I moved to New Orleans, my ancestral home, two decades ago. In that relatively short period of time, I’ve witnessed our dining scene ebb and flow through a multitude of changes: citywide disasters and neighborhood recoveries, the rise of national trends, the fall of restaurant empires, and the rebirth of regional specialties.

As New Orleans winds down from its 300th-anniversary celebration, held last year, it’s worth taking a look at what's changed, and what hasn’t, in the culinary landscape of a city so closely associated with the joys of eating and drinking. It's well known that we citizens of the Crescent City are raised on the glorious bounty of the Gulf of Mexico and smoked Cajun meats, but there's more to New Orleans than that.

Once the nation’s first great coffee port and former roasting capital, the city subsisted for too long on inferior grounds; today, its reputation has bounced back, thanks to new-wave coffee houses like Cherry Espresso Bar and French Truck. A former leading sugar exporter, New Orleans remains a swell place to enjoy sweet treats like snowballs and pralines, but it's also in the midst of a bread and pastry renaissance, assisted by bakeries like Willa Jean, Bellegarde, and Bywater Bakery. And though there's (sadly) no merit to the oft-repeated claim that the cocktail itself was invented in New Orleans, let’s just say we’re reinventing it every evening.

The city’s present dining options offer both a vision of the past and a peek into our next century to come: tables laden with as much Vietnamese pho as gumbo, handmade tortillas along with po' boys. Here, you can find Southern-inspired fine-dining menus, but also a Slavic-punk late-hour hangout serving shashlik and pierogi; syrup-coated crushed ice, but the best vegan cookies, too. And cocktails—always an abundance of cocktails.