Inside N7, the #10 Best New Restaurant 2016
Franck Bohbot1/13Everything about N7 feels meticulously curated, from the glass in the windows to the antique dogeared Michelin guides behind the bar. But that cherry red vintage Citroen DS parked in the driveway? A perfect coincidence. "I bought it seven years ago, before N7 was even an idea," laughed Walker. "I started parking it on this lot to keep it off the street, and the restaurant kind of just came up around it."
Franck Bohbot2/13The couple tends to think of the spot as a natural wine bar first and foremost, inspired by the kinds of casual-chic, linger-for-hours-over-a-few-bottles-and-some-snacks places they fell in love with while traveling in Europe. "We're really into natural wine," explains Walker. "This is all basically an excuse to be around wine. If we weren't doing this, we woudn't have such a great excuse to read about and drink and enjoy this stuff."
Franck Bohbot4/13It's rare to dine in a space that feels as carefully designed and deeply personal as N7. At a time when anyone with deep pockets can hire a big time designer to rustle up vintage-this and antique-that, nearly all of the accents at the restaurant come from the couple's personal "collection." "The posters and lithographs are mine, things I brought with me from France," says Walker. "I'm kind of a hoarder in that way. Almost all of the furniture—chairs, tables, etc—are antique French stuff that we had shipped over or collected over the years."
Franck Bohbot5/13The idea for the N7 came organically. "We bought the place and once we'd cleaned it up, we started inviting friends over for barbecues in the space," recalls Yamaguchi. "And after a while we decided it might be nice to have a restaurant here. It just made sense."
Franck Bohbot7/13Walker and Yamaguchi bought the lot where N7 stands now after Hurricane Katrina. They spent the next four years slowly hauling out tons of garbage and transforming the former tire shop into a usable space. “It was a lot of sweat equity,” recalls Walker. “The place was totally rotten. Dragging all the junk out became our morning exercise.” The idea of opening a restaurant in the space was far from their first idea—originally, Walker was thinking of turning it into a video-editing studio.
Franck Bohbot8/13The yard around the building was completely full of trash and wildly overgrown when the couple bought it. After pulling out all the weeds, they slowly started populating the garden, sometimes gleaning unloved plants from behind nurseries. The result feels like a subtropical secret garden hidden in the middle of a city block.
Franck Bohbot9/13N7's design is influenced heavily by Walker's experience as a filmmaker. "The whole thing was based on old French New Wave films," he explains. "I definitely see N7 as a set. Every night people come, they're in a living movie. Most of the places where people sit, there's a shot in their vision, somewhere to look, something to rest their eyes on."
Franck Bohbot10/13Co-owners Yamaguchi and Walker met while working at a sushi joint together in the early 2000s—she had moved from Japan to NOLA to study English, and he was in grad school for film. They live with their young daughter and four dogs just a short walk down a gravel path from the restaurant. "We go back and forth throughout service," says Walker. "It's really nice, it works. It feels like we've got a garden party in our yard every night."
Franck Bohbot11/13If you've had a hard time finding intel on N7 online, well, you're not the only one. Walker and Yamaguchi didn't have so much of a press strategy upon opening as they did an anti-press strategy. Of their no-website, no-phone, no-social-media approach to owning a restaurant, Walker says that "it felt like an experiment: Could we do this whole thing without advertising, without putting the word out in any formal kind of way?" Indeed.
Franck Bohbot12/13The "Can to Table" section of N7's menu is reason alone for a visit. The restaurant stocks a rotating cast of supremely delicious tinned seafood items—lobster rillettes, baby eels, pristine smoked sardines—many of which they have to import directly from producers in Europe. "We want a meal here to feel like a French picnic," Walker explains. "You pull over on the side of the road, open a can of fish, break a baguette, open a bottle of wine."
