New Orleans takes its food as seriously as its music, and the Food and Wine stage at the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture proved it. Crescent City natives Big Freedia, Tokyo Vanity, and Britni Ricard, who all tout their passed down skills in the kitchen, sat down with senior director of editorial Victoria Uwumarogie for a conversation billed as On the Menu: New Orleans, the Most Delicious City On Earth, and what unfolded was less a Q&A and more a lively defense of a culture that can’t be replicated anywhere else. They shared their must-visit places for charbroiled oysters, beignets and more, while also speaking fondly, and in a protective way, about the New Orleans food scene. 

Britni Ricard, founder of Coda Skin, set the tone early, describing the city’s food not as a single cuisine but as a living mixture of everyone who built it. “New Orleans in itself is one big gumbo pot filled with so many different ethnicities, so many different cultures. And when you put all that together, especially with us, we created the Cajun. We created that spice, that feel,” she said.

Tokyo Vanity took that same idea and rooted it in family. “When I think of food, I think of family. We always know that our family’s going to get together and throw a party for something, and it’s going to be the food that you’ve been craving all year,” she said. It’s why, she added, she never had a Longhorn or another national chain growing up. “New Orleans is a place where we eat at home, and we eat at so many New Orleans-owned restaurants.”

That pride turned sharp when the conversation moved to imitators. Freedia did not hold back on out-of-town spots slapping New Orleans on their name without the roots to back it up. “A lot of times the people don’t be from New Orleans. And so when you go there and you try this and you think you about to get some New Orleans soul food or something inspired by New Orleans, it be a flop,” they said. Tokyo Vanity put the blame on the internet. “It got you feeling like long as you can make it look like it, it don’t have to taste like it. And that’s the problem.” 

Freedia went further on the point of authenticity in general, insisting the city cannot be copied. “Ain’t nothing like a New Orleans po’ boy, honey. I go all around the world and when I get back home, this the one place that I know I can get a real po’ boy,” they said.

Ricard carried that same frustration into her own experience of leaving the city. After moving to Georgia, she found herself disappointed more than once by places claiming New Orleans or Louisiana cuisine. “This ain’t New Orleans. This is not what I signed up for,” she said. “You have to get that only in New Orleans. They can’t bring it. They can’t replicate it. They can’t make it anywhere else. It got to be here. It got to be home for us.”

Tokyo closed with a piece of advice for anyone visiting the city looking for the best of the real thing, not a pseudo version. “If it look like it’s not in business anymore, if it look like it is falling down, if it was very hard to find, I promise you that’s where you want to be eating at,” she said as the crowd laughed. “I promise you, nobody live in that house. It’s a restaurant that’s been in business for 30 years.”

Asked what New Orleans food means to her personally, Britni Ricard gave the line that tied the whole conversation together. “New Orleans food, it means home. Me traveling or moving, coming back home and being able to get that cuisine, being able to get that flavor, being able to get that Cajun, it means that I’m home. It feels safe. It feels fun. It feels lively. It feels like Mardi Gras. It feels like Bourbon Street. It feels like all of that.”