The Greatest Restaurant For People Watching Is In New Orleans, According To David Chang

Momofuku founder and chef David Chang has a lot of thoughts when it comes to finding good restaurants — and one of his ideas for finding a great place to eat in a new city is to find a place that both tourists and locals love. One example that fits that bill is famed New Orleans restaurant Galatoire's, in the city's French Quarter — and Chang has a unique take on why it's so special.

On his podcast "The Dave Chang Show," Chang declared the French-Creole restaurant to be the "greatest people watching restaurant." His reason for saying this isn't so much because of the crowd that the 120-year-old restaurant draws — rather, it's due to the design of the dining room. Galatoire's dining room is surrounded by mirrors on its green-tiled walls, allowing you to peek at guests easily. If someone has their back to you and you want to spy on them, no problem: Just look in the mirror. The restaurant's lighting — not too bright, but not too dim — also helps on this front. Chang says it's something he can't do in his own restaurants "because maybe we're just not that cool," but it may also help that Galatoire's is a pretty spacious restaurant, with room for close to 200 guests. Chang's East Village Momofuku location, by comparison, has a much smaller capacity (around 70), with a longer, narrower room that might not allow the same kind of mirror set-up.

Despite his effusive praise of Galatoire's (or at least, its mirrors and lighting), David Chang hasn't always been a fan of the restaurant's approach to food. Open since 1905, Galatoire's firmly sticks to tradition when it comes to its Creole cuisine, sticking to classics and not really changing its menu, while even enforcing strict fine dining rules like a dress code of collared shirts, pants, and dinner jackets for male diners. In an episode of his Netflix series "Ugly Delicious" focusing on seafood in Houston and New Orleans, Chang takes issue with restaurants that stick too firmly to tradition. (His go-to example is the tendency to boil crawfish with its seasonings in New Orleans food culture, which he considers inferior to a Vietnamese-influenced approach in Houston, in which the crawfish is doused in spiced butter after being boiled.)

While the criticism isn't explicitly targeted at Galatoire's, the restaurant is featured prominently in the episode (alongside just two other New Orleans establishments), and given Galatoire's status as a steward of tradition, there's a clear connection to Chang's words. In any case, some five years later in an interview that took place in Galatoire's itself, Chang admitted that he was perhaps ignorant to the value of food traditions. In any case, Chang has also acknowledged that he loved Galatoire's, even while filming, so any criticism was obviously not too serious for him.