Seafood Charcuterie Is A Thing, Here's Where To Find It in Nola

Ian McNulty reports that seafood 'charcuterie' programs are now a budding trend in New Orleans.

Seafood charcuterie differs from ubiquitous raw bar offerings in that most of the seafood isn't served raw and the experience is "more about the transformative potential of techniques originally developed to preserve meat" now being used to preserve seafood.

So where can you find seafood charcuterie?

Palace Cafe [Photo: Brasted]

Palace Cafe: Rene Bajeux cooks "tuna rillettes... in olive oil, rather than pork in lard, and mixes in sundried tomato, pine nuts, even a blast of Sriracha hot sauce." Also home to killer shrimp and smoked redfish mousse, seafood sausage, and octopus headcheese.

Kingfish: The charcuterie at Kingfish could include garfish tasso, crawfish boudin, shrimp-flavored chips or even a "creamy catfish terrine edged with radish and frog rillettes packed into a miniature iron skillet under a cap of butter, with various pickles, mustards and marmalades as accompaniments."

Red Fish Grill: An "early adopter" of seafood charcuterie, this Quarter staple does everything from "snapper aquachile, a spicy, marinated, close-to-raw preparation" to fish jerky.

Smoked fish dip at Kitchen Table Cafe [Photo: Paul Broussard]

These spots also do fish dips, terrines and more.

Kenton's: smoked drum mousse

Primitivo: smoked mullet dip with field pies

Grand Isle: sardine dip

Bayou Wine Garden: alligator tasso

Domenica: octopus carpaccio

Elsewhere: Newly opened Arabi spot Kitchen Table Cafe does a smoked Gulf fish dip. Peche has smoked tuna dip. GW Fins does house cured salmon carpaccio.