In our seafood Friday feature, News With a Twist photojournalist Ed Matthews took us to Bucktown for good eats at New Orleans Food and Spirits.

Owner Mark Bergeron says, “We’re just the casual side of New Orleans cooking. We’ve been open 17 years at this location. Fridays during Lent it’s madness, but it’s great. It’s a great time to highlight the restaurant during the seafood season. Some of the exciting dishes I’m proud of is–let’s start with the seafood platter. We use fresh shrimp, and crabs. We have a taste of Louisiana we have stuffed shrimp, shrimp pasta and fried shrimp all on one plate. The stuffed fish that we talked about earlier, that’s really good. We have the daily lunch specials like smothered rabbit and paneed chicken on Wednesday, and homemade shrimp stew on Tuesday. Today we have chicken and sausage gumbo that we do periodically.”

According to one customer, “The food is consistently good. There’s never anything that I’ve ever ordered that I didn’t like and the portions are very generous.” Another customer chimes in, “Comes for the Oysters and the popular Voo Doo rolls.”

According to Bergeron, “The Voo Doo rolls are a crawfish pie wrapped in an Asian rice paper. It kind of evolved, as I married this beautiful Asian lady and we were doing egg rolls at the house one day ,and I decided to put the crawfish pie stuffing in there, and the rest is history. On any given day we have 5 different types of fresh fish. You can get po-boy, you can get a homemade hamburger, everything in the kitchen is homemade.”

Bergeron says, “The biggest compliment is the repeat business. There are a lot of choices out there, and we have some folks that come in 3-4 times a week.”

News Orleans Food and Spirits has 3 locations: Bucktown, Covington, and Gretna