Willie Mae’s Brings Its Legendary Fried Chicken to a New Restaurant in New Orleans

Willie Mae’s NOLA opens Friday. November 8 in downtown New Orleans

On Friday, November 8, New Orleans’s most famed fried chicken will return to the city — albeit not in its original, legendary Treme home. A new restaurant from Willie Mae’s Scotch House, called Willie Mae’s NOLA, opens today at 898 Baronne Street in downtown New Orleans.

New Orleans has been without the enduringly beloved restaurant since it closed following a fire in April 2023. Willie Mae’s Scotch House, located at 2401 St Ann Street, remains closed, with owner Kerry Seaton-Stewart telling the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate that repairs are ongoing and reopening remains at least a year off. Seaton-Stewart said at the time that the building suffered damage from an electrical fire and a sprinkler system triggered by the fire.

Randy Schmidt/Eater NOLA

In the meantime, Willie Mae’s NOLA plans to capture a different customer base — downtown diners that fill up nearby hotels, office buildings, and event venues. The restaurant is taking over the Warehouse District space formerly home to Caribbean restaurant NOLA Caye, which closed late last year while citing issues like broken windows and vehicle break-ins.

It’s an exciting new venture for the iconic restaurant, which opened its first full-fledged restaurant outside of New Orleans in Los Angeles in 2022 (in 2014, the family opened Willie Mae’s Grocery and Deli in Uptown, and Willie Mae’s at the Market, a stall in the now-closed New Orleans food hall Pythian Market, opened in 2018). This location seems to be similar in style to the West Coast version: a more modern interior, full-blown bar program, and new menu items alongside staples like wet-battered fried chicken, red beans and rice, mac and cheese, butter beans, fried okra, and gumbo.

Darian Williams, who has previously cooked at Emeril’s and Nice Guys Bar & Grill, is the chef at Willie Mae’s NOLA. The Times-Picayune reports that new menu items at Willie Mae’s NOLA include fried chicken deviled eggs, Buffalo cauliflower bites, catfish etouffee, and red snapper with orzo jambalaya. Ian Julian, a longtime New Orleans mixologist who has shaped bar programs at Fritai and the newly-reborn Dew Drop Inn, is the beverage director.

Randy Schmidt/Eater NOLA

The fried chicken at Willie Mae’s Scotch House has been called some of the best in America. Willie Mae Seaton first opened the Scotch House in Treme as a bar in 1957, where the house drink was a mix of Scotch and milk. After gaining a reputation for the food she cooked for bar patrons, Seaton grew it into a restaurant, running it for the next five decades. In 2005, the James Beard Award Foundation named Willie Mae’s named it one of America’s Classics. Months later, Hurricane Katrina would destroy the restaurant (and Seaton’s home), which was rebuilt and reopened in 2007 with Seaton’s great-granddaughter Seaton-Stewart at the helm. Since then, Willie Mae’s has remained one of New Orleans’s most famous culinary and cultural institutions. Seaton died in 2015 at the age of 99.

Willie Mae’s NOLA opens Friday, November 8 at 5 p.m. From there, it will be open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday through Monday.