Casamento's Just Reopened in New Orleans, and This May Be Its Final Season

Casamento’s opened its doors this morning for the season, and the message on the restaurant’s website says the quiet part out loud: “We will reopen on Thursday October 1st which is looking like our final season. Hope to see you then!”

One hundred and seven years after Joe Casamento, an immigrant from the Italian island of Ustica, hung out his shingle on Magazine Street, the little tile-clad oyster house may be pouring its last oyster stew.

The man from Ustica

Joe Casamento came from Ustica, a small Italian island four hours by boat from Sicily, and landed in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. He worked food-service jobs across the city and became convinced he could build a better restaurant, because he kept seeing the same sins: fry cooks who never changed the grease, and oysters drowned in egg and milk under a heavy batter. Joe was old-school Italian. Everything simple, so you could taste your food.

In 1919 Joe opened on Magazine Street, with his brother Anthony behind the counter beside him. He built the room the way Italians build rooms: tile, inside and out, more than a century old and imported from Italy, because tile cleans easy and holds its beauty. He needed so much of it that it took four tile companies across the United States to fill the order.

The dining room at Casamento’s. Photo: neworleans.com

The oyster loaf, the sandwich that explains the place, came out of Joe’s hatred of waste. New Orleans French bread went hard by the afternoon, but Sunbeam Bakery’s pillowy white sandwich bread only got more toothsome as it sat. Sunbeam would pull loaves off the conveyor before the slicer, and Casamento’s cut them into thick slabs, their “pan bread,” a Texas toast brushed with butter and broiled golden while the oysters fried. “You couldn’t even get lettuce and tomato on it while Joe was alive.”

They fry in lard. “It used to be we couldn’t tell people, or they’d make a face,” Linda Gerdes told Saveur. “But then lard came back in style.” C.J. still fries corn-floured oysters in six blackened pots, two minutes, until the coats crinkle golden.

The restaurant turned 100 in 2019. A mural of four generations of the family hangs inside, and the fifth is already here: Nash, born in June 2022 to Nicole, one of the twins.

The man behind the counter

C.J. Gerdes, 69, the third-generation owner, told Where NOLA Eats that he is weighing a permanent close at the end of this season. “If I had to say today, then yes, this will be the last season for us. But you never know, things could change.”

Gerdes has worked the room since he was 14. He runs it with his wife Linda, and he has set his own clock. “I told myself once I hit 70 next year that’s it.”

The succession story is the part that hurts. Their daughter Natalie Gerdes Hebert came back full time during the pandemic, at 33, and modernized the place: she built the Instagram, redesigned the website, and started the oyster-shell crafts. She was the heir apparent. Then she died last summer of a heart attack at 37. Her twin sister Nikki was severely injured in a 2015 car wreck and cannot take over the restaurant. Their grandson is 4.

C.J. Gerdes, the third-generation owner, at the fryers at Casamento’s. Photo: David Grunfeld, NOLA.com

That is the arithmetic of a family restaurant with no one left to hand it to, and it is why a man who has given the place 55 years is talking about the end.

The room and the food

Casamento’s is a temple built of tile and butter. The dining room is clad floor to ceiling in the stuff, cool to the touch and older than almost everyone who eats in it, and the oyster bar sits close enough that you can watch your dozen get shucked steps from your table.

The oyster loaf is the order that explains the place: a mound of cornmeal-crisped fried oysters piled onto thick buttered planks of white bread, the kind of sandwich that needs no improvement and has received none in a century.

The oyster loaf at Casamento’s. Photo: Where Y’at

The raw oysters come cold and briny off the half shell, the charbroiled ones arrive bubbling, and the oyster stew, whole oysters in scalded milk, is the bowl you order when the weather turns and you want to remember why this city eats the way it does. The fried soft-shell crabs shatter. The seafood gumbo belongs in the conversation with the best in New Orleans. All of the fried seafood is gluten free, a quiet kindness the regulars have known about for years.

Raw oysters on the half shell at Casamento’s. Photo: Yelp

The autographs behind the counter

Saveur’s writers looked up and found T-shirts autographed by Nicole Kidman, Jimmy Carter, and Guy Fieri hanging behind the counter. The restaurant’s own site puts it this way: “visited by celebrities from Hollywood to the White House.”

The television came calling because the room photographs like nowhere else. Casamento’s did Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives twice, in 2008 and again in 2018, plus Guy’s Favorite Places, The Originals with Emeril Lagasse, Foodography with Mo Rocca, and Cheap Eats. Movies, TV shows, and commercials have used the tile room as a backdrop. The magazines followed: Travel and Leisure, Food and Wine, Southern Living, Garden and Gun, Saveur, Bon Appetit, and even Playboy.

The most important people in the room never needed a camera. Anthony O’Neal Rogers spent 22 years behind the counter as the longtime shucker, prying oysters open in full view of the dining room, which is the whole show at Casamento’s anyway.

What’s next

Here is what is known. C.J. Gerdes, 69, says, “If I had to say today, then yes, this will be the last season for us. But you never know, things could change.” The season that opened October 1 runs through roughly June 2027, when the summer closure begins.

Here is what is not known. No buyer has been announced. No landmark designation has been announced. Nothing has been said about the building’s future. That is the whole of it, and we will not dress it up with guesses.

Go now, while the doors are open

Casamento’s keeps its own hours and always has: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, 11am to 2pm for lunch and 5:30 to 9pm for dinner, plus Sunday 4:30 to 8:30pm. Closed Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Closed June, July, and August, and all major holidays. Cash only. Takeout available.

They do not take reservations, and you should not need one explained to you. Show up, sit in the tile room, and order the loaf.

Casamento’s Restaurant, 4330 Magazine St, New Orleans. Official site: casamentosrestaurant.com. Instagram: @casamentosrestaurant.

One hundred and seven years. Four tile companies’ worth of tile. A man who has worked the room since he was 14. The tile, the stew, the loaf: none of it exists anywhere else. Go.