Metairie's Table Is Changing: The New and Returning Restaurants Worth Your Weekend
May 28, 2026
May 28, 2026
The assumption has always been that serious restaurants open in New Orleans and Metairie gets the overflow. A second location here, a casual spinoff there, something for the suburbanites who don't want to cross the parish line on a school night. That story made sense for a long time. It doesn't anymore.
In the span of about eighteen months, Metairie has collected a cluster of restaurants that weren't built for it out of convenience. They were built for it on purpose. The chefs who opened them had credentials that would have gotten them a lease anywhere. They picked Veterans Memorial Boulevard. They picked Metairie Road. They picked a park pavilion on a lagoon. That choice is worth paying attention to.
Dr. Jones sits at 1325 Veterans Memorial Boulevard in a strip mall that most people have driven past without registering. Thirty-two seats. An open kitchen. No liquor license — you bring your own wine.
The chefs are David Rouse, who grew up in Mandeville, and Billy Jones, from Slidell. They trained at the Louisiana Culinary Institute, moved to Chicago together, worked Michelin-starred kitchens there, came home to New Orleans and cooked at Herbsaint, Cochon, and Restaurant August, then opened Blue Giant. At some point they both stepped away. When they came back, they leased the small space on Veterans, started catering out of it, and decided they liked being in Metairie. Dr. Jones opened late 2024.
The menu changes constantly, which is the point. Recent dishes have included shrimp scampi with lemongrass and lime leaf, steak au poivre finished in Singapore pepper sauce, and a chicken and andouille gumbo whose roux contains overnight-roasted tomatoes and okra, dried scallops, and djon djon, a Haitian black mushroom. None of these are tricks for their own sake. They're what happens when two people who spent years in serious kitchens cook exactly what interests them in a room the size of a large walk-in closet.
The BYOB format keeps prices genuinely accessible. Smaller dishes run $7 to $12; larger ones $15 to $22. Reservations are recommended because the room fills quickly and the chefs are not planning to expand it. The smallness is the concept.
Kenji Kazoku opened at 2929 Metairie Rd in April 2026, the third concept from the partnership of chef Matthew Nguyen and Malachi Dupre, a former NFL wide receiver who first encountered Nguyen's work at Yakuza House in Metairie. They had already launched Kenji Omakase in December 2023, expanded to Houston with Casa Kenji, and then came back to Old Metairie for a full buildout.
The menu centers on dry-aged Japanese fish, sashimi, nigiri, maki, grilled octopus, and wagyu beef cooked over Japanese Binchotan charcoal. The space at 2929 was built from scratch, not converted from something else. The fact that this team, with two successful concepts already running, chose Old Metairie for their third rather than the Warehouse District or Magazine Street, tells you something about where they think their audience lives.
Lafreniere Park at 3000 Downs Boulevard has a two-mile jogging loop, a lagoon, a bird sanctuary, and as of fall 2025, a food pavilion. The Pointe at Lafreniere is a covered, open-air structure built on a point of the park's lagoon, with four separate restaurant kitchens, a shared dining area, restrooms, and an outdoor stage. Jefferson Parish funded the construction at $3 million.
The four vendors fill it out in four different directions:
Willie Mendez's first permanent brick-and-mortar after years of event catering. This is the restaurant he had been building toward.
A Mexican restaurant from John Miquet, Mendez's partner, also opening its first fixed location here.
The grab-and-go version of a Cajun buffet that has run in Metairie for more than 50 years. Owner Amy Quinette kept the fried fish, potato salad, and most popular plate-lunch items; added daiquiris and compostable packaging for the park setting.
Chef-owner Shermond Esteen closed the original 7th Ward location and relaunched in the pavilion. Regulars who came for weekend brunch and homestyle Cajun comfort food followed the move to Metairie.
The pavilion runs during park hours, 6 a.m. to 9:45 p.m. daily. The practical shift: you can run the loop, watch the birds over the lagoon, and eat a Cajun plate lunch without getting back in the car. That combination didn't exist a year ago.
Crazy Johnnie's Steakhouse returned to Veterans Memorial Boulevard in spring 2025. The original closed years back, but its reputation held through pop-up steak sandwich events that drew long lines across Jefferson Parish. The new location follows the original template: steaks, crazy potatoes, New Orleans-style BBQ shrimp, and a garlicky filet mignon po-boy, now in a renovated former bar space on Vets.
Drago's, at its original Metairie location, still serves charbroiled oysters in garlic butter and herbs the way it has for decades. Impastato's, the Creole-Italian restaurant Joe Impastato has run since 1979, is still there. Fury's, family-owned and remodeled in 2023, still makes its sauces in-house and fries everything to order. These aren't background details. They're the baseline that makes the new arrivals look even more intentional by comparison. You don't open a 32-seat BYOB with a rotating menu next to Drago's unless you're confident the neighborhood can hold both.
The geography of a Metairie Saturday has changed in a specific way. Old Metairie Road now has a reason to linger after dinner. The Kenji Kazoku buildout at 2929 is a full evening; the residential streets around it fill the rest. Veterans Boulevard, which has always been the main corridor, now has Dr. Jones for a lunch worth planning, Crazy Johnnie's for the kind of steak night that needs no justification, and enough new options between them that the strip-mall-and-chain narrative about Veterans feels dated.
Lafreniere Park on a weekend morning is its own circuit now. The loop, the lagoon, four vendors covering barbecue, Mexican, Cajun comfort food, and pastries, all under one covered pavilion on the water. The park has been there for three decades. The reason to make a morning of it is new.
The through-line in all of this is the same: the people who built these restaurants had options, and they picked Metairie. Not as a compromise. As a destination.
Curious what the Metairie market looks like right now beyond the restaurant news? Patricia Conaghan knows this neighborhood well and is glad to talk through whatever's on your mind. Let's talk about your next move.
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