinating because it blends together the culinary styles of the various groups who settled in New Orleans during Louisiana's colonial and post-colonial period. Predominant among these is the French influence, evident in techniques like using a roux (mixture of butter and flour) to thicken soups and gumbos, in foods of French origin like beignets and remoulade, and in French names for dishes like etouffee ("smothered," in French). Also significant are the Spanish influence of rice and beans, seen in dishes like Jambalaya and dirty rice; West Indian ingredients like cayenne and hot peppers, brought to New Orleans by Haitian immigrants of the early 19th century; African okra, introduced to the Americas by slaves; American southern staples like cornbread, grits, greens and country ham; and the abundance of shrimp, crawfish, oysters and other seafood due to New Orleans' position at the mouth of the Mississippi River. This complex blend makes New Orleans perhaps the only region of the US with a truly unique regional culinary tradition.
But Creole food has in many ways fallen victim to the larger American phenomenon of commercially processed food products, and to the economic rules of a globalized food system. When I sifted through a stack of Creole cookbooks from a collection at Tulane University, I was struck by the number of recipe ingredients that would fall into Michael Pollan's category of "edible food-like substances": canned mushroom soup in a shrimp dish, instant coffee powder for a cake, Sure Jell to thicken jams and jellies, ketchup all over the place. Also, many of the ingredients listed were brand-specific, like Knox gelatin or Lea & Perrins worchestershire sauce or Philadelphia cream cheese, reinforcing the supermarket shelf mentality. Meanwhile, many New Orleans restaurants are forced by high local prices to buy crawfish from China, eroding the ties between Creole cooking and the unique geographic location that helped define it in the first place. The result of these factors, and probably others as well, is that many New Orleans restaurants are cooking mediocre food, Creole in practice but drained of the indigenous ingredients and methods that make Creole cuisine an authentic regional specialty.
I think part of the reason Cochon has gained so much national recognition is that it is reconnecting Louisiana recipes with the local ingredients and methods upon which those recipes were founded. The restaurant uses Louisiana grits and "popcorn" rice (smells like basmati to me), local shrimp, oysters and crawfish, and places a large emphasis on home-made foods, from pickles to bacon to mustard to moonshine. Cochon has thus struck that magical culinary sweet spot, having both a well-formed ethnic identity and a self-consciously ingredient-driven philosophy that elevates Cajun food without making it fancy, and I think that, as much as its devotion to pork, is why Cochon warrants Frank Bruni's comparison to Momofuku. Certainly, it places Cochon in a league far above the vast majority of Creole and Cajun restaurants in New Orleans.
In my opinion, though, Cochon could go even further. I would love to see the restaurant pay more attention to the quality of its produce. Meat definitely takes the center-stage on Cochon's menu, but vegetable accents like the tomato slice in an oyster bacon sandwich or the arugula in an andouille salad have the ability to really enhance a dish when they are delicious in their own right. For whatever reason--perhaps because partnering with small farms is hard to do in Louisiana, perhaps because keeping food costs low is a priority--Cochon is not following its commitment to top-notch local ingredients through to the vegetable corners of its menu. I wonder if it could get away with such slackness among the demandingly locavorous diners of New York...