Cochon Restaurant

Donald Link grew up in Rayne, Louisiana, and opened Cochon in the Warehouse District in 2006 to prove Cajun food is a cuisine, not a novelty. The name means pig in French. The menu treats Louisiana's pork-and-rice heritage with the same seriousness fine dining gives to French technique — wood-fired oysters, boudin, and cochon de lait are the standards. Link won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South in 2007. New Orleans was the largest port in the Southern United States throughout the nineteenth century, exporting most of the nation's cotton and farm products, but the city's own foodways ran deeper than what left the docks. Cochon is an argument that what people cooked and ate here — the Cajun tables inland, the rice and pork that fueled the work — deserves the same attention French technique gets. Reservations recommended.