Like many South Louisiana stories, this one starts with a party and a pig. Growing up in River Ridge, Alfredo Nogueira’s sprawling family would take any excuse to host big celebrations. These overflowed with the foods of Cuba, the island where many of them were born. There were platters of and tostones, troughs of beans and rice and, always, at the center, a slowly roasting pig. This was the province of Juan Cazabon, Nogueira’s uncle and king of the feast. Cazabon would carefully tend the meat, keeping the skin crisp and the meat tender, while shooing away would-be peekers and line-jumpers, until the time was just right.
“He just liked to throw parties and cook the pig,” says Nogueira, who goes by the nickname “Fredo.” “Ever since, I’ve tried to emulate and honor him as much as possible.”
Nogueira is forty five years old, has a beard, a mop of dark hair, and a perpetual air of mild distraction that belies the fact that he’s been building a low-key New Orleans restaurant empire: There’s Vals, the breezy Austin-style Mexican restaurant Nogueira opened on Freret Street with CureCo, the group for which he is executive chef. There’s Cane & Table, where Nogueira’s pan-Caribbean menu — along with one of the French Quarter’s loveliest courtyards and best cocktail menus — has managed to tempt even locals to lower Decatur Street. There’s the High Hat Cafe, which he and partner Ryan Iriarte bought in 2023, saving a much-loved neighborhood stronghold of New Orleans from closure.
Now comes Nogueira’s most personal project to daICafe Conmigo, the tiny lunch-counteIyle cafe that he and Iriarte opened in late January as a love letter to their shared Cuban heritage. With it, the chef continues to quietly put his mark on New Orleans cuisine.
It took a while to get here. Growing up, Nogueira didn’t really care much about New Orleans culture: not the music (he played with bands that favored the darker shades of punk) and not the food, which he and his friends derisively dismissed under the catch-all heading “Gumbo Town.” Certainly, he wasn’t the first teenager to roll his eyes at the culture in his own backyard. (Perhaps you know a tween who can’t imagine anything more booooring than Mardi Gras, a party that half the known universe wishes it could be attending.)
Nor is he the first to take a thing for granted, then appreciate it only when it seemed in danger of disappearing forever. Nogueira was 25 when New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina, followed by the failure of the federal levees. Forced out of the city, he landed in Memphis first but soon headed north, to Chicago, where he had connections in the music world. One night at a party, somebody put on a song by a growl-voiced singer that he mistook for Tom Waits. “Dude, that’s Dr. John!” somebody told him. The reeducation of Alfredo Nogueira had commenced.
At the same time, he found himself drawn into the kitchen. “Everybody in music has to work in restaurants, so that they can afford being in music,” he says. Despite having barely any experience, he began cooking Creole and Cajun food at a popular bar called Analogue. To his surprise, his cuisine was a hit: “Suddenly, I was a chef!” That led to more formal training at Chicago’s One Off Hospitality, Chef Paul Kahan’s award-winning restaurant group. Finally, in 2017, an opportunity with CureCo came up, and Nogueira answered the call of home.
Though the Cuban population of the New Orleans area is relatively small, its roots are deep. Both Cuba and the Crescent City were, for a time, Spanish territories — and both were capitals of the sugar industry. The rhythms and sounds of Cuban music were a crucial part of what would become jazz. In the 1950s (the peak of commerce between the two international ports) Cuba was Louisiana’s largest trading partner; millions of tons of Cuban imports flowed through the Port of New Orleans, while as much as a third of all goods leaving the port were destined for Cuban shores. The economic embargo that followed the Cuban Revolution brought an end to that, but it also brought a new group of Cuban exiles and refugees to the New Orleans area.
Both Nogueira and Iriarte’s families were part of this wave to the New Orleans Cuban community — a community much smaller than those that evolved in places like Miami and New York, but still a place where Cubans carried with them the pride and traditions of their home island. Iriarte’s father narrowly avoided being one of the so-called “Peter Pan” children who were brought unaccompanied to the United States as part of the relocation program known as Operacíon Pedro Pan. (In many instances, they were never reunited with their families.) Nogueira’s father left Havana and became a cadet at The Citadel in South Carolina. He came to New Orleans as part of the school’s color guard, which performed at the Krewe of Rex ball; he fell in love with the city and soon made it his home.
A small gallery of black-and-white photos depicting both families hangs near the back of Cafe Conmigo: Nogueira’s grandfather and namesake, Alfredo, a onetime politician, addressing a Havana crowd; Iriarte’s father and aunt toasting at a Thanksgiving dinner in their new home; and Nogueira’s mother as a child, posing with her four siblings. The restaurant is a bright, white vest pocket of a spot located in the former Ice Cream 504, a stone’s throw from High Hat. You can often catch Nogueira or Iriarte hustling back and forth between the two, as though they were one big restaurant. Leading the menu is the signature cafecito, a coffee whose cutesy name and miniature size belie its ability to levitate you several inches off of your stool; if all the caffeine and sugar on Earth could be condensed into a black hole, it would resemble this drink. A shelf behind the long counter is stacked with classic Cuban sandwiches on pan cubano (Cuban bread) — layered with ham, pork, pickles and cheese — and medianoches, which present the same ingredients on a brioche; all waiting to be toasted on the gleaming silver sandwich presses below. (It remains a mystery as to why the sweeter brioche version is more of a “midnight” snack than its more famous cousin.) Both breads are custom-made for Cafe Conmigo by Ralph Brennan Bakery.
Less well known is a Havana street-food burger known as the frita; it’s made with chorizo-spiced beef, basted with a sauce of ketchup and vinegar, and topped with a teetering haystack of shoestring potatoes. Near the cash register, a case holds freshly baked puff pastries filled with canonical Cuban flavors: sweet guava jelly, cream cheese, guava with cream cheese and savory ground beef picadillo. Completing the transit from breakfast to cocktail hour, and perhaps helping you come down from that cafecito, there is a small cocktail menu offering a classic mojito and a Floridita daiquiri, among other libations.
The result is the kind of casual but focused cafe that any neighborhood would be lucky to call its own. It’s also Nogueira’s way of officially taking up the responsibility of stewarding his family’s traditions. His uncle Juan, master of the pig roast, passed away 18 years ago; Juan’s son Pedro, a doctor who had taken on guardianship of the familial cooking secrets alongside Nogueira, also died, at the age of 57, in 2023.
“This is the place I’ve wanted to open forever. The place I’ve needed to open,” Nogueira says. In the restaurant’s first few weeks, a steady stream of Cuban New Orleanians have stopped by — some Nogueira knows and some he doesn’t. He’s watched as they’ve peered curiously around, tasted the food, closed their eyes for a moment and then nodded quietly in approval.
“It makes me wish I’d done this 10 years ago,” he says.
