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This Restaurant Sees No Gulf Between New Orleans and Mexico

July 1, 2025
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This Restaurant Sees No Gulf Between New Orleans and Mexico
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If you’re headed to New Orleans and you mention it to anyone, you’ll be directed to the boundless joys of muffulettas and po’ boys, gumbos and étouffées, red beans and rice and jambalaya.

This list goes on, an American canon built by overlapping culinary influences in what was once a hub for Indigenous tribes and later the trans-Atlantic slave trade, shaped and reshaped by hundreds of years of colonial rule and immigrant flux.

Every city has its greatest hits from another century, its repertoire of untouchable classics, but New Orleans is so loaded with them, it can seem a little unfair. It can also give a visitor the wrong impression — as if, somewhere back there, the city got stuck in time.

No, the juice is always running here, and those influences keep bopping together deliciously. Call the Gulf whatever you want. At Acamaya, the chef Ana Castro insists on the connection between Louisiana and Mexico.

Ms. Castro nixtamalizes heirloom corn to make chochoyotes, and lately she has immersed the pudgy, dimpled masa dumplings in a slippery green sauce, lush with sweet crab meat, prickling with the warmth of poblano chiles and peppery nasturtium leaves.

To collect that crab, Ms. Castro drives 30 miles south from her restaurant in the Bywater neighborhood, past cypress trees slung with Spanish moss, to a centuries-old fishing village called Lafitte. That’s where Dottie and Dennis Higgins run Higgins Seafood.

Higgins is a tenuous family business, so small it’s sometimes just the two of them cooking and picking and packing. To do their work, they rely on Gulf Coast fishermen up against forces beyond their control: a dwindling labor pool, shameless restaurants passing off imported seafood as local, and ferocious storms that batter a disappearing coast.

Does the vulnerability of a taste sharpen its pleasure? If Ms. Castro can’t get crab from Higgins, you won’t find it on the menu at all. But you might find something else — a surprising guest appearance from some less marketable fish, like strawberry grouper or barracuda, triggerfish or hogfish.

Adapting to what purveyors can or can’t get is as much a creative choice as a survival skill for some kitchens now — a way to build interdependence and sustain a community against disasters, big and small. (“The idea that everything must be available at all times is a capitalistic construct,” Ms. Castro told me over the phone.)

Ms. Castro, who was born in Texas and grew up both there and in Mexico City, built her reputation with the Mexican tasting menus she devised at Lengua Madre in New Orleans, where she partnered with the chef and restaurateur Michael Stoltzfus. It was open only a few weeks in 2021 when Hurricane Ida blew the roof off. When the restaurant reopened months later, press and accolades followed — Ms. Castro was in the national spotlight.

She opened Acamaya last year with her sister Lydia Castro, who manages the place. The restaurant is light on its feet, constantly revising and adjusting. Though it doesn’t specialize in crowd pleasers for the jazz dads, it knows how to satisfy them with carne asada and a sturdy costra — here a tunnel of lightly browned cheese that might hold crawfish or shrimp — on a flour tortilla.

The blackened flounder is as Cajun as it is Veracruzana, with a paprika-heavy seasoning seared against the fish, and a briny stew of canned tomatoes and olives, lit with lemon zest. It’s elegant grandma cooking (truly, the recipe is borrowed from Ms. Castro’s grandma).

Some of the riskier dishes play with unflinching bitterness. Results are expansive, as in the inky, crunchy arroz negro, the rice embellished with squid and shrimp, deeper and darker still with a blot of ripe huitlacoche. They can also be extreme, as in the sticky octopus smeared with cacao nib salsa macha and a slightly menacing coffee aioli.

The kitchen cooks seafood with expertise, but can seem unnerved by vegetables, which tend to sound more exciting than they taste. A roasted beet dish that promised the flavors of hibiscus, sour cherry and rhubarb landed unexpectedly wet and muffled.

There is a spikiness to Acamaya — don’t be fooled by the soft pink glow it emits on Dauphine Street. The restaurant takes some visual and spiritual inspiration from a young, progressive generation of restaurants in Mexico City. The kitchen is open, and the dining room is small but somehow capacious-feeling — big tables set far apart. There’s no tasting menu, but there is an ounce of golden Kaluga caviar on the menu for $90.

The caviar course can be predictable, but this one comes with an unlikely extravagance: half a dozen popcorn-scented gorditas, their bubbled exteriors still hot and crackling and salty, ideal for splitting and filling with bean purée and crema — as well as the requisite cured egg yolk and chives.

It might be jarring to spot gorditas and caviar on a menu if you’re scanning for chips and salsa, but Acamaya isn’t a chips-and-salsa kind of restaurant. It isn’t dead-serious, committed to regional specialties, either. It’s more idiosyncratic and puckish than that, more brainy and rewarding.

Servers are composed, but approachable, and don’t tend to explain the dishes much, though you might overhear them consoling diners who were expecting free guac, not crab chochoyotes. There’s no easy way to say it: The guac isn’t free. Also, there isn’t any.

Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.

Tejal Rao is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.

The post This Restaurant Sees No Gulf Between New Orleans and Mexico appeared first on New York Times.

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