The James Beard Foundation Awards recognize outstanding achievement within the food and wine industry. Considered one of the most coveted marks of distinction within the culinary community, Link Restaurant Group partners are honored to have been recognized for their culinary achievements. Link’s flagship restaurant Herbsaint earned him a James Beard award in 2007 for Best Chef South. The same year Cochon was nominated for Best New Restaurant; The James Beard Foundation also honored Link’s first cookbook– Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking from Donald Link’s Louisiana (Clarkson Potter) with their top award for Best American Cookbook. Link was also nominated by the James Beard Foundation for the prestigious award of Outstanding Chef in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Stephen Stryjewski, chef/partner of Cochon, Cochon Butcher and Pêche Seafood Grill was named Best Chef: South at the 2011 James Beard Foundation Awards. In 2014 Pêche Seafood Grill was honored with two coveted James Beard Foundation Awards Best New Restaurant and Chef Ryan Prewitt Best Chef: South.  In 2017, Chef de Cuisine Rebeca Wilcomb was named Best Chef: South for her stewardship of the Kitchen at Herbsaint.

New Orleans seafood cookery is, by and large, a minimalist discipline – flour, butter, lemon, fish – and you can be excused for not seeing Pêche as practicing it. The last time I had speckled trout at the James Beard Award-winning restaurant it was fried whole, glazed with chili aioli and showered with peanuts. The signature crawfish dish is a spicy capellini pasta. Got a taste for that other great Louisiana crustacean? Start with the shrimp toast, which is what you think it is, only topped with pickles. That’s just scratching the surface of Pêche’s menu, which drifts from transcendent steak tartare and bubbly cauliflower-fontina gratin to beer-battered fish sticks and baked drum served in hot cast iron with falafel-crisp spheres of rice calas. On paper, the kitchen’s repertoire reads like the crossbred mutt that it is. In practice, chef-partner Ryan Prewitt simply brings new hues to Louisiana’s minimalist tradition. The result is the perfect manifestation of this Link Restaurant Group property’s original mission: to create a local seafood restaurant that reflects how New Orleanians eat today. Be thankful it includes an oyster bar.

Times Picayune Top 10 List:  2014, 2015, 2017, 2018

Fish are beasts. Flounder resemble shrunken sea monsters, with their crooked lips and creepy migrating eyes. You can tell they hang in the murky shadows just by the color of their skin. It’s dark enough to show through miso chili butter. Redfish, speckled trout and red snapper are sleeker species but all still unmistakably animals, with tails, skeletons and spiky fins. That’s a representative sample from my scrapbook of Pêche Seafood Grill, where meals are lessons in piscine anatomy. Look up from your plate at any moment and you’ll find a room of diners taking to the food like Alaskan brown bears to spawning salmon. They’re tearing through whole gulf fish, grilled or roasted in the heat of a live hardwood fire. The fish, the flames, the bones everyone are pulling clean from their mouths: These are the visual signatures and culinary touchstones of this remarkable restaurant. Still, whole fish aren’t even the half of it. Pêche is the realization of a modest but still visionary vision: a traditional Louisiana seafood restaurant that owes little to any particular style of restaurant that has come before. Its chef and co-owner, Ryan Prewitt, is not prone to wild experiments. Whatever thought process goes into Peche’s food is concealed beneath a veneer of simplicity…

In the Warehouse District, Balise (refined Southern food, like Gulf shrimp pan roast, in a historic town house), chef Donald Link’s Herbsaint (for the duck-leg confit), and Peche Seafood Grill (ah, that smothered catfish) are all worth pacing yourself for.

This youngest sibling of Donald Link’s restaurant empire (which includes Herbsaint, Cochon and Cochon Butcher) is focused on gulf seafood of every stripe. Start with the stellar raw bar and end with a whole fish for the table.

This James Beard Award–winning restaurant is consistently a top contender for the best restaurant in town, with an exciting approach to seafood that preserves local cooking techniques. The smothered catfish and Louisiana shrimp roll are outstanding.

“Where have you been eating lately?” I get this question all the time. And luckily, it’s one of my favorites to answer, since I have the opportunity to try the most amazing restaurants around the country. So here’s a little update of where I’ve been recently. Pêche I stopped counting after 10: That’s how many whole fish I saw waiters carrying out to customers at Donald Link’s new restaurant. The whole-animal trend has now been embraced by pescatarians. Two friends and I shared a moist, flavorful grilled redfish with salsa verde. It could have served six!

Pêche celebrates a visceral approach to eating seafood, so expect whole fish delivered to the table, ready to be sliced up and eaten between tables of friends. The menu is deceptively simple, but the presentation, choice of ingredients, and dressings is what elevates the experience beyond the tourist traps of the French Quarter. It’s a Donald Link restaurant, so fans of Cochon wanting to ease off on the meat are in abundance, as are people keen to go beyond the usual shrimp and fish dishes that permeate this city.

Chefs Donald Link, Stephen Stryjewski and Ryan Prewitt are inspired by the cooking of South America, Spain, and the Gulf Coast at Pêche Seafood Grill. Focused on working with local fishermen and farmers who harvest sustainably, dishes are rustic and utterly moreish. In 2014, Pêche won a James Beard award for Best New Restaurant in America and their standards haven’t slipped. This place has celebrity draw too with the likes of Jennifer Lawrence booking tables. 

NOLA is all about the seafood, and here you’ll find some of the freshest in town.

Another instant hit from The Link Group restaurant empire, chef Ryan Prewitt culls the bounty of local seafood and transforms it into sophisticated Southern-inspired dishes, rightfully earning him a James Beard Foundation Award for best chef in the South. 

For spectacular seafood in the Big Easy, wander out of the bustling French Quarter to the Central Business District, home to Donald Link’s seafood-centric Pêche. Guests at the oyster bar have a prime view as busy shuckers prepare Gulf-sourced bivalves (from Dauphin Island and Grand Isle to name a few) served exclusively raw. After slurping the salty shells, advance to mains like a Louisiana Shrimp Roll or the whole catch of the day. Be sure to heed the servers’ advice and finish with the smooth and salty peanut pie from Link’s partner in crime, Pastry Chef Maggie Scales.

New Orleans has plenty of places doing great things with oysters, crawfish, and shrimp. But none are like the Warehouse District’s Peche, a restaurant specializing in rustic, live-fire cooking that takes its style cues from Uruguay and Spain as much as Louisiana’s coast and bayous. Local oysters are reliably briny, and snapper tartare with coconut and lime, served with slices of sweet potato and crisped rice, is soft and crunchy, creamy and sharp. Intensely flavored shrimp bisque is a can’t-miss dish, as is the fire-grilled whole fish of the day. Pêche is part of the Link Restaurant Group of chef-proprietor Donald Link, whose empire includes Herbsaint, Cochon, and Cochon Butcher.

The seafood at this bustling, casual eatery in the Warehouse District might be local, but the inspiration by chefs and partners Donald Link, Stephen Stryjewski, and Ryan Prewitt is global. Make a meal out of the hearty snacks and small plates, including the smoked tuna dip with house made saltines, crawfish and jalapeño capellini, and fried bread. Desserts (like the salted caramel cake) ensure your meal ends on a sweet note, too.

Louisiana native Donald Link grew up visiting family in Southern Alabama and taking trips to the Florida coast, so it’s fitting that Peche, his seafood-centric New Orleans restaurant, celebrates the flavors and foodways of the entire Gulf coast. Link’s Smoked Tuna Dip is reminiscent of the ones he enjoyed at Gulf Coast fish shacks throughout his childhood, but he adds extra Southern flair by gently smoking Gulf-caught tuna over pecan and oak woods in the restaurant’s smoker until just cooked through. The tuna is then shredded with forks to retain texture, and folded with Creole mustard, mayonnaise, sour cream and Cajun spices. The creamy, smoky dip is served with Saltines, the unofficial table cracker of NOLA seafood restaurants.

Pêche means “fishing” in French, but change the spelling to péché and it’s “sin.” In the case of the restaurant on Magazine Street opened earlier this year by chefs Ryan Prewitt, Stephen Stryjewski and Donald Link, the former is what’s intended, but you have to admit that both meanings are apt for a restaurant in New Orleans. Pêche was conceived as a seafood restaurant, but after the chefs spent time in Uruguay and Spain, they knew that a wood-burning grill had to be a feature as well. Factor in a raw bar and a serious drinks program and you get one of the most interesting restaurants to open in New Orleans in quite some time. It isn’t as though the place is immune to trends – there are small plates and bar food on the menu – but there aren’t a lot of other places doing whole fish on a wood-burning grill (redfish with salsa verde and American snapper with Meyer lemon on my last visit) and certainly none where the fish changes with such frequency that they print an insert daily. That insert also lists the oysters they have available and what they’re doing in the way of raw fish. There are always a few other items available on the raw side – a seafood salad, crab claws with chile and mint and a seafood platter, for example and highlights from the “snacks” menu include a smoked tuna dip served with saltines, hush puppies and fried bread with sea salt that’s completely addictive…. A few months ago I ran into chef Link while I was eating at Pêche. Link (and this is true of Stryjewski and Prewitt for that matter) is the kind of guy who lights up when he’s talking about food. What I remember most about that conversation was the way he described the Royal Red shrimp. He is fond of them, and justifiably so; they’re large, sweet-salty things that are cooked in a little butter but otherwise basically un-seasoned. They are the perfect example of what ingredient-driven cooking should be – not an excuse for a lack of technique, but the recognition that some things are best enjoyed simply.

This airy warehouse space is where Donald Link, who rose to prominence as chef-owner of Herbsaint, and Stephen Stryjewski, Link’s co-chef and partner at Cochon, are empowering their Peche co-owner Ryan Prewitt, Herbsaint’s former chef de cuisine, to run a restaurant of his own. Cut to the chase: At this stage of the game, the youngest member of the modern family that is Link Restaurant Group is as good as its sibling restaurants (both among the best in town). The concept is south Louisiana seafood dishes, much of it cooked over hardwood coals. The twist is that the food tastes thrillingly new without disconnecting from tradition. After a meal at Peche Seafood Grill, it’s possible to imagine a fantasy fish camp where ground shrimp is tossed with housemade pasta or embedded in buttery, cocktail-time toasts; where blue crab enriches eggplant gratin or chile-spiked capellini; where whole grilled redfish is draped in salsa verde and drum is baked with ginger and tomato. That place is, in fact, not a fantasy; just be sure to book a table in advance, because everyone in town appears intent on living it at once.

Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski—along with chef-partner Ryan Prewitt—opened this homage to fish just down the street from their famed pork emporium, Cochon. The centerpiece here is a roaring wood-fired grill onto which most everything on the menu is tossed. Come here with a crew on nights when you want to eat a grouper as big as a fire hydrant.

In New Orleans, Donald Link, Ryan Prewitt, and Stephen Stryjewski recently revealed Pêche Seafood Grill, an open-fire emporium inspired by a trip to Uruguay. Don’t miss the smothered cast-iron catfish, a riff on a Cajun classic.

Great seafood has never been hard to find around here, but an argument could be made for a certain lack of inspiration in the way many places prepare it. However, a new wave of seafood establishments have come onto the scene offering a different take on what can be done with the daily catch. They approach the same ingredients with a fresh perspective – and the results are rewarding. Pêche, the seafood-centric offering from the Link Restaurant Group, is one of the year’s more anticipated openings. In terms of design it shares more DNA with Cochon than Herbsaint, offering a dining room defined by floor-to-ceiling windows and exposed wooden beams, creating a feel that’s simultaneously contemporary and rustic. And like Cochon, the menu puts the focus on small plates, snacks and sides. But it’s the beast of a wood-burning grill, a custom-built iron and brick rig in the back that serves as the real engine of Pêche and is its most defining feature…

It’s very late on an early-spring evening, and I’m sitting at the French farmhouse table in my mother’s house in Seaside, Fla., looking at the remnants of several astonishingly good seafood dishes and more empty wine bottles than people. It’s the sort of scene I’ve surveyed many times at Donald Link’s New Orleans restaurant Herbsaint, in the company of the same festive group: Donald himself, the engine behind a Crescent City culinary empire that also includes Cochon and Butcher; his top manager, Heather Lolley; Cochon chef-partner Stephen Stryjewski; and Ryan Prewitt, chef-partner at the soon-to-open Pêche Seafood Grill, the restaurant that’s a long-held dream of all four. This particular meal, though, is about more than late-night camaraderie. It’s the culmination of a research road trip along Florida’s Gulf Coast to collect ingredients and inspiration for Pêche. The restaurant was originally conceived, not long after Katrina, as a homage to the rustic seafood joints that once lined the banks of New Orleans’s Lake Pontchartrain. Now, after seven years and similar missions to South America and Spain, the glorified-seafood-shack concept has morphed into a worldly, gutsy and thoroughly modern restaurant. Two key inspirations are what Donald describes as “the primitive, soulful way of cooking” over fire in Uruguay, and the grilling wizard Victor Arguinzoniz, of Asador Etxebarri, in the Basque Country. Still, the team has never lost sight of the fabulous fresh ingredients closer to home, on the stretch of beach known as the Redneck Riviera. Our first stop is Burris Farm Market, in Loxley, Ala., where we stock up on the muscadine wine vinegar that Donald loves, along with loaves of fresh-baked yeast bread. Lunch at the Original Point (motto: “Not Fancy But Famous”), a landmark near Perdido Key, Fla., includes such old-style Gulf Coast classics as smoked tuna dip and fried mullet backbones (yes, you eat the bones, chased immediately by lots of cold beer), as well as Royal Reds, a ruby-colored deep water shrimp virtually undiscovered until the early 1990s and so sweet and salty that folks make the three-hour drive from New Orleans just to eat them. A half-hour away in Pensacola, the enormous market Joe Patti’s specializes in all things seafood. A crew of fresh-faced female 20-somethings in matching baseball caps takes orders (“Have I asked you yet if you’re having a good day?”), while 80-something Frank Patti (son of Joe), is the barker in their midst, hawking specials with a hand-held mike one minute and taking a cleaver to a tuna filet the next. After the team stocks up on Florida clams, more Royal Reds, Spanish mackerel, red snapper and scamp, a superior member of the grouper family, we head down Highway 98 toward Seaside, 75 miles away. The road to Pêche, slated to open on April 20, was a lot less direct. As early as 2006, Donald went so far as to nail down a location and mock up a menu, but parking was a problem, and everybody was already busy opening restaurants, writing books and collecting awards (a James Beard for Donald, another for Stephen and a third for Donald’s book “Real Cajun”). Still, they kept coming back around to seafood. So when a spot opened up in the perfect building, a one-time livery undergoing a meticulous restoration on a Warehouse District corner, they jumped. Not only did the space have great character and some weird history—Jefferson Davis was embalmed upstairs—there was room for a free-standing oyster and crudo bar as well as a wood-burning oven, modeled after the rigs used in Uruguay and built by Donald’s uncle Duane Link. In the kitchen at the Seaside house, the cooks get to work while Heather and I uncork bottles of Txakolina, a dry, citrusy and slightly fizzy Basque wine she and the boys discovered on a pilgrimage to Etxebarri. At Pêche, one side of the oven will have a raging wood fire throwing off coals that will be raked to the other side beneath a low grill. On our deck, we have a cheap gas contraption instead, but Ryan manages to pull off a perfectly cooked mackerel accompanied by delicious grilled chard, and Royal Reds dressed with garlic, oil and lemon. Inside, Stephen and Donald work on a chili-glazed scamp and a clam stew that is the essence of what Donald says they hope to achieve at Pêche: “seafood in a ballsy way.” Enriched with the leftover fish heads, bones and throats, it’s a way for the team to cook seafood without relying on typical go-tos like pork stock or bacon to provide nuance and depth. My favorite dish of the night is the raw seafood salad, enlivened by citrus and a dash of the farmers market muscadine vinegar, and served with grilled slices of the yeast bread that are deemed a great success. But then Ryan comes in with another accompaniment, snapper skin grilled to a perfect crisp and dusted with sea salt—an ingenious receptacle for the fish and the kind of productive playing around that all three chefs thrive on. Lunch the next day features the time-honored combo of Budweiser and Apalachicola oysters on the half shell, and sparks a conversation between Stephen and Ryan about the possibility of making their own saltines. Even the perfectionist Donald rolls his eyes at that. Pêche is poised to be a world-class restaurant, but it’s still, in part at least, an oyster bar. In New Orleans. “Guys,” he says, “the crackers have to come in the cellophane packets.”