Rhythm & Roux: The Simmer and Swing of New Orleans

New Orleans recipes and jazz stories from chef Brian Landry and bassist Peter Harris. 

Rhythm & Roux is a hardcover New Orleans cookbook featuring 100 recipes alongside interviews, stories, and photographs from the city’s jazz community. Chef Brian Landry and bassist Peter Harris bring the food and music of their hometown together in a book that invites readers into the kitchens, conversations, and shared pleasures of New Orleans. 

The book grew out of the Bayou Bar at the Pontchartrain Hotel, where Landry’s culinary world and Harris’s jazz program meet. Longtime friends and native New Orleanians, they share a personal connection to the city and the people who give it its flavor and sound. Their collaboration explores the relationship between making a meal, making music, and bringing people together.

Recipes range from cocktails and starters to soups, salads, entrées, and desserts. The chapters unfold like a set list: cocktails and starters are the improvisations, soups and salads the side notes, entrées the main acts, and desserts the finale. Between recipes, readers encounter musicians including Branford Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater, John Boutté, Nicholas Payton, Herlin Riley, and Stanton Moore, whose voices offer a close view of New Orleans music and the lives behind it.

Photography by Randy Krause Schmidt and Steve Rapport brings the people and places into view, giving readers reasons to linger over the pages as well as explore the recipes. Foodways and music emerge through the experiences of the people who keep these traditions alive and continue to shape them.

A thoughtful gift for jazz lovers, people passionate about foodways and cooking, and anyone with a love of New Orleans, Rhythm & Roux offers recipes to explore and stories to return to. Give it for the holidays, bring it as a gift for a host, or keep it close for the next meal you want to make memorable.

Brian Landry is a New Orleans chef and co-founder of QED Hospitality, where he leads culinary direction for the group’s restaurants, cafés, and bars. His work celebrates Louisiana’s regional foodways and the connection between a place, its people, and the food they share.

Peter Harris is a New Orleans bassist and composer who leads the jazz program at the Bayou Bar at the Pontchartrain Hotel. The Jazz Journalists Association named him its 2024 New Orleans Jazz Hero in recognition of his leadership and support of the city’s jazz community.

Emery Whalen is the editor of Rhythm & Roux and co-founder of QED Hospitality with chef Brian Landry. Raised in New Orleans in a home filled with jazz, she brings a lifelong connection to the city’s music and a career in hospitality to the book.