At his Treme restaurant Fritai, chef Charly Pierre draws a thread of unity through Creole flavor from his roots in Haiti to his adopted home of New Orleans.
This year, he’s bringing those flavors to Jazz Fest for the first time.
You’ll find the Fritai booth in Food Area 2 (next to the booth for pralines and crabmeat stuffed beignets).
Shrimp pikliz is a spicy, cool Haitian dish from food vendor Fritai at Jazz Fest. (Staff photo by Ian McNulty, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
The star dish is the shrimp pikliz ($12). This is a cool dish that is blazing-hot with chile pepper fire. It’s essentially a slaw surrounding sweet shrimp, with plantain chips drag through as your edible utensils. The heat is serious; it arrives with a delayed fuse and it builds.
There’s hot sauce provided at the counter. No one in their right mind needs to use it on the pikliz. You can also get an order of just the plantain chips ($6) for a crunchy snack.
Crabmeat macaroni au gratin is a hearty dish at from Haitian restaurant Fritai. (Staff photo by Ian McNulty, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
At the other end of the spectrum from this light, fiery dish is the Haitian crab macaroni au gratin ($12), a boat of hearty, heavy comfort food. It tastes like a mix of crabmeat au gratin and baked macaroni, something you’d find on a holiday table, with strands of crab deeply blended into a thick, buttery, creamy sauce. As with all things au gratin, the best bits here are the pieces scooped from the top and carrying a crispy edge.
Toasted corn ribs with roasted pepper sauce is a Jazz Fest dish from Haitian restaurant Fritai. (Staff photo by Ian McNulty, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
Does corn have ribs? Fritai’s festival menu has “toasted corn ribs” ($8) that are cut so that you nibble the kernels off a curving “bone” sliced from the cob. What you want to do first, though, is thoroughly run those ribs through the accompanying roasted red pepper sauce, which tastes very Creole.
That is on brand for Pierre and Fritai.
Chef Charly Pierre created Fritai as a food hall stand in 2016 and turned it into a restaurant in 2021, opening in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
The chef created Fritai in 2016 as a stand in the St. Roch Market food hall and turned it into a full-fledged restaurant in 2021. His menus combine the flavors of his Haitian heritage, learned from his first-generation immigrant parents, with his own vision as a chef coming up through the modern American culinary scene.
Many people around the country saw Pierre compete earlier this year on the Bravo show “Top Chef.” Alas, he was felled in that contest, but it’s great to see a rising local talent get a shot at Jazz Fest.
