New orleans food and spirits menu pdf5/16/2023 ![]() Irene cooked at Fausto’s, observing their growing business and decided to create a little place of her own in her beloved French Quarter, but far from the maddening crowds – who would eventually find their way to the little arched doorway at the entrance to Irene’s on St. In the late eighties, Irene’s brother, Fausto, along with her younger brother, Roland, opened Fausto’s on Veterans Boulevard, which continues to be a very popular eatery today. The family would start each establishment together one would manage, several would cook, the others would assume certain responsibilities. Instead of pursing his trade as a translator, Irene’s father, joined by her mother, opened a series of restaurants. ![]() The French Quarter was so incredible then,” she said. “I expected it to be so different, to be ‘American’ but it was very European and everyone we met was Sicilian. When the family arrived in New Orleans, little Irene was aghast. My mother was a great cook, so they were both very welcome in this country.” “People with trades were in big demand,” she explained, “and my father was a translator who could speak seven languages. He booked passage and fifty years ago, Irene, her parents and siblings – two sisters and brother Fausto – arrived in New York by ship, then took the train to New Orleans where her father had a sponsor. ![]() That year, her father decided to take the family to America. But it wasn’t until 1956 that the government settled with the family and they received a stipend for loss of property. Irene’s father lost everything in World War II. She was the best cook I’ve ever been around. She had a huge dining table where the whole family gathered. She baked bread and prepared feasts for St. “She grew or raised everything she cooked, including lamb and rabbit. She lived in a house that was built into the side of a mountain with a spice garden and olive trees atop the hill and citrus orchards all around.” “I remember taking the train every summer to visit my grandmother in Noto, the little town where I was born,” she said. The family traditions that infuse the culinary style and ambience of Irene’s began long ago with her parents and grandparents and their forebears. How owner Irene DiPietro, a baby boomer from a little town in southern Sicily, came to dazzle the palates of the French Quarter’s jaded souls and create an enticing, enchanting setting that is both intimate and homey is certainly fodder for dining out fanatics.Ĭannelloni to die for irresistible duck lamb chops both delicate in flavor and hearty enough for any appetite roasted eggplant soup to make you cry, and that extraordinary, complimentary bruschetta everyone is served when they are seated! It’s all wonderful: aromatic, full of fresh textures and flavors, and exhibiting both the warmth of home-cooked goodness and the élan of haute cuisine. Since its opening sans fanfare in 1992, Irene’s has remained one of the hottest tickets in town, but because there aren’t as many people in town due to Katrina, the eatery is somewhat more accessible. At first, people spoke of it in whispers, as though it was just “our little secret” but then passers-by couldn’t miss the crowds waiting out in the street for tables, and certainly not the garlic and rosemary aromas wafting out into the street from the kitchen’s fans. Once the French Quarter’s underground secret, Irene’s Cuisine has emerged over the years as one of the area’s most desired and endearing dining spots.
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