About Top of New Orleans.

The same handful of marquee rooms with publicists get covered to exhaustion, while the neighborhood spots locals drive across town for on a Tuesday night stay buried under sponsored listings on the platforms most people search.

New Orleans gets covered like it's Bourbon Street and Café du Monde and not much else, which flattens a city that runs on Creole red gravy, Treme soul food, Mid-City po-boy shops, and a Vietnamese and Honduran food culture most visitor lists skip entirely. Locals know Parkway from Domilise's, know Willie Mae's from the tourist fried chicken, know Casamento's closes for the summer and that's tradition, not an inconvenience. We built Top of New Orleans because the marquee coverage keeps recommending the same dozen rooms while Gentilly, the West Bank, and New Orleans East keep cooking.

We track the Creole grand dames and the corner po-boy shops with equal seriousness, from Antoine's and Commander's Palace down to Parkway and Domilise's. That means gumbo and jambalaya alongside Dong Phuong's banh mi in the East, char-grilled oysters at Drago's in Metairie, boiled seafood houses, and the taquerias serving Kenner and the West Bank. We cover the French Quarter honestly, tourist traps named as such, and give Mid-City, Treme, the Marigny, Bywater, and Magazine Street the same weight as downtown's modern dining rooms. We track 61+ restaurants across the metro against the same methodology; the full method is laid out at How We Work.

Top of New Orleans is published by Top Rated Network LLC, an independent, veteran-owned Las Vegas media company that runs city dining guides on the same methodology across the country. The rankings and the writing are produced by this site’s own desk.

The site is small by design. No investors, no growth pressure, no quarterly board meeting that needs engagement numbers to keep climbing. The rankings answer to the data; the data answers to the city.

The methodology (Bayesian-weighted ratings, weekly recalculation) is the same one Top Rated Network uses across its other city guides. The editorial voice is local to New Orleans. The sites themselves are built and maintained by WebIgniter, our in-house web studio.