Ian McNulty: Check out these food and drink ideas for Louisiana road trips in 2024

Covering New Orleans restaurants is a job that has me constantly on the go, trying to keep up with all the changes and sharing the stories of what endures in this world for food.

But I also seek stories my food-loving readers will appreciate farther afield in Louisiana.

This has brought me across the Cajun prairie on the hunt for a butcher shop oddity, to the side of the bayou for Louisiana flavors with a view of large gators, to a colorful Acadiana oasis for food and beer, to another on the northshore that’s exploring new possibilities for Louisiana wine and even on the rails for a different kind of road trip altogether.

Gearing up now for another year, I’m rounding up some ideas from 2023 for food-inspired outings in different parts of the state.

Tour de Ponce (or boudin, or cracklin')

It was a conversation about haggis, the Scottish specialty, that inspired what we came to call Tour de Ponce.

Ponce is that Cajun butcher shop specialty of sausage-stuffed pig stomach. Its natural habitats are the Cajun butcher shops that seem to crop up in every town on the Acadiana map.

Together with a circle of fellow Louisiana food obsessives, we spent the better part of a day zooming around the country roads, mostly north of Interstate 10, and ended up with a harvest of different examples, later divvied up to people I thought would enjoy cooking them.

Cooking a ponce, I would learn, is quite an undertaking, if it’s done right, calling for that slow and low approach to bring the most from this creation.

But the quest also took us through the same stops that offer the instant gratification of boudin and cracklin’.

The framework was more defining than the particular item we were after. Touring the region with food in mind was the fun, and such an outing can be organized around any distinctive Louisiana product you’ll find in a region that takes such pride in it all. It's also rewarding to share the fruits of such a trip back home. So always, always have an ice chest ready.

Lafayette by train, then by foot

Here was the gist: take Amtrak’s Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Lafayette and back for a weekend jaunt exploring the Hub City’s food and music scene by foot.

Amtrak’s timetable set the schedule for a 36-hour outing, including travel time. The train was more than a way to get there; it was two-part bookend and integral to the adventure.

The train stops right in downtown Lafayette, which proved easily walkable for a Saturday to Sunday stay.

The crop of interesting and delicious new places to explore gave us plenty to do, see and eat for a laid-back itinerary, and the live music at night was a heartening display of Louisiana culture going strong.

There were curve balls and delays on this trip, and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

New wine from the northshore

Wild Bush Farm + Vineyard is the new name for a property that had long been known under previous ownership as Pontchartrain Vineyards.

Right now, Wild Bush is making wine that was transported from West Coast wine country and finished here. But this is just the first gulp of more to come.

In the near future, Wild Bush will produce wine from grapes grown on-site using newly released hybrid grapes bred for climates like ours. It’s part of the vision shared by new proprietors Monica Bourgeois and Neil Gernon to shake up the idea of what Louisiana wine can be.

As this develops, Wild Bush is, like its predecessor, a destination for wine-centric events like its ongoing music series Jazzin’ the Vines and for regulars tours and tastings.

Beer and much more by the bayou

Bayou Teche Brewing was one of the pioneers of the modern craft beer business in Louisiana, and it was distributed widely. Today, its beers are available only at the taproom itself, out by the farm fields and crawfish ponds just outside Arnaudville. But there’s much more here now than beer.

It has become a colorful oasis with wood-fired pizza and sushi, tiki drinks and wine, arcade games galore and live music. With all this on tap, Bayou Teche is a unique draw in Acadiana, attracting families, foodies and travelers alongside the beer nerds.

The shift is part of the family-run brand’s effort to reinvent itself in a changing landscape for beer.

“I’ve never been happier,” founder Karlos Knott told me. “Part of the reason you get into beer or any craft product is seeing the look on people’s faces when they try your stuff and they like it. You don’t get that when all your work is going into distribution. But we have that all the time now here.”

Supper by the swamp

Sometimes a road trip is not about the actual distance traveled but the distance you’ve gone from your routine at home.

That’s the case anytime I get down toward Lafitte, about 20 miles from my house in New Orleans.

One trip this summer was to check out the revive Restaurant des Familles, located just before the bridge to the island of Lafitte and close to the entrance of the Jean Lafitte National Park.

It was a return after successive disasters — first a fire in 2020 and then storm damage from Hurricane Ida the following year.

But here it was again, a restaurant that serves many roles for its community. One is as a destination for place-based flavor in a setting that becomes part of the experience, with windows looking over Bayou Familles and its wildlife (and often, as with the very large gators here, wildlife looking back at you).

Not all of us have hunting camps. A meal here feels like getting access to one, with a chef in the kitchen to boot.

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