DANIELLE AND RICHARD Sutton met as students at Tulane University in New Orleans. After graduation, they received a different kind of education at Paxton & Whitfield, one of London’s oldest cheesemongers, and in 2005 decided to return to the city they loved and open a shop of their own. Not only were they starting a new business in a place with a decidedly uncertain future so soon after Hurricane Katrina, they were pushing a relatively novel product in a community long set in its ways. Traditional fare, awash in hollandaise or béchamel (or, in the case of such dishes as Trout Marguery, both), did not exactly cry out for a cheese course. But by 2006, the Suttons were serving up ploughman’s lunches and cave-aged Gruyère on ciabatta to a mostly uninitiated populace suddenly eager to take a pass on the po’ boys and learn all about cow versus sheep. Now, more than 10 years later, the city’s new wave of chefs is among St. James Cheese Company’s most devoted customers, and in late 2015 the Suttons opened a second location in the booming Warehouse District.

St. James is one of the many happy poster children of post-Katrina New Orleans, a city now dotted with similar specialty food shops and an astonishing 200 additional new restaurants, ranging from Compère Lapin—the recently opened Caribbean-Italian brainchild of Top Chef runner-up and St. Lucia native Nina Compton—to Shaya, the popular Israeli restaurant started by chefs Alon Shaya and John Besh in 2015 and nominated for a 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for best new restaurant in America. Last year Shaya won the award for best chef in the South for his work at Domenica, another of their restaurants, known primarily for its pizzas.

THE NEW NOLA | the interior of Paladar 511’s converted warehouse dining room. Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

Remarkably, the culinary boom that began almost as soon as the debris was cleared away continues apace in a city that according to the most recent census has approximately 100,000 fewer residents and 1,677 fewer businesses than it did before the storm. Restaurants and shops (including the wine and liquor emporium Keife and Co., which also stocks such increasingly popular pantry staples as serrano ham and Lucques olives) are clearly bucking the trend. One possible reason: A significant chunk of the city’s current residents is new—an estimated 15 percent arrived after 2005.

Given the new demographics—and the fact that Katrina managed to blow apart such entrenched institutions as a corrupt city hall and an outdated levee board—the pre-Katrina culinary scene now seems insular and narrow. New Orleans had long been one of the nation’s great food meccas, but one primarily composed of century-old temples of Creole cooking such as Galatoire’s and Arnaud’s, neighborhood joints selling po’ boys and red beans, and a handful of oyster bars—a surprisingly small number, given the local bounty. There were culinary stars, to be sure, but even Emeril and Paul Prudhomme made their bones at another Creole landmark, Commander’s Palace.

Chefs Susan Dunn and Jack Murphy rolling pasta for their egg yolk and truffle ravioli at Paladar 511 Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

Just eight months after Herbsaint reopened (it was one of the first “white tablecloth” restaurants to do so following the storm), Donald Link and partner Stephen Stryjewski opened Cochon, a hypernuanced but unfussy (and delicious) homage to the Cajun food Link grew up with. Three years later they followed with Cochon Butcher, a more casual affair devoted to small plates and sandwiches (but no po’ boys), where diners might leave with a marinated chicken or house-made salumi from the butcher’s case. Next up was Pêche Seafood Grill, which reinvented the New Orleans oyster bar to glorious effect and won the 2014 Beard for best new restaurant. (In the same year, Pêche chef Ryan Prewitt, formerly of Herbsaint, also won the award for best chef in the South).

New Orleans wine shop Keife & Co Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

“ There’s an opportunity in New Orleans outside the Creole formula. ” — Stephen Stryjewski

THE TRACTION OF such diverse enterprises has spurred restaurateurs and chefs with established restaurants and careers in bigger cities to try to break into the New Orleans market, a trend that used to happen in reverse. “It was seeing the Cochon Butchers of the world, it was seeing Pêche—those are the places that got me thinking this was possible,” says Sean Josephs, proprietor of Manhattan’s critically acclaimed Maysville. He opened Kenton’s, which he describes as “an American whiskey bar and restaurant,” in Uptown New Orleans last fall. Josephs’s wife, Mani Dawes, owner of the Manhattan tapas bar Tía Pol, is a native New Orleanian, so the couple’s frequent trips south to see family allowed for plenty of market research. “At one point, I remember having a really tasty sandwich at St. James Cheese and thinking, It’s a pretty far leap from Domilise’s [a much-loved po’ boy joint] to this.”

Cheese and charcuterie plate and the Lomo Bocadillo from St. James Cheese Company in New Orleans Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

Josephs says that while he felt “it was important not to open a ‘New York’ restaurant in New Orleans,” he also made no effort to try to make Kenton’s a “New Orleans” restaurant. “Philosophically, we are more like Maysville,” he says, though local pompano and trout replace Maysville’s porgy and char. “Just because we could figure out how to make great crawfish étouffée doesn’t mean it makes sense.”

The more established local chefs welcome the new competition. “I’m just so excited that people feel there’s opportunity in New Orleans outside the Cajun or Creole formula,” says Stryjewski, whose popular Cochon just doubled its square footage.

Nina Compton, the owner of Compère Lapin. Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

In addition, diners in New Orleans no longer expect or even want Creole mainstays to be a part of every restaurant’s repertoire. That fact struck Nina Compton, who last worked with Manhattan-based Scott Conant at the Miami Beach outpost of Scarpetta. At Compère Lapin, which opened last June, Compton is busy reacquainting New Orleanians with some of their earliest culinary roots via Caribbean mainstays like curried goat (it comes with sweet potato gnocchi), but at the same time she’s already embraced some beloved local elements. Her arancini is made with dirty rice, for example, and while her beignets with spiced chocolate sauce are the best in town, she offers up a Caribbean pepper pot rather than a gumbo. (“I won’t go there,” she says.)

Danielle and Richard Sutton, outside of St. James Cheese Company in New Orleans’s Warehouse District Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

At Paladar 511, which Jack Murphy and siblings Susan and Ed Dunn opened last year in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, gumbo is replaced by a spicy seafood cioppino, the signature dish of San Francisco (where Jack and Susan also own Pizzetta 211). The restaurant’s gutsy California Italian menu and formerly industrial and now oddly cozy space complete with open kitchen have made it both a critical and local favorite.

The swiftness with which even outsider restaurants like Paladar 511 are woven into the fabric of neighborhoods that are more than 200 years old means that New Orleans is doing what it’s done before, when it embraced African, French, Spanish, and later, Italian and Cajun cuisine. Many of the new establishments have tapped deep into the city’s past. Philadelphia native Daniel Stein, who used to practice law, said he had no idea what he was doing when he opened Stein’s Market and Deli in 2007, but it turned out that he was filling a long-overdue gap in a city with a robust Jewish population and once thriving tradition of delis. Such is the quality of Stein’s matzo ball soup and lengthy list of sandwiches (an early store motto was “Looking for a Po-boy...Go Somewhere Else”) that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who were regulars when in town filming Green Lantern, once flew all the way from Manhattan just to grab a couple of Rachels (a Reuben in which the corned beef is replaced with pastrami).

TALENT SHOW | Daniel Stein, the co-owner of Stein’s Market and Deli Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

Even some of the more staid Creole standbys are benefiting from the new energy. In late 2014, the long-stagnant Brennan’s, founded by Owen Brennan in 1946, got a $20 million face-lift and a talented chef, Slade Rushing, who once toiled at New York’s Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar with his wife, Allison Vines-Rushing. Last year Rushing was a finalist for a best chef in the South award. His cooking draws inspiration from the classics, some of which, like a stellar Eggs Hussarde, are only lightly tweaked.

If the old New Orleans had depth, the new New Orleans has a breathtaking range. There’s plenty of room for a fancy “Breakfast at Brennan’s” or a bagel at Stein’s, a bowl of West Coast Italian-American seafood stew or dark Cajun gumbo. There are restaurants with deep South influences like High Hat Cafe (in the old New Orleans, grits were in short supply) and low-country inspiration like Angeline, where some combination of shellfish and smoky pork is always on the menu.

A SLICE OF LIFE | Jim Yonkus and John Keife, proprietors of Keife & Co.Ò Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

Fusion, after all, is what the city was founded on. At Compère Lapin, for example, Compton naps those dirty rice arancini with sour orange mojo, while at Josephine Estelle, the Italian-Southern New Orleans osteria opened in March by Memphis-based chefs Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman, the gulf fish comes with both “potlikker” and lemon conserva (it’s no accident that the chefs’ cookbook is titled Collards & Carbonara).

Grilled flatbread with wood-roasted carrots and green garlic ricotta from Kenton’s Photo: Rush Jagoe for WSJ. Magazine

Many of the newest establishments are reminders that New Orleanians may also have gotten a little lazy—locals who used to stock their bar from the shelves at Rite Aid now pore over the 40-odd boutique gins at Keife & Co., where they might also pick up an artisanal loaf from Bellegarde Bakery, which mills its own grain, instead of the ubiquitous squishy French.

Despite the changes, there’s always been one constant: “People are very excited about food here,” says Compton. “They plan their lives around food. So it made it an easy decision to move here from Miami.”