Mandina's Restaurant

Mandina's Restaurant at 3800 Canal Street in New Orleans' Mid-City neighborhood has been a community cornerstone since 1932, when the Mandina family transformed a neighborhood pool hall and grocery into the dining room it remains today. The restaurant sits on the Canal Street streetcar line at the boundary between Mid-City and the Carrollton neighborhood, drawing a mix of longtime neighborhood regulars, medical professionals from the nearby hospitals, and visitors looking for an authentic experience away from the French Quarter. The cuisine is Italian-Creole, a hyphen that reflects New Orleans' large Italian immigrant community and their integration with Creole cooking traditions over more than a century. Turtle soup — a New Orleans staple that appears on only a handful of menus — is a Mandina's signature, finished with dry sherry and topped with a hard-boiled egg. The combination po'boy of shrimp and oysters on a single French bread loaf is a lunch standard. Trout almondine, with butter and toasted almond slivers, represents the French-Italian thread in the city's Creole cooking. The Italian sausage po'boy speaks directly to the restaurant's Sicilian heritage. The dining room is warm and unchanged: formica-topped tables, neon beer signs, a long bar populated by regulars who know the staff by name, and a ceiling fan moving slowly overhead. Mandina's was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and rebuilt to its original specifications; the reopening in 2006 was treated as a community event. Reservations recommended for parties of four or more.