On my radio show, if someone calls to ask about a restaurant that's been out of business for many years, I know that most of the remainder of that day's program will be about other restaurants that "ain't dere no more'" (to use Bennie Grunch's famous Yat phrase).

We must really love restaurants in New Orleans for this to be true. In most other places, eateries come, serve for a decade or so (if they're lucky), then disappear forever, leaving few memories. Here not only do we remember many favorite restaurants of the past, but we yearn for them, hoping they will someday reopen, or to discover the former chefs working somewhere else but still cooking the same food. Or, at least, for recipes that we should have procured while the old place while it was still around.

Below is an index to articles I've written over the years about these cherished restaurants. Most of them can also be found in Lost Restaurants of New Orleans, a book I co-authored with Peggy Scott Laborde, who dug up hundreds of visual artifacts to illustrate the nostalgia. The book was published by Pelican in 2011, and is available in every bookstore in town. Predictably, it's selling like the hotcakes did at the Buck Forty-Nine Pancake and Steak House in the 1960s.