dining amidst a packed dining room with photos of the space completely submerged post-katrina hung as a reminder of the crescent city’s resilience, parkway bakery & tavern is every bit the community icon as willie mae’s scotch house, and then some, the restaurant open and closed intermittently at 538 hagan avenue ever since 1911, though the classic po-boy was not created until the railway strike of 1929.
earning both local and international acclaim over the decades, their overstuffed sandwiches on toasted rolls the photographic definition of what people envision when thinking of new orleans’ most famous dish, it was mere minutes after noon that the counter was approached as part of a line that moves quickly, the ordering process simple with a window near soda dispensers around the corner where order after order is called out.
harkening the days when every new orleans neighborhood had its own corner bakery, this one of german ancestry but no longer making its own bread and instead sourcing leidenheimer’s baking company like so many others, current owner jay nix still insists on doing things the right way, wild-caught gulfshrimpand fish breaded in-house daily with roast beef and gravy all made inside parkway’s kitchen from an old family recipe.
priced affordably enough to attract some 1,000 patrons on a good day, the “surf n’ turf” withshrimpand debris a sloppy smile-inducer when fully-dressed in lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and hot sauce, other options include hot links, oysters or seasonal selections made by nix’s nephew justin kennedy, the desserts also made on-site with the banana pudding creamy if not particularly innovative while the steaming hot slab of bread pudding is chock-full-of raisins in a pool of boozy crème anglaise.