An Oak-Lined Esplanade Brunch Under the Pecan Tree

Faubourg St. John sits where Esplanade Avenue runs toward City Park under live oaks, a residential stretch of raised houses, small parks, and neighbors who walk to dinner. It is not the Quarter’s public square and it is not Magazine Street’s shop corridor. It is a quieter New Orleans of professionals, couples, and people who prefer a reserved table to a ticketed show. Café Degas has occupied 3127 Esplanade Avenue since 1986, close enough to the Degas House that the name still means something. Edgar Degas lived farther down this same avenue during his months in the city. The restaurant took that neighborly fact and built a French bistro that has outlasted fashion.

Jacques Soulas, a painter from Paris, and Jerry Edgar, his partner from Flint, Michigan, opened in a room the size of a former barbershop. Forty years later the dining room is still intimate, still mostly open to the air when the weather allows, and still organized around a pecan tree growing through the space. That tree is not a gimmick. It is the architecture of the morning. Light comes through leaves. Conversation stays at the table. Service has the courtesy of a house that expects to see you again. Voted among the city’s most romantic restaurants year after year, Café Degas is built for two people who want comfort without spectacle—the traditional comfort of being received, seated, and fed with care.

Weekend brunch runs Saturday and Sunday from half past ten until three. Reservations matter. Dress is smart casual. The room fills with locals from the bayou side of Mid-City and with visitors who already know that the city’s French cooking did not begin and end in a courtyard on Royal Street. Executive chef Gaetan Croisier keeps the board in the language of a serious bistro: onion soup under melted Swiss, escargots in garlic butter, mussels with fennel and frites, then the morning plates that earn the Diamond.

Order the famous gratinée d’oignon if you want the house’s first sentence. Escargots à la Bourguignonne and the pâté board set a proper table. For the main plate, the crab crepe with wild mushrooms, asparagus, and hollandaise is the luxurious order. Grillades and organic stone-ground grits bring Louisiana into the French room without turning the meal into costume. The shrimp omelette with wild mushrooms and apple-smoked bacon, classic eggs Benedict, hanger steak and eggs, and the Belgian waffle with white chocolate praline butter cover the rest of a well-made brunch. A three-course brunch offering appears in season; the better Diamond use of the room is still choosing plate by plate.

You come here instead of a closed Jackson Square breakfast because the cooking is finished, the setting is singular, and the ownership never left the neighborhood. The amenity is the tree, the oaks outside, and a staff that still treats Sunday as a meal. Compared with a hotel buffet or a Quarter line, Café Degas gives you time, shade, and a kitchen that has practiced the same hospitality since the mid-1980s.

The graceful limitations belong in the same account. Brunch is a weekend service, not a dawn-to-afternoon café. The room is compact and can grow lively when full. Weather decides how open the dining room feels. Parking on Esplanade requires patience. The owners also run Le Ponce, a small French sandwich shop and bakery around the corner; that is a local companion, not a national chain, and this Diamond is awarded to the Esplanade bistro itself.

Citywide Spotlight names Café Degas a Breakfast and Brunch Diamond because Stanley’s closing left a hole where luxury and place used to meet, and this room still holds both. Comfort here is traditional: a reserved table, a pecan tree overhead, French cooking with Louisiana product, and a welcome that has lasted forty years.