Dr. Jones is a shoe box-sized Metairie restaurant that feels like a diner. You can see the whole operation from any seat, with just a handful of tables, five seats at the dining counter and an open kitchen.
What you don’t see, but can vividly taste, are steps that go into this short menu to make its dishes sing.
Dr. Jones is what happens when chefs with the bona fides to run high-end restaurants instead turn the sourcing and flavor-building techniques of upscale kitchens into their own take on comfort food.
Much of it tastes like New Orleans cooking, but it’s different from anywhere else, and that makes unpacking a meal at this casual, affordable spot more exciting.
The gumbo is ostensibly a chicken and andouille version, common enough. Left unsaid are how tomatoes and okra are roasted overnight to join the dried scallops and shrimp invisibly worked into the roux, plus a dose of djon djon, a type of Haitian black mushroom. Remarkably, it tastes like gumbo, but unlike any I’ve had before, and every spoonful is a major umami bomb.
The basic-sounding, kid-friendly “crispy chicken bites” have a hot sauce honey butter. But they start by caramelizing that honey on its way to becoming a glaze for these two-bite chunks. The dish is generally in the neighborhood of Gen. Tso’s chicken, though with deeper flavor, and the American Chinese food connection has at least one reference to the backstory of Dr. Jones.
Who is Dr. Jones?
The chefs here are David Rouse and Billy Jones, two northshore natives who have long worked in each other’s orbits. That included time in Chicago, cooking in that city’s Michelin star restaurant realm. Back in New Orleans, they would each eventually hold chef de cuisine posts at Donald Link restaurants – Rouse at Herbsaint, Jones at Cochon. Jones later left to co-found Blue Giant, the American Chinese restaurant that has since closed.
The two started working together again with a catering business, and leased the small space on Vets as a homebase (it was previously the first location of Yakuza House before that sushi standout moved to much bigger digs nearby)…