Tom Fitzmorris’s Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, the City Where Food Is Almost Everything

Tom Fitzmorris covers the New Orleans food scene like powdered sugar covers a beignet. For more than thirty-five years he’s written a weekly restaurant review, but he’s best known for a long-running, daily radio talk show devoted to New Orleans restaurants and cooking. In Tom Fitzmorris's Hungry Town, Fitzmorris movingly describes the disappearance of New Orleans’s food culture in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its triumphant comeback—an essential element in the city’s recovery. He leads up to it with a recent history of New Orleans dining before the hurricane, from the Creole craze of the 1980s to the opening of restaurants by big-name chefs like Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Fitzmorris’s coverage of the heroic return of the city’s chefs after Katrina highlights the importance of local cooking traditions to a community. The book includes recipes for some of the dishes mentioned in the story, and numerous sidebars informed by Fitzmorris’s long career writing about this delicious city.