10 best restaurants of Marigny and Bywater

Of all places in the NOLA Metro, Marigny and Bywater are my least favorite. I much prefer riding my bicycle through the heart of Central City than perambulating along the sidewalks of these two neighborhoods. There's just something so terribly touristy feeling about the area -- like it's a replica of a Disney World replica of New Orleans. Don't get me wrong -- the architecture of these neighborhoods is stunning and the fragrance of the plants in bloom is invigorating. Nonetheless, the feel of the neighborhood is that of an uprooted, wandering community that tries to replace those deficiencies with a respect for the neighborhood's history.

The neighborhood, of course, was first started by this loser named Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville de Pedro Gonzalez. His name was actually longer than that, but I prefer to mock it because during the course of his life, he mocked, killed, and cheated many. Marigny was the sort of fellow who some of los perdidos on the OT would admire. He inherited a fortune. I mean today, it would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But he gambled and drank it away. Pretty pathetic considering he was the guy who introduced America to the game of craps. You'd think he wouldn't have sucked so bad at it. The plantation next to the French Quarter his mom and pop had given him? He had to sell it to make up for his debt. So begins the history of Marigny, which some who like to give it street cred, call the Marigny, as a neighborhood. A wannabe Renaissance man, he tried naming the streets after Classical themes and characters.
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Marigny loved to duel. He killed some people. He became a state senator and made many American enemies. One fellow senator, from Catahoula Parish, didn't like him. He challenged Marigny to a duel. But he knew Marigny was a skilled shooter, so he demaned that the diminutive, five foot Marigny meet him for a duel in Lake Pontchartrain, where the water was six feet deep, and they would bash each other with clubs underwater. Marigny weaseled his way out, saying he would not duel someone with such a sense of humor.

Marigny hated America and the Americans. To him, they represented Protestant Anglo Saxon culture and values. A Francophile in every way, they were anathema to him. So when he started selling plots of his father's plantation, he would only sell to French Creoles, both white and black, and those in between. This demographic would continue for some time, but demography, especially in financially booming cities, as the NOLA of the early 1800s was, is a highly evolving thing.

Like the Irish Channel uptown, Marigny and Bywater became a poor neighborhood during the mass European immigration of the mid 1800s. However, like its sister neighborhood a few miles upriver, it didn't take long for a burgeoning middle class to arise. Most were German and Irish. But unlike the mix bag of Protestant and Catholic Germans who moved to the Irish Channel and Gretna, it seems that most of the Germans of the Bywater were Catholic. Some geographers, I believe, have recently labeled this area Little Saxony. Germans love their precision and mechanics, so wood and metal working became quite the hobby. The historical remnant we see today are the highly adorned shotguns that pepper these neighborhoods. The Germans of the area brought with them a love of beef and bread. Such love translated into the birth of the hamburger in New Orleans. None has argued that this burger presence then spurned the birth of the po-boy, but I will. It was at the corner of Touro and St. Claude that the Martin brothers served the first known po-boy, though variants probably already existed in the neighborhood. The offering? Lightly fried potatoes covered in roast beef gravy.

The Martin Brothers second restaurant, at which they are given credit for inventing the poor boy.

The Creole cottages we find are reminders of its Creole birth. You get an idea of this side-by-side architecture in this picture of one of the surviving institutions of this neighborhood, Hubig Pies.


Bywater is essentially an extension of Marigny. The namers of the neighborhood were not very creative. As the name suggests, it is by the water. In the 1920s, as we discussed previously in the essay on the 9th Ward, this area was transected by the Industrial Canal. The land below became the Lower 9th Ward. The land above became the Upper 9th Ward. For purposes of our map, Marigny and Bywater are confined by Esplanade Ave to the west, St. Claude Ave. to the north, the Industrial Canal to the east, and the Mississippi River to the south.

The only event of any importance that has ever occurred in Bywater or Marigny set in motion one of the great injustices of American history. In 1892, Homer Plessy got on a train in Bywater. He was 7/8 white and 1/8 black. But to the post-Reconstruction white supremacist government, headed by men like Thibodaux's E. D. White, who became the top dog on the Supreme Court, such people were legally black, and legally black meant legally you had no rights. Plessy sat in the white section of the train. When he wouldn't move, he was arrested. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where that famous precedent, separate but equal, was set.

Demographics stayed the same in these neighborhoods during the early 1900s. As New Orleans East, Metairie, and Chalmette readied themselves for the great exodus of middle class folk, Marigny and Bywater would begin losing their middle class. It became a poorer area, one riddled with crime. It wasn't until the 1990s that the area would surge back, this time with middle and upper class Bohemians from who knows where. With them, came the birth of a strong local music scene on Frenchman St. Why? Because no one loves New Orleans as much as someone born elsewhere, but then moves to New Orleans. And since such people make up 95% of these neighborhoods, they celebrated local culture by supporting local music.

These houses of music have become the neighborhood's worship halls. Organized religion is an afterthought to most here, and as a result, no new culture of value will come from these neighborhoods any time soon.


10. Mimi's in the Marigny

9. Adolfo's

8. Gene's PoBoys

7. Pizza Delicious

6. Bacchanal

5. Three Muses

4. Snug Harbor

3. Buffa's

2. Maurepas

1. New Orleans Cake Cafe Bakery