Two New Restaurants Opened Blocks Apart in Olde Towne Slidell. Neither Is Replacing Anything.

If you have lived in Slidell for more than a few years, you know the Olde Towne restaurant story that usually gets told. A storefront changes hands. A new sign goes up. Six months later it changes hands again. That story is real, and the corner of Robert and First streets has lived it more than once.

This year, though, the more interesting story in Olde Towne is not about a corner that keeps changing hands. It is about two different restaurants that opened within a few months of each other on two different streets, backed by two very different kinds of confidence, and neither one took another restaurant's spot to do it. That is worth paying attention to if you live within walking distance, because it changes what a Tuesday night actually looks like around here.

The Corner That Kept Changing Hands

Start with the address that has the history. 300 Robert Street, at the corner of Robert and First, has cycled through more than one concept over the past several years. Diners who tried the location before knew it as Bistreaux 55, among other names, and not every version found its footing.

The version now running there is Audibert's Bistreaux, opened in late 2025 by Justin Audibert, a St. Tammany Parish native who grew up in Mandeville and spent weekends in Slidell with family. Audibert is not new to restaurants. He started at an Outback Steakhouse while in college and spent the next twenty years working his way through restaurant management, with his last stop as Director of Operations overseeing four Mexican-concept restaurants in Austin doing a combined fourteen million dollars a year. People who worked with him described his reputation simply: his M.O. was "Justin fixes things."

He came home to open his own place instead of fixing someone else's. Audibert's Bistreaux now runs a menu built around shrimp and grits, fried green tomatoes, and a crawfish and andouille queso, with a patio that hosts live music on weekends and a rotating lineup of theme nights, Whiskey and Steak Wednesdays, Ladies Night Thursdays, and a Monday plate of red beans and rice with andouille and pickled pork. The restaurant is closed Tuesdays.

That is a business built by someone who has watched a lot of restaurants succeed and fail elsewhere before deciding to bet on this specific corner in his own hometown.

A Different Kind of Bet, Two Blocks Away

Two blocks over, on Carey Street, a second restaurant opened around the same season without any of that turnover history behind it. Crave 985, which opened in the fall of 2025 at 2219 Carey Street, is not a first attempt at anything. It is the second location of Crave, an already-running restaurant in Meraux, over in St. Bernard Parish, that built a following on a menu with no fixed lane, swinging from Thai-style pork shanks to a bacon and blue cheese burger to a meatloaf special on any given week.

The Slidell location carries that same instinct into Olde Towne. The menu leans on bayou spring rolls, crawfish etouffee-topped cornbread, and a signature dish called the Crabcakes Rex, alongside a Fisherman's Grill of redfish, mahi, or salmon and a set of wok-fried noodle dishes that would be out of place on most other Olde Towne menus. It is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Sunday and Monday.

Where Audibert's is a first-time owner betting everything on one dining room he built from scratch, Crave 985 is an established operator extending a proven concept into a new zip code. Those are two different kinds of confidence, and they landed in the same six blocks in the same season.

Here is the side-by-side, for anyone deciding where to go on a given night:

What Was Already Here

Neither restaurant opened into an empty district. Olde Towne Slidell already had a working roster of places within a short walk of both new arrivals, and that existing density is a big part of why two new openings register as addition rather than disruption.

Within a few blocks of Crave 985 alone, the neighborhood already had KY's Olde Towne Bicycle Shop Seafood, the Olde Towne Hatchet House, the Olde Towne Pizza Company, and the Victorian Tea Room. Closer to Audibert's, longtime spots like Palmettos on the Bayou, Gallagher's on Front, Times Grill, Creole Bagelry and Cafe, Habenero's, and Peck's Seafood Restaurant round out the walk. Southside Cafe, serving New Orleans neighborhood cooking, has been a fixture in its own right.

That is not a district with one restaurant per block. It is a district with several restaurants stacked into a handful of blocks, which is exactly the kind of density where a new opening either has to steal customers from an existing spot or find a gap those spots were not filling. Crave 985's Asian-Cajun swing and Audibert's brunch-and-cocktail bistro format both read as gaps, not overlaps, with what was already on the street.

Why Two Openings Beat One

A single new restaurant opening in a historic district does not tell you much. Restaurants open and close constantly, and one data point is just a data point. Two restaurants opening in the same few months, on different streets, backed by different kinds of operators, is a pattern.

One operator was a first-timer who spent two decades learning the business elsewhere before finally opening a restaurant of his own in his home parish. The other was an already-successful operator expanding a working formula into new territory. Neither of those decisions gets made lightly, and neither one depends on the other restaurant's presence to make sense. When two independent bets like that land in the same footprint in the same season, it says more about the footprint than about either restaurant individually.

For someone who already lives in Slidell, that translates into something practical. Olde Towne is not thinning out. It is filling in. The choice on a weeknight now runs from a seafood plate at KY's to wok-fried noodles at Crave 985 to a bourbon cocktail on the patio at Audibert's, all within the same few blocks, without picking sides between what used to be there and what just arrived.

The Corridor in Practice

Foot traffic in Olde Towne already has a calendar built around it. White Linen and Lagniappe, the annual August evening of art, antique shopping, and live music along the same stretch of storefronts, drew its usual crowd again this year, giving both new restaurants their first real taste of a big Olde Towne night out. The next marker on the calendar is the Olde Towne Slidell Christmas Market, set for Saturday, November 28, at 1952 First Street, which will put the corridor's newest additions in front of holiday shoppers for the first time.

Between now and then, the practical version of this story is simple. If you have not made it to Crave 985 or Audibert's Bistreaux yet, both are close enough to the rest of Olde Towne to add to a night out rather than replace one. The corner that used to worry regulars with its turnover has a new tenant with two decades of restaurant experience behind him. And two blocks over, a proven concept from across the lake decided Slidell was worth a second location.

That is not a neighborhood losing its restaurants. It is one adding to them.

Patricia Conaghan lives and works across the Northshore, and keeps an eye on the small changes, a new restaurant, a shifted event calendar, that tell you more about a place than a listing ever will. If Olde Towne Slidell or another corner of the Northshore is on your radar for reasons beyond dinner, Patricia Conaghan is glad to talk through what you are seeing. Let's talk about your next move.