Savor Scout › Food guides › Beignets
How to find good beignets
Beignets are New Orleans' square doughnuts — puffy, hollow fried dough buried under powdered sugar, served hot with café au lait. They must be eaten within minutes of frying.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- Fried to order — Hot, puffy and hollow inside.
- Light, not greasy — Clean, hot oil.
- Plenty of powdered sugar — A drift of it.
- Served in threes — The New Orleans tradition.
- Café au lait — Chicory coffee with hot milk.
What to order
- An order of three — Hot.
- Café au lait — With chicory.
- Filled beignets — Some places offer them.
- Savoury beignets — Crab or crawfish, if available.
- Share — They are rich.
Where to find Beignets
Beignets is mostly found at Cajun and Creole restaurants, so that is where to look. Open listings put 3,169 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.
Cities with the most
New Orleans, LA 213 Houston, TX 94 Baton Rouge, LA 60 Lafayette, LA 50 Dallas, TX 29 Austin, TX 26 Los Angeles, CA 24 Chicago, IL 24
Campuses with the most within a mile
UL Lafayette 12 Delgado Community College 8 Tulane University 7 TSU 6 HCC 6 City Colleges of Chicago-Harold Washington College 6
A few to start with
- Public Service — New Orleans, LA
311 Baronne St, New Orleans - Ragin Cajun — Houston, TX
930 Main St, Houston - Cork's Cajun Fried Fish and Shrimp — Baton Rouge, LA
5131 Government St, Baton Rouge - Pat's Downtown — Lafayette, LA
107 E Main St, Lafayette - NOLA Brasserie — Dallas, TX
1201 Main St, Dallas - Roux Restaurant — Austin, TX
214 E 6th St, Austin
Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for beignets, fried to order and café au lait, and favours places where reviewers mention they arrive hot.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX