Katie's Restaurant and Bar, New Orleans

Featured on the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Katie’s Restaurant & Bar’s head chef and native New Orleanian Scot Craig celebrates traditional and modern creole dishes at the nearly 30-year-old establishment. Cochon de lait plays a key role in the cuisine, and for good reason: Chef Craig spends hours rubbing down the pork with dry-spice rub, reading it pig-themed nursery rhymes, and then smoking it to a luscious finish in the small smoker behind the restaurant. You’ll find the tender pork atop a Brooklyn-style stone-baked pizza, which was Lauded by Best of New Orleans as “hard to resist.” It also dons Tabasco mayo in the restaurant's barge-sized po' boys, and weekends finds the meat sitting daintily atop a poached egg and English muffin drenched in hollandaise.