Best Of New Orleans #6

Every day during the month of August, we're highlighting one restaurant from our recent ranking of the 31 Best Restaurants in New Orleans. Today's restaurant, Domenica, is #6 on our list.

Chef Alon Shaya (recently nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Chef — South) serves some of America's best pizza at John Besh Restaurant Group's New Orleans restaurant Domenica (Italian for "Sunday") in the renovated and historic Roosevelt Hotel. You'll have a hard time choosing between the 17 pizzas made in the Pavesi pecan-wood-fired oven. Just look at the photos — the slightly imperfect circles ringed with light, puffy, and black-blistered crusts, the center of the pie sauce-speckled and beautifully topped with stellar (and fun) ingredients like cotechino (sausage made from pork, fatback, and pork rind), bacon and eggs, apple and pecans, mortadella, spicy lamb meatball, roast pork shoulder, and duck with sweet potato — ordering just one pizza is a tough call. So don't. Order Domenica's most popular pie, the Margherita (tomato, basil, fresh mozzarella), then wild-card your second and third choices with the Tutto Carne (fennel sausage, bacon, salami, and cotechino), the Roasted Carrot (with goat cheese, red onion, Brussels sprouts, beets, and hazelnuts — wow!), or give the clam pie a shot.

Here's our complete ranking:
#31. Maurepas Fine Foods
#30. Boucherie
#29. Mother's
#28. Luke
#27. The Joint
#26. Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse
#25. Mahony's
#24. MiLa
#23. La Petite Grocery
#22. Gautreau's
#21. Coquette
#20. Parkway Bakery
#19. Clancy's
#18. Dooky Chase
#17. Drago's
#16. Emeril's
#15. Redfish Grill
#14. Jacques-Imo's
#13. Bayona
#12. Camellia Grill
#11. Domilese's
#10. Willie Mae's Scotch House
#9. SoBou
#8. Root
#7. Herbsaint
#6. Domenica
#5. Cochon
#4. Peche
#3. August
#2. Galatoire's
#1. Commander's Palace