Louisiana food, history, and local flavor.
Louisiana Eats follows Louisiana food from fields, docks, restaurants, family kitchens, and festival grounds. Its episodes connect recipes and ingredients to local history, economic pressure, Latin American influence, carnival rituals, and the people keeping regional traditions alive.
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Louisiana Eats is a food-and-culture program with Louisiana as its compass. It begins with appetite, then follows that appetite into history, labor, family, weather, ritual, and place. The show regularly starts from a recognizable dish or ingredient and widens the frame. Pecans become a story about a Natchitoches family business. Seafood becomes a question of local sourcing, imports, climate pressure, and the people trying to keep Louisiana fishermen visible. Corn tortillas, Mexican seafood, Salvadoran breads, and pastries become part of the Crescent City's broader food identity. The program is especially strong when it treats tradition as something active. St. Joseph's Day altars are not museum pieces here; they are meals, family obligations, fancy dress histories, and neighborhood memory. Mardi Gras is not just spectacle. It is king cake loyalties, babka experiments, parade-route food, and the small logistics that make carnival taste like carnival. The show also likes a good seasonal turn. Cooler weather brings Cajun Prairie festivals and night markets, while Halloween opens the door to vampire-themed restaurants, haunted breweries, and French Quarter lore. Short segments can feel like a local visit. Longer conversations give business owners, authors, growers, and cooks space to explain how their work came together. Poppy Tooker's recurring presence gives the series a steady Louisiana point of view without turning the episodes into personality-first talk. The emphasis stays on foodways. There is warmth, but also attention to hardship: the Great Depression, Hurricane Katrina, struggling industries, and changing markets appear as part of the culinary record. That makes the show useful as well as charming. It suits listeners who want more than restaurant recommendations. It is for people interested in why dishes endure, who grows or catches the ingredients, and how celebrations keep renewing themselves. Louisiana Eats makes regional food feel lived-in, practical, and full of stories still being told.
Made for: For listeners drawn to Louisiana cuisine, New Orleans culture, food history, regional festivals, growers, cooks, and small food businesses. It also fits travelers and home cooks who like stories behind ingredients as much as recipes.
What sets it apart: The show ties Louisiana food to the people and places that produce it, from docks and farms to markets, altars, parades, and haunted French Quarter buildings. Its range reaches beyond familiar Cajun and Creole shorthand into Latin American food, backyard food, seafood economics, and living ritual.
Louisiana Eats! is a radio show for people who cook and people who love to eat well—all with a Louisiana point of view and Poppy’s distinctive Louisiana voice. In each program listeners join Poppy as she meets people who produce, cook, and eat the foods we enjoy and treasure — exploring kitchens and stores, farms and waterways where favorite foods are produced and prepared. And because Louisianans love all kinds of food, Poppy won’t limit herself to shrimp creole and hot sauce!
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
New Orleans food history through stretched meals and help for neighbours during the Great Depression.
Poppy Tooker's Louisiana Eats looks at how New Orleanians managed food scarcity during the Great Depression. William Warrington's offer of food and lodging at the LaLaurie Mansion sits alongside Anne Byrne's account of mayonnaise as a high-calorie staple.
Bakers, chefs and founders talking shop with Kerry Diamond
Solo-narrated recipe builds and viral food-and-wellness trend briefings in under five minutes.
Food talk with grill marks and local flavor.
Long food conversations, with a reporter's follow-up question
This episode of Louisiana Eats highlights a Cajun festival and the Nola Night Market, featuring authentic Asian street food and live music.
This episode of Louisiana Eats features stories about haunted New Orleans locales, including a vampire-themed business and a brewery in a former funeral home.
Poppy Tooker introduces a special Halloween episode of Louisiana Eats, featuring stories of hauntings and paranormal activity in New Orleans, including a conversation with Chef Greg Piccolo.
This episode explores the history and mythology of absinthe, including its prohibition and modern revival, through interviews with an author and a cocktail historian.
["Louisiana Eats follows the LaLaurie Mansion at 1140 Royal Street beyond its haunted-house reputation and into William Warrington's Depression-era charity work in New Orleans.", "Lance Zoll says Warrington's house fed about 200 meals a day, housed up to 250 people in winter, and helped about a million people over 17 years.", "The episode cites 10,000 unemployed workers in 1930, cotton prices dropping 80% by 1932, and a New Orleans relief fund that ran out after $750,000 was raised in 1931.", "Anne Byrne explains why mayonnaise replaced scarce eggs in cakes and casseroles, and Nicole Doregnac recalls a Depression-era rule of waste not, want not with potatoes, chicken scraps, and saved containers."]
This episode of Louisiana Eats celebrates locally grown and caught ingredients in Louisiana, featuring interviews with a pecan company owner and a dock-to-plate seafood market.
This episode of Louisiana Eats explores Latin American cuisine in New Orleans through interviews with chefs Ana Castro, Carlos and Will Avalar, and Carlos Sanchez.
Louisiana Eats host Poppy Tooker visits Tony Marino's annual St.
Louisiana Eats host Poppy Tooker interviews Tamar Haspel about firsthand food, a term for food obtained through gardening, fishing, hunting, foraging, or beekeeping.
Louisiana Eats: Going To The Mardi Gras examines New Orleans Carnival through king cakes, restaurants, parades, and childhood memories.
Poppy Tooker examines kitchen organization through Kay Morrison’s New Orleans company, The Occasional Wife, Jason Cummings’s silver and heirloom assessments, and Lydia Blackmore’s work at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
Louisiana Eats visits Middendorf's, Pascal's Manale, and Arnaud's as ownership changes test century-old restaurant traditions.
Chris Hanna links the Jewel of the South to Joseph Santini’s 1850s cocktail history and the Brandy Crusta.