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.”

Mary Jo cooks pretty much the same dishes that Provino did in the days when Mosca’s, struggling for customers, was open for lunch to feed employees of the Avondale shipyards and remained open late at night to catch some of the customers from the gambling joints that were then prevalent in the area. The dishes aren’t complicated. For instance, Chicken a la Grande—which, John Mosca informed me, was named after a horse trainer named Charles Grande—has in it, in addition to the chicken, only salt and pepper, rosemary, oregano, white wine, and, of course, ten cloves (or is it heads?) of garlic. Still, James Edmunds, who takes great pride in being able to reverse-engineer dishes from the restaurants he likes, has never been able to replicate Chicken a la Grande. “I’ve made any number of tasty chicken dishes in the attempt,” he told me. “But no Chicken a la Grande.” Since the recipe calls for the chicken to be cooked in a skillet, James suspects that his failure has something to do with his not being able to match the heat of a restaurant burner—plus the fact that, as he puts it, “they know how to do something that I don’t know how to do.” James’s analysis reminded me again that what I was once told by Charles Reynolds, a scholar of magic, about magic tricks has wider application: by reading enough books in enough libraries, you could learn how any trick is done, but that doesn’t mean you could do it.

The tales told about the Mosca family in New Orleans have also remained unchanged over the years, although it turns out that not all of them are true. Until a few years ago, I wasn’t even pronouncing the family name correctly. (The Moscas pronounce it with a long “o,” as in “Joe,” while everyone in New Orleans has always pronounced the first syllable to rhyme with “ma” or “pa.”) On my recent visit, I learned that, contrary to what I’d heard and read and repeated, Provino Mosca was never Al Capone’s chef. It’s true that Chicago Heights was a suburb that, like Capone’s headquarters of Cicero, had a number of citizens whose funerals were likely to be observed from across the street by the F.B.I. And Mary Jo Mosca told me that her maternal grandmother, Pasqua Frattura, once catered a baptismal party at which Al Capone was the godfather. Not the godfather like Marlon Brando; the baby’s godfather. (According to the story, Capone came back to the kitchen and gave each of the caterers a hundred-dollar bill. Pasqua Frattura bought a stove.) But Provino Mosca apparently never laid eyes on Al Capone. I’m not someone who finds the Mob romantic—real mobsters are less punctilious than the Corleones, who in three blood-spattered movies managed not to harm anyone who wasn’t a criminal himself—but I always enjoyed imagining what it might have been like to be Al Capone’s chef. Just consider the potential consequences of, say, bringing out a plate of slightly overdone fish. I suppose I’ll have to quit telling the Capone story, although I do so reluctantly. I’m not much for change.

It turns out that another Mosca’s story about what people in Chicago used to call The Outfit is true: Carlos Marcello, widely referred to as the crime boss of New Orleans, was indeed a regular. In fact, he was the Moscas’ landlord. When the family decided to move to New Orleans, John told me, an acquaintance found them a corner bar for sale on the New Orleans side of the river, just over the Jefferson Parish line, but the deal fell through. So Marcello, whom they knew through mutual friends in Chicago Heights, rented them the white building on Highway 90. They speak of him as not only their landlord but their friend, and they say that in their dealings with him he was always a gentleman. (When John’s older brother, Nick, who died in 1997, left the business, in 1960, it was to operate a restaurant in partnership with Marcello’s brother.) Eventually, Marcello sold the Moscas a lot a hundred yards or so from the restaurant, where they built a neat brick house; John and Mary Jo brought up their daughter, Lisa, there. But Marcello never got around to selling the restaurant itself; his son is now the landlord.

Particularly on slow weekday nights (Saturday night, even in the worst economy, is never slow), the Moscas are likely to wonder what it might have been like to run a restaurant that didn’t require most of its customers to take a thirty- or forty-minute drive that included the Huey P. Long Bridge—a 1935 structure that used to be known for its terrifying narrowness and is now known for being clogged by a construction project aimed at widening it. About twenty years ago, according to Mary Jo, she suggested to John that they move Mosca’s to premises somewhere on the New Orleans side of the river: “And he said, ‘No. The house is next door. This is where my father started. This is where I’m staying until I die.’ ” Mary Jo later polled the customers, eighty per cent of whom are locals, on how they would feel if Mosca’s were moved somewhere else—presumably somewhere more convenient. “Well, they said they didn’t know about that,” she told me. “So that made me stop and think.”

It had been the Moscas’ custom to ride out storms in order to keep an eye on the restaurant—they’d done that during Hurricane Camille and Hurricane Betsy—but, as Hurricane Katrina approached, the entire family joined the exodus, heading for Jackson, Mississippi, by car in a trip that took ten hours instead of the normal three and a half. As it turned out, they were away for a month—first with a relative in Jackson, who found himself with eighteen people in his house, and then with relatives back in Chicago Heights. Katrina left the restaurant’s dining rooms essentially untouched, but there was extensive wind damage to the back of the building; among other things, the kitchen was destroyed. For the Moscas, it was time to take stock. John Mosca was then eighty—a poker-faced man with a sly wit who had married relatively late in life. Mary Jo was only fifty-five. Their daughter, Lisa, was in college. “John said, ‘I’ve had it,’ ” Mary Jo told me. “He said, ‘I’m going to step away. If you want this restaurant to continue, you are going to have to do it on your own.’ Although he still does make oysters, and I do consult him on various things.”

Rebuilding took ten months, and there were times, Mary Jo told me, when she felt like throwing in the towel. In the aftermath of Katrina, there were problems finding skilled workers. There were problems obtaining permits. When Mary Jo talks about the experience, she says she tried to keep in mind something Provino Mosca used to say: “Without trouble, there is no life.” The kitchen was rebuilt—and, for the first time, it was air-conditioned. New rest rooms were installed. The dining rooms were spiffed up a bit, although not to the point of exchanging the wall units for central air-conditioning. In June of 2006, Mosca’s reopened. A story in the New York Times was headlined “THE AROMA OF GARLIC IS BACK ON THE BAYOU.” Had there been an A.T.M. machine in the bar dining room before? Had the walls in the other dining room always been painted that color? I, for one, couldn’t remember. To the regulars, Mosca’s looked more or less unchanged—which was, of course, the way they liked it.

Four years later, BP’s well began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, presenting a much more serious long-term threat to restaurants like Mosca’s than Katrina had. This fall, Gulf oysters were in relatively short supply. When I dropped into Casamento’s for my ritualistic oyster loaf—this was against the advice of friends, who told me that anyone eating as often as I intended to eat at Mosca’s should endeavor to make a lunch out of dry toast and unsweetened tea—the waitress told me that they had ordered twenty-five sacks of oysters from their supplier and been given ten. Drago’s, which is known for what it calls char-grilled oysters, had sought to ease the pressure on its oyster supply by offering char-grilled mussels as well. At Cochon, a breezy post-Katrina restaurant that serves inventive Cajun food, I ordered wood-fired oyster roast and the waitress said, “The oysters aren’t in yet. They’re supposed to come this afternoon, if at all.” I had to settle for chicken-and-andouille gumbo and fried alligator with chili-garlic aioli. Brett Anderson told me that at a recent meal at Galatoire’s his waiter, in the spirit of full disclosure, had informed him that the Oysters Rockefeller were from the Gulf but that the Oysters en Brochette were from Oregon.

Some New Orleanians won’t eat oysters that aren’t from the Gulf, and these days some visitors to New Orleans are wary of eating oysters at all. (The seafood and restaurant industries have been in the position of trying to reassure customers that the seafood is fine at the same time as they complain to BP and the government that it has been disastrously compromised.) Mary Jo Mosca actually made a few test dishes of Oysters Mosca with Pacific oysters, to see what that would taste like, and she was disappointed with the results. For a while, Mosca’s, which uses different suppliers from most New Orleans restaurants, was able to get enough Gulf oysters, but then came two evenings when customers were not able to order one of the restaurant’s best-known dishes, Oysters Mosca; there simply weren’t any. Mary Jo is as concerned with the price as she is with the supply. She had been accustomed to paying thirty-six or thirty-eight dollars a gallon for shucked oysters. Lately, she has been paying as much as sixty-eight, and she expects the price to go up.

Mosca’s weeknight business has been off, but it’s difficult to know how much of that is from the oil spill and how much from the soft economy. Mary Jo told me that she had obtained a claim number, which is the first step in trying to get compensation from the BP fund, but she has yet to do the paperwork necessary to file a claim. She has considered joining a class-action lawsuit against BP and others led by Susan Spicer, a prominent New Orleans chef whose complaint says, “Simply put, the oil slick and continuing discharge of crude oil is an ecological and economic disaster for Plaintiff.” Lately, Mary Jo has been thinking more and more about another saying of John’s father’s. “He used to say, ‘If you have a person who did you wrong, talk him into going into the restaurant business: he’ll make a living, but you’ll get even with him for the rest of his life,’ ” she told me one evening. “I didn’t quite understand all that until now.”

On the first night of my visit, I was joined at Mosca’s by James Edmunds and his wife, Susan Hester, and a friend of theirs who had moved from New Iberia to New Orleans. Some improvements in Highway 90 several years ago cut more than an hour off the driving time between New Iberia and Mosca’s, meaning that James and Susan can now get there in two hours flat, have an early dinner, and be back home in time for the ten-o’clock news. James has not completely come to terms with his failure to replicate Chicken a la Grande, but he acknowledges that his new proximity to the real article has sort of taken the sting out of the defeat. The next night, there were five of us at the table, and the night after that I was joined only by one old friend. It later occurred to me that, without any consideration of how many of us were present, I might have ordered the same amount of food for the table three nights in a row, including what I have come to think of as the Cacciatore Variation. (The night Brett Anderson was there, he said, after some extensive sampling of both chicken dishes, “It’s a Grande night—I’m convinced.”) I recalled a conversation I’d had with Allan Jaffe in the seventies, after we’d eaten at Mosca’s with a large group on the evening before JazzFest:

“I was looking at the check, and I think we had the same number of dishes we had when three of us came here last month,” Allan said.

“But that’s impossible, Allan,” I said. “There were sixteen people at the table tonight.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not too full.”

On the second night, I met John and Mary Jo’s daughter, Lisa. At Mosca’s, the presence of assorted family members has always been assumed, whether they’re in the restaurant to work or not. When John’s sister, Mary, and Mary Jo’s mother were sharing the nearby brick house in their declining years—John and Mary Jo and Lisa had moved to a house in Harahan, about fifteen minutes away—they would walk over every night to sit at a family table, between the bar dining room and the kitchen, in order to survey the scene. Lisa, who has put in some time in Mosca’s kitchen, recently got a master’s degree from Tulane—a double degree in social work and public health. Since Mary had no children and Nick’s children did not follow their father into the restaurant business (“They’re smart,” Mary Jo says), Lisa Mosca, who carries the name of the matriarch, is the last of the line. Aware that a family business is no respecter of degrees, I asked her if someday she might take over Mosca’s. She smiled and said, “I’m not sure I have a choice.” ♦