This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to our very opinionated editors’ favorite things to eat, drink, and buy.
My crush on Nina Compton started from afar, but totally wasn’t creepy, I swear. In some ways, it was born out of a crush on New Orleans itself, a city I haven’t stopped annoyingly waxing poetic about since I went for Mardi Gras as a college freshman. But it also had something to do with a photo of plump head-on shrimp skinny-dipping in a cast-iron pan full of Calabrian chile butter that I happened upon in 2016 while scrolling through Instagram. It was a thing of beauty, and it turned out to be the creation of this new chef who’d just arrived in my favorite city from St. Lucia (by way of Miami) and opened a French-Caribbean restaurant called Compère Lapin.
I didn’t get a chance to actually taste Compton’s food until last year’s Southern Foodways Alliance symposium, where the chef somehow managed to pull off a near-perfect 350-person lunch. The cowheel soup she served—made from real cowheels and cleverly tied to a Caribbean folktale about a beautiful man-killing woman, identifiable as an evil spirit only by her cow foot (I mean, come on)—was the most delicious thing I ate in a weekend packed with delicious things. It was thick like velvet, with ginger and pumpkin and stewy lentils and habaneros rounding out the lush broth of roasted cow feet. I could’ve bathed in the stuff. My vague crush became a full-blown obsession. Not like, starting-an-Instagram-fan-account-level obsession, but close.
A few weeks later, by sheer coincidence, I found myself back in New Orleans, with time for only one unplanned meal. So, duh, I picked Bywater American Bistro, Compton’s newest restaurant, a sophisticated celebration of local flavors and ingredients with nary a plastic beaded necklace in sight. There, I ate the dish that ended it all: a simple yet perfectly steamed red snapper blanketed in Crystal hot sauce-kissed Hollandaise. The sauce gets pumped through a whipped cream canister, making it so light and so fluffy that it resembles what I’ve always thought clouds might taste like. And despite the fact that Compton and I had yet to speak a word to each other, it felt like the end of a rom-com, where everything falls into place and a jangly pop song starts to play. The credits roll and we all live happily ever after.