If you want to know whether a New Orleans restaurant is the real thing, watch who’s eating there on a Tuesday afternoon.
At Neyow’s Creole Café on Bienville Street in Mid-City, the answer is clear before you even walk in. Look through the large front windows, and you’ll see a cook grilling oysters behind a garlic-scented plume of smoke, and every table filled with people who know exactly what they came for. This is not a tourist destination that stumbled into local credibility.
Tanya Dubuclet and her mother, Teka Wilson, built this place from scratch, starting with supper cooked out of their home for family and friends, drawing entirely on recipes passed down from Dubuclet’s grandmother. The restaurant opened in 2010, moved into its current building in 2016, and hasn’t needed to reinvent a single dish since…