Eating In Translation

Red's Chinese

When you consider that one owner is a veteran of Mission Chinese, many menu items at Red's may have a familiar ring. I was sorely tempted, for example, by a fellow diner's plateful of General Lee's chicken. But for a change of pace from a weekend's worth of deep-fried poultry and seafood, I gave the nod to two vegetarian dishes: Bywater eggplant and bayou bok and broccoli ($10 each). The first was complemented by crunchy green chunks of mirliton, better known outside of New Orleans as chayote; the most notable flavor of the second was preserved lemon. Both entrees were served in large, sharable portions.

From any distance, the restaurant itself — in the final photo, it's on the ground floor of the center building — is identified only by a large red square. Signage that reads "Coca-Cola, groceries, ice, taqueria, meats, deli" is a holdover from the previous tenant, and adds a divey appeal. It's spiffier inside.

Red's Chinese
3048 St. Claude Ave. (Montegut-Clouet Sts.), New Orleans
504-304-6030
www.RedsChinese.com
Closed Tuesday

QuarterMaster

Crawfish hand pie ($3).

QuarterMaster (a.k.a. The Nellie Deli)
1100 Bourbon St. (at Ursulines St.), New Orleans
504-529-1416
www.QuarterMasterDeli.net

Uneeda Biscuit

Surviving signage, 730 Dumaine St. (seen from Bourbon St.), New Orleans

Pho Cam Ly

In the early 1970s, emigrants from South Vietnam put down roots in New Orleans East. Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, hit their Ninth Ward neighborhood especially hard; on the day I visited in April 2006, the community was dealing with one of the its periodic power outages. "Too much wind, the power goes out, maybe five, six hours at a time," one merchant told me. "It's like living in a Third World country." One supermarket employed a generator to light bare bulbs strung from the ceiling; other shops made do with daylight through doors and windows.

Today, the community is back on its feet. Further signs of its strength are the many Vietnamese restaurants that have opened nearer the center of New Orleans, sometimes as family operations with a multigenerational staff. My countergal at Pho Cam Ly was born and bred in New Orleans; when I ordered a Chinese sausage and fried egg banh mi ($4.50), her query "How do you want your egg?" was conveyed in a gentle Southern accent. We settled on "over easy"; she provided plenty of napkins to deal with the drips.

Pho Cam Ly
3814 Magazine St. (General Taylor-Peniston Sts.), New Orleans
504-644-4228
www.PhoCamLy.com

The Front

A temporary facade, installed for a sandwich-themed exhibition by the Austin, Texas-based collective Mass Gallery.

The Front
4100 St. Claude Ave. (at Mazant St.), New Orleans
www.NOLAfront.com
Generally open on Saturday and Sunday afternoons only; Mass Gallery exhibition on view through February 8, 2015

Manchu Food Store

Not a Chinese restaurant, despite the availability of egg rolls, mandarin chicken, party trays of fried rice, and, to stretch a point, yakamein. On the customer side of the security glass is a grocery store; on the far side is a Vietnamese-run kitchen partial to deep-frying, chicken wings a specialty. Fried shrimp and oysters (on a bun, $5) were runty and engulfed by heavy batter, but you get more than one sandwich can hold.

Do note that, even in daylight, the immediate neighborhood is a marginal one, as suggested by the ramshackle structure next door. That first photo was taken from beneath the elevated I-10 roadway.

Manchu Food Store
1413 North Claiborne Ave. (Esplanade Ave.-Kerlerec St.), New Orleans
504-947-5507

Treme Coffeehouse

Oversized jars of DiSalvo's pickled pork lips are a colorful fixture on the sales counter of many local markets. The barista who filled my coffee cup (my previous cup, with coffee) hadn't tried them; she said she never could get past the combination of vinegary pickling liquid and red dye number 40. I ventured a dollar and was stymied by a texture that lingered somewhere between gelatinous and cartilaginous; 25 cents' worth was plenty.

Folks from the neighborhood like them, though, the barista maintained. Some, she added, crumble potato chips in the bag, then dip the lip to give it a salty, crunchy coating. This methodology is hauntingly familiar — but all my late nights, from multiple visits to New Orleans, seem to be accounted for.

Treme Coffeehouse
1501 St. Philip St. (at North Villere St.), New Orleans
504-218-8663
www.Facebook.com /TheTremeCoffeehouse

St. Bernard Market

This antebellum public market survived the Civil War and the Depression before being sold to private owners in 1941. From the 1960s until the devastating arrival of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the building operated as the Circle Food Store; that business finally reopened its doors to the neighborhood in 2014.

St. Bernard Market
Surviving decoration, 1522 St. Bernard Ave. (at North Claiborne Ave.), New Orleans

Mother's Restaurant

"Debris," in po-boy lingo, is a good thing: It describes cooked-to-pieces beef soaked in pan drippings. On the Ferdi special ($13), debris serves as a dressing for slices of ham and roast beef. As served, the bread itself isn't soaked through, but the second photo (taken not long after the first) demonstrates the wisdom of holding some sandwich bread in reserve, for mop-up duty.

Also shown: an all-debris po-boy, from many JazzFests ago.

Mother's Restaurant
401 Poydras St. (at Tchoupitoulas St.), New Orleans
504-523-9656
www.MothersRestaurant.net

Mita's Cafe Cubano

Like many of the city's best po-boys, this Cuban sandwich ($7.50) is framed by Leidenheimer's bread. The sandwich press squeezes most of the air from that bread's famously airy crumb, true, but by lightly toasting the splendid crust may possibly improve it.

Mita's Cafe Cubano
7007 St. Claude Ave. (Friscoville Ave.-Aycock St.), Arabi, Louisiana
504-279-5115
www.Facebook.com/pages/Mitas-Café-Cubano/378191868952654