Willie Mae's Scotch House

Willie Mae's Scotch House, originally located in Treme, opened as a bar in 1957. After a year, the bar moved to its current location in the Sixth Ward, near Treme and the French Quarter. Willie Mae's Scotch House originally featured a bar, a barbershop, and a beauty salon in the front. By the 1970s, however, the beauty salon closed, and taking advantage of the available space owner Willie Mae Seaton expanded the bar into a full-service restaurant.

The restaurant quickly became famous for its soul food and especially its fried chicken. Fried chicken is something of a New Orleans speciality thanks to the efforts of Willie Mae's and Al Copeland and the creation of Popeye's. The restaurant garnered national attention in 1995 when the James Beard Foundation awarded Willie Mae's with an award for "America's Classic Restaurant for the Southern Region."  The fried chicken often appears on lists of America's best fried chicken. The restaurant continued to grow in popularity until it was nearly destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. As with other famous New Orleans restaurants--like Dooky Chase--Willie Mae's eventually reopened in 2007 thanks to the support of local and national organizations like the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization devoted to the preservation of Southern food culture.

Currently, Willie Mae's kitchen is run by Seaton's great-granddaughter Kerry Seaton Stewart and still serves the famous fried chicken.