Here’s the latest on St. Roch Market as New Orleans food hall vendors continue to change

As a girl growing up in Honduras and later in Chalmette, Aritza Garcia was the one in the kitchen watching her relatives cook and pleading to have a part in the production. Now she’s doing the cooking, with a lot of family help, at her own first venture in the food business at St. Roch Market.

Aritza’s Kitchen serves Cuban food, to the tune of pressed Cuban sandwiches and plates of ropa veija and yucca with chicharrón. It’s the newest vendor at the food hall on St. Claude Avenue and the latest change in the offerings here since new management took over in the summer. Two vendors have left recently — the French Stall and Everything Spice.

Aritza’s Kitchen is all about the Cuban flavors Garcia knows from her stepfather’s side of her blended family.

“We have a lot of Honduran restaurants now, but not so many from the Caribbean and especially Cuban,” Garcia said. "I saw an opportunity to do this and share what I love." 

On the menu

The Cuban sandwich is sure to be the entry point to her menu for many.

This one is made on bread from John Gendusa Bakery, which does approximate traditional Cuban bread after its time on the sandwich press. There’s a chewy texture and a butter-crisp shell around the filling of roast pork and ham, Swiss cheese and the crucial sour edge of mustard and pickles.

Ropa veija (“old clothes”) is a plate of comfort food incarnate, with strands of beef cooked down to a juicy tangle with peppers and olives, served with a meaty version of rice and black beans with blossoms of crispy fried tostones (green plantains) on the side.

There are puffy, fried beef empanadas and homey desserts, like flan and tres leches cake.

State of the hall

These are familiar flavors of home for Garcia, though she is new to the restaurant business. That’s why she’s at St. Roch Market, where food hall management handles many of the operational and business functions (from dish washing to licensing) and vendors can focus on the food.

Some vendors here now have previously left to open their own restaurants, but returned to the food hall model. For Garcia, it’s a way to learn the business.

“People like her are the reason I wanted to take on St. Roch Market,” said food hall operator Kevin Pedeaux.

St. Roch Market has a long history as a public market, where for many years neighbors bought their daily groceries. It became a single-vendor seafood market in the years before Hurricane Katrina, and after it sat empty until the city redeveloped it and put the property up for lease. It opened as today’s modern food hall in 2015.

But over the summer, the food hall’s then-operator was preparing to shut it down, facing dwindling business and high turnover among vendors.

Pedeaux has run an outpost of his CR Coffee Shop at the market since 2015 and this year he stepped in to take over the lease as its new operator.

Since then, he’s received much praise from people grateful for the effort, but he says the future of the food hall is still highly uncertain as it contends with the ups and downs of business volume.

“I’d say it’s precarious,” he said. “If people value this kind of place, they have to use it. Hopefully, we’re giving people more reasons to do that.”

Arrivals, departures

Aritza’s Kitchen is the fifth new vendor to join St. Roch since the management change.

The others are Genevieve’s for po-boys, gumbo and raw oysters; Nuccio’s for muffulettas and meatball subs; Fried & True for fried chicken, biscuits and breakfast dishes; and Slow & Pho, for Vietnamese dishes with a modern twists, including slow-and-low barbecue. Those last two are run by vendors who had previously been at St. Roch Market early on and returned after Pedeaux took over.

On the other side of the ledger, though, the hall has recently lost two vendors — the French Stall, which opened here in 2022 with savory and sweet crêpes and French style king cakes in season; and Everything Spice for Indian food, which started just a few months prior in the summertime. Everything Spice continues its schedule of pop-ups around the city.

The other vendors are Lin Poke and Sushi, which spins raw fish into its namesake items, handrolls and a “shushirito”; Laksa NOLA, for dishes from Burma and Malaysia; Dolma for Egyptian style Middle Eastern dishes; CR Coffee Shop for coffee drinks and pastry; and the food hall’s bar, called the Mayhaw.

Between the arrivals and departures, there is now one stand open in the food hall.

2831 St. Claude Ave.

Open daily, hours vary by vendor

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