John Mosca, whose family opened a roadhouse outside New Orleans in 1946, doesn’t like change. Actually, New Orleans itself resists change—an attitude that is widely thought of as both part of its glory and one of its problems. When people talk about change in New Orleans, it’s often to explain how they’re doing their best to avoid it. A headline in the New Orleans Times-Picayune not long ago about the sale of a bar known for its po’ boy sandwiches read “NEW PARASOL’S OWNERS PROMISE MINIMAL CHANGES FOR THE LEGENDARY BAR AND RESTAURANT.” I’m not much on change myself, particularly when I’m in New Orleans. The city has some remarkable restaurants of recent vintage, for instance, but when I’m back in town I gravitate toward places like Casamento’s, a seafood café on Magazine Street that has been around since 1919. It’s comforting to find Casamento’s virtually unchanged from when I first walked in, decades ago—two simple rooms all done in tiles, so that sitting down to eat one of the renowned oyster loaves is sometimes compared to having lunch in a drained swimming pool. The Napoleon House bar, at St. Louis and Chartres, looks pretty much the way it looked when I visited New Orleans back in high school. So does Galatoire’s, whose interior resembles a large and unusually elegant barbershop. Yes, Galatoire’s now has an additional dining room and a bar on the second floor, but I make it a point not to go up there.

From Highway 90, which runs through what people in New Orleans call the West Bank (the side of the Mississippi River that someone studying a map would be tempted to call south of the city), Mosca’s looks roughly the same as it did in 1946, around the time John Mosca came back from the war in Europe—a small white clapboard building on a deserted stretch of a double-lane highway thirty or forty minutes from the center of the city. When John’s father, Provino Mosca, who had previously operated a restaurant in Chicago Heights, Illinois, opened for business that year, he moved his family into a few rooms in the back. The area around Mosca’s is still deserted. My friend James Edmunds, who lives in New Iberia, Louisiana, about a hundred and thirty miles to the west, says, “It always had the feel of a neighborhood restaurant, except there was no neighborhood.”

The double-lane, though, has seen some changes. Development has stretched from the Mississippi River into what I remember as a vast darkness. When I began going to Mosca’s, in the early sixties, we used to interrupt our conversation in the car—a conversation that was likely to be about, say, the possibility that Mosca’s Chicken a la Grande was even better than the baked-oysters-and-bread-crumbs dish identified on the menu as Oysters Mosca—so we could concentrate on peering into the blackness for Mosca’s Budweiser sign. It was illuminated, as I remember, by one bulb. When we spotted the sign, we could warn whoever was driving that in a moment he’d have to cut across the break in the median strip into Mosca’s parking lot, which was and is made of gravel. Ten or twelve years ago, a storm destroyed the Budweiser sign. The Moscas tried to get another one exactly like it, but Anheuser-Busch wasn’t distributing signs like that anymore. I learned about the fate of the sign only recently, when I spent some time at Mosca’s—partly to see how a place reluctant to change had fared through the disasters that have brought involuntary change to New Orleans in the past five years and partly to catch up a bit on Mosca family history and partly to see if eating there a few nights in a row would finally, after all these years, give me my fill of Chicken a la Grande.

As my mention of the Budweiser sign indicates, I am not one of the people who claim that they were guided off the double-lane in those days by the smell of garlic. It is true that Mosca’s devotion to garlic has remained unchanged since the days when Provino Mosca was at the stove, and almost the same can be said of the menu; it’s not the sort of place that surprises you with its daily specials. I could give my order before I get out of the car. I should say “our order,” since the family-style portions served at Mosca’s make it not the place to go for that contemplative dinner alone. We’ve always wanted Italian Crab Salad, Oysters Mosca, Spaghetti Bordelaise, Chicken a la Grande, Shrimp Mosca, and Mosca’s Sausage. At times, we have ordered the Chicken Cacciatore as well as the Chicken a la Grande. I consider that a permissible variation. (Brett Anderson, the restaurant critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who joined me at Mosca’s one evening on my recent trip, considers ordering both chicken dishes a necessity rather than a variation, since he remains ambivalent about which one he prefers.) We have never ordered Chicken Cacciatore instead of Chicken a la Grande. I do not consider that a permissible variation. While waiting for the food to arrive—Mosca’s cooks everything to order—I have often been in discussions about how interesting it would be sometime to try the quail or the Cornish hen or even the steak. We have never ordered any of those things.

The dining area of Mosca’s always seemed the same: One room, as you entered, had a bar and a few tables and a jukebox, heavy on Louis Prima. A larger dining room was off to the right. The late Allan Jaffe, the co-founder of Preservation Hall and a storied New Orleans trencherman, once told me about a conversation he’d had in the bar dining room one autumn when he came in to repair the deprivation he’d suffered during Mosca’s annual August closing. Jaffe mentioned to John Mosca, who by then was running the front of the house, that something seemed different. John explained that, some years before, he had permitted a slight extension of the bar and it had never looked right to him. It looked changed. So during the August closing he had come in and sawed it off.

The proprietorship of Mosca’s has changed only with the generations, and there has always been a Mosca in the kitchen. When Provino died, in 1962, the cooking was taken over by his daughter, Mary, and, eventually, her husband, a former Louisiana oysterman named Vincent Marconi. His family was originally from the town in Italy where Provino Mosca was born—San Benedetto del Tronto, on the Adriatic. Provino’s widow, Lisa, also known as Mama Mosca, became the proprietor of Mosca’s. (I have always treasured her for having said to a reporter from the New Orleans States-Item, in 1977, “You can write all that you want, it won’t bother me because I cannot read or write.”) By the time Mary retired, John’s wife, the former Mary Jo Angellotti, some of whose forebears had also made the journey from San Benedetto del Tronto to Chicago Heights, had been helping with the cooking for nearly twenty years, and she took over as chef. At Mosca’s, the chef does not oversee the cooking; she cooks. When Mosca’s was given a James Beard award, in 1999, Mary Jo apologized for not being able to come to the ceremony in New York to accept it. She said, “We’d have to close the restaurant.”