Image courtesy of Mayflower Café.
Mayflower Café in Jackson, MS is the oldest restaurant on the 2025 New York Times list of the 50 best restaurants in the United States.
The votes are in! Last month, The New York Times announced its annual list of “50 Best Places to Eat in America Right Now”—an endeavor that enlists fourteen reporters and editors to put down more than 200 meals in thirty-three U.S. states in search of institutions offering “delicious food and mastery of craft, but also a generosity of spirit and a singular point of view.” Our region is frequently represented (hard to overlook the big-hearted, big-bellied South), and this year is no different. In New Orleans, the Times’s reviewers selected two restaurants, one old with new blood and one new with old tastes.
Emeril’s, a thirty-five-year-old institution in New Orleans, met the Times’s expectations of legacy even as it impressively pivots under the leadership of the younger Lagasse, with a new tasting menu to boot. Then, out in Algiers, one finds Melissa Martin’s newest endeavor, the hidden, historic oasis that is Saint Claire—which also made the list with its rustic take on South Louisiana classics, which true to Martin’s oeuvre, are local to the bone.
[Read our article about the Mayflower Café from when it first re-opened, here.]
The oldest restaurant on the list can be found due north, in Jackson, Mississippi—where Hunter Evans’s sleek takeover of the ninety-year-old Mayflower Café continues to be the talk of the town. Crucially, the comeback sauce has stayed on the menu, but now you can use the restroom without climbing up the outdoor stairs. As reviewer Brett Anderson put it, “The old downtown seafood house is once again a great one.” Read the full article at nytimes.com.
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