The Restaurant
Drago's Seafood Restaurant was founded in 1969 by Croatian immigrants Drago and Klara Cvitanovich in a small Metairie storefront, and operated for two decades as a neighbourhood crab-and-oyster room before chef Tommy Cvitanovich — Drago's son and the current owner — invented the charbroiled oyster in 1993. The technique (oysters on the half-shell topped with garlic butter and Romano-Parmesan, fired over open flame until the edges curl) became a Louisiana standard within a decade and the foundation of Drago's transformation into a Greater New Orleans institution. The original Metairie location remains; the flagship downtown room opened in 2008 on the ground floor of the Hilton Riverside on Poydras Street, occupying a sprawling 350-seat industrial space with an open grill visible to the dining floor and a centre bar dedicated entirely to oysters.
The kitchen builds the menu around the charbroiled oyster — ordered by the dozen, served on cast-iron sizzling platters with French bread for sopping the garlic butter — and extends out to a comprehensive Louisiana-Croatian seafood programme: hand-stuffed Croatian-style crab cakes, lobster Herradura with tequila-cream sauce, the seafood-stuffed redfish, a barbecue-shrimp preparation in the New Orleans style, whole grilled fish from the Gulf, and a steakhouse-cut filet that anchors the cooked-not-from-the-sea side of the menu. The lunch crowd skews business; the dinner crowd skews celebratory; conventions and football weekends fill the room from end to end.
The wine list runs to about a hundred and twenty labels — appropriate to the price level rather than aspirational — with a sensible Sancerre and Champagne presence at the by-the-glass tier and a deeper Burgundy and Italian programme for the by-the-bottle tables. Service is career New Orleans-Croatian: the senior servers have been at Drago's for fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five years, and the staff will read a group's mood — quiet business meal, raucous birthday, conference reunion — within the first three minutes. Tommy Cvitanovich himself frequently works the front of the house. For a seafood room that locals trust and visiting executives ask for, no Greater New Orleans address comes close.
Why This Is New Orleans’s Team Dinner Pick
Drago's is the team-dinner room because the architecture of the 350-seat space and the sizzling charbroiled-oyster platter is engineered for it. A long table of twelve or sixteen orders six dozen oysters as the opening salvo and the cast-iron platters become a shared centre of the table — a working dinner moment that no other New Orleans address can match. The kitchen handles a team of twenty without breaking pace; the senior captains know how to keep oyster orders moving while the entrée course is plated. The bar at the front handles a pre-dinner cocktail round without dispersing the group. And the bill — generous but never absurd — does not punish a host for taking the team somewhere that visiting executives talk about for months afterward.
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