Book excerpt: A cuisine lover’s history of New Orleans—from the Creole craze to rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina—from one of the city’s best-known food critics. Tom Fitzmorris covers the New Orleans food scene like powdered sugar covers a beignet. For more than forty years he’s written a weekly restaurant review, but he’s best known for his long-running radio talk show devoted to New Orleans restaurants and cooking. In Tom Fitzmorris’s Hungry Town, Fitzmorris movingly describes the disappearance of New Orleans’s food culture in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—and its triumphant comeback, an essential element in the city’s recovery. He leads up to the disaster with a history of New Orleans dining prior, including the opening of restaurants by big-name chefs like Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Fitzmorris’s coverage of the heroic return of his beloved city’s chefs after Katrina highlights the importance of local cooking traditions to a community. The book also includes some of the author’s favorite local recipes and numerous sidebars informed by his long career writing about the Big Easy. “New Orleanians are passionate about a lot of things, especially food! Nobody understands this better than Tom Fitzmorris. In Hungry Town, Tom gives readers insight into this amazing and one-of-a-kind city, and shows how food and the restaurant industry helped the city to survive and thrive after Katrina.” —Emeril Lagasse, chef, restaurateur, and TV host