When I take a short road trip from New Orleans, I often head west to Acadiana, the land of Cajun butcher shops, to stock up on coolers to take home.
Lately, however, I’ve been looking east, particularly to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where towns known for their beaches and cozy beachfront restaurants have raised the bar for truly great food—restaurants worth planning a road trip for.
That’s what led me recently to Ocean Springs, the small, once quiet coastal village just across the Bay Bridge from Biloxi. Ocean Spring is still small, but now it’s booming with a lively nightlife among overhanging oaks and cute cottages.
One of these cottages is home to an exceptional restaurant that has become a regional culinary attraction. It’s called Vestige, and although the restaurant has been around for a decade, since the pandemic it has become a highly ambitious tasting menu restaurant. That means you’ll be served a multi-course meal selected by the chefs for an orchestrated experience. Vestige combines local seafood and produce with a nuanced influence of Japanese cuisine for dinners that are utterly unique, unmistakably upscale, and for those of us who like to measure time in unforgettable meals, well worth the trip.
Bay St. Louis is much closer to New Orleans and is better for a quick day trip. Good food is on the rise here too. There are lots of casual places down by the water and I like those beach bars where you can sit up high and have a drink overlooking the water.
But Bay St. Louis is also now home to a world-class modern seafood restaurant called Thorny Oyster, part of a boutique hotel called the Pearl. The dining room is stylish, the wine list is good, the seafood dishes show a chef’s hand, and the chilled seafood tower from the raw bar is a decadent centerpiece for sharing and maybe even as inspiration for the whole trip.
This is the part of summer when I measure time by each step we take toward fall. Coming home from a quick day trip with visions of a blue Gulf horizon and meals worth writing about now feels like a restful leap in the right direction.
