With restaurants you feel like a regular in from your first visit, and elegant places to end a day of sightseeing, the Northshore of New Orleans, Louisiana, has many options, as writer Betsa Marsh shows us. 

Owner Liz Munson still serves when her soon-to-reopen Where Y’at diner is packed with locals and travelers to Louisiana’s Northshore.

How about an Oreo Explosion Waffle for breakfast, piled with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce? After just a few days eating my way through the Northshore of New Orleans, this seems like a perfectly sensible eye-opener.

Northshore has long been an escape hatch for New Orleanians who cross Lake Pontchartrain to their weekend and summer homes. Today, little towns such as Covington, Mandeville and Lacombe create their own Northshore culture. Louisianans come for the lower home prices and crime rates. Travelers come for the food.

Along the Northshore of New Orleans: Liz’s Where Y’At Diner

I went to Northshore searching out authentic cuisine, which is how I find myself at Liz’s place, on the main drag of Mandeville, ripping into an Oreo Explosion Waffle. The Diner experienced a fire in June of this year and is planning to open again in September. When I visited in the Spring, owner Liz Munson plopped down across the table and told me she never puts any stops on her chefs’ creativity—so someone’s Oreo dream is on the menu.

“I don’t micro-manage my people.”

Munson is a beacon of joy, from the tie-dyed T-shirts she designs, covered with giant hearts, to the artwork she commissions to cover her walls—inside and out. Her cinder-block building is a psychedelic landmark along Florida Street in this town of 12,000.

Her food is just as ebullient, with N’awlins Benedict, topped with fried green tomatoes and lump crabmeat, and biscuits with “debris” gravy, packed with roast beef bits. Some people can only rise and shine after savoring Who Dat, a light little blend of scrambled eggs with bacon, ham, sausage, mushrooms, onions, peppers, green onions, tomatoes, and cheese.

“I can’t take one thing off the menu,” Munson said, “without getting my fingers chopped off.”

Families spread out at Liz’s, with kids claiming one booth while the adults take the next. Neighbors pop in so often that the daily answer to “Where Y’at?” is often Liz’s.

Liz’s Where Y’At diner is just one of the dozens of great, quirky restaurants in the Northshore of New Orleans, and her friendly competitors can take you from brunch till nightcap.

Along the Northshore of New Orleans: Mattina Bella, Covington

It’s time to swing through the old screen door at Mattina Bella and pull up a chair at another local comfort spot in nearby Covington.

This sprawling brick storefront, in an open-floor plan that lets everyone take in the action, hops from breakfast through lunch. Businesspeople swing by early to fuel themselves for the day: the Iron Man egg-white omelet or maybe the Blue Crab Benedict, with sautéed jumbo crab, mushrooms and green onions atop those traditional eggs and English muffins. Later, friends and neighbors meet over pecan waffles and a second—or third—cup o’ joe.

Chef and co-owner of Del Porto Ristorante, Torre Solazzo, serves up a board of crispy flatbread layered with prosciutto, onions, arugula and pears, laced with balsamic reduction.

Hungry for more? Enjoy this recipe for Chicken and Sausage Gumbo from New Orleans.

Along the Northshore of New Orleans: Del Porto Ristorante, Covington

Even though we’re just a long causeway away from New Orleans, not all Northshore restaurants revel in Southern cooking. While you’ll certainly hear “Stars Fell on Alabama” in Del Porto, the chefs zero in on the house’s Italian specialties.

Chef David Solazzo is from New York and his wife, Chef Torre, is from New Orleans—and they met in Napa, California. They have three James Beard nominations to their credit, so they know what they’re doing in this little corner of Covington, a posh hamlet of 9,600 on a decided culinary upswing. Lunch might start with some crispy flatbread layered with prosciutto, onions, arugula and pears, laced with balsamic reduction. Then things move on to homemade mozzarella with tomato and pine nuts, ready for dipping. For the pescatarians among us, it’s crudo of redfish with orange segments.

Everything is delicate and precise, including the pistachio cake and vanilla bean panna cotta to round things out. So no one has to curl up for a nap, like most of us want to do after heavier Italian lunches.

Along the Northshore of New Orleans: Cypress Bar, Southern Hotel, Covington

Later, lunch has settled and it’s time for a little aperitif. Let’s pop into the Southern Hotel in Covington to nurse a cocktail.

This 1907 retreat was transformed into a boutique darling in 2014, taking on a chic new life. Friends love to sit and sip in the high-ceilinged lobby, or out on the little palmy patio.

In the evening, there’s something really cozy about the Cypress, with extravagant trompe l’oeil paintings of Old Covington ringing the giant walnut bar.

Your barkeep will be glad to stir up some Sage Advice, the house specialty of refreshing fruit to pique the appetite. It’s Tito’s vodka with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, fresh sage, a touch of hopped grapefruit bitters and a top-up of champagne. All you need now is a bit of time to chat over the day with friends and mull all the savory possibilities for dinner.

 Your barkeep at the Cypress Bar in the Southern Hotel will be glad to stir up some Sage Advice, the house specialty of refreshing fruit to pique the appetite. It’s Tito’s vodka-based fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, fresh sage, a touch of hopped grapefruit bitters and a top-up of champagne.

Along the Northshore of New Orleans: Oxlot 9, Covington

Did someone say dinner? Nothing could be easier than picking up your Sage Advice and ambling a few steps to the cozy Oxlot 9 Restaurant, tucked into the Southern Hotel.

Once I see how local the menu is, it’s clear why residents and travelers cross the 24-mile causeway from New Orleans to taste a bit of the Shore. Oxlot 9 is one of the perfect spots to get a sense of the Northshore region and its flavors. Everything is deeply local, from the frog legs that are brought in from the nearby Atchafalaya Basin, to the table where I’m sitting, which is crafted out of old timber lost in a local river and recovered a century later.

But can I have only beef at Oxlot 9? No, it’s just a name that reaches back to Covington’s founding, when ships pulled up to unload and drivers had to park their ox-drawn wagons in the city center. That became an ox lot, and that’s the bit of heritage Chef Jeffrey Hansell wanted to evoke for his fine dining spot.

Besides the meat, seafood here is always a good bet, even if my starter does have a bit of Yankee flare: East Coast scallops with roasted butternut squash purée, nutmeg, brown sugar and spiced pumpkin seeds. Other diners go 100% local, with rabbit, oysters, pork and beef, all from the region. And everything goes better with a little bit of house-made mustard pickles and bread. Hansell even crafts his own bacon and sausage.

Yet even with all these touches, Hansell said he’s “surprised someone’s going to drive from New Orleans to come here.” But Oxlot 9 pulls from NOLA, the Southshore of New Orleans and even Baton Rouge. And when epicures want to branch out? There are two dozen other restaurants within walking distance of the Southern Hotel.

And what would a classic Southern dinner be without pecan pie and Bourbon sauce? Check that. Just when I think I have this Southern thing figured out, Hansell gobsmacks me with the Campfire, starring cold-smoked vanilla bean ice cream. Hansell smokes the cream, sugar, and vanilla beans to make the ice cream—I imagine it’s like tasting winter clouds.

It’s just one more memory for my Northshore culinary scrapbook.

When You Go

The Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain, 45 minutes north of New Orleans, is made for golfing, swamp touring and shopping—not to mention some serious eating. Check it out at their website, LouisianaNorthshore.com.

— Story and photos by Betsa Marsh