Mosca's Restaurant

In 1946, Provino Mosca and his wife Lisa opened a roadhouse seventeen miles out of New Orleans on US Highway 90, in a building owned by Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans crime boss. Nearly eighty years later, the same family runs the same menu in the same building. Calvin Trillin profiled it in The New Yorker. The James Beard Foundation named it an America's Classic in 1999. The dining room still takes cash only. Three dishes anchor the menu: Oysters Mosca, Chicken à la Grande, and Italian crab salad. The recipes haven't changed. The drive from downtown is the same seventeen miles it was when Provino and Lisa first turned on the lights. What endures is the refusal to adjust for convenience — the distance, the payment method, the menu itself. You go because some things were good enough the first time.