If you have searched for “cajun food in Madrid” or “New Orleans restaurant”, you will have seen the three words — soul food, Creole, cajun — used almost at random, sometimes in the same sentence and sometimes on the same plate. It is worth separating them, because each tells a different story, and because knowing which is which changes what you order.

Soul food: the African American tradition of the South

Soul food is the African American cooking of the southern United States, rooted in West African culinary techniques brought by enslaved people and developed over generations from limited ingredients. It is not a regional cuisine in the strictly geographical sense: it is a cuisine born of a specific community and a specific history.

Fried chicken is one of its most emblematic dishes, and historically it represents creativity and resilience — making something memorable out of scarce resources. Long cooking, slow-simmered dishes and braised greens belong to this tradition too.

It is the tradition our sauces come from: cooked dishes, not dressings, from family recipes over seventy years old.

Creole cooking: the city, the eighteenth century and the mix

Creole cooking was born in urban eighteenth-century New Orleans, a port city where French, Spanish, African and Caribbean influences lived side by side. It is city food and, in the context of its time, relatively well-off food: it uses butter, tomato, seafood and more refined techniques.

Its emblematic dishes are gumbo, jambalaya and fried green tomatoes. If a Louisiana sauce contains tomato, you are almost always in Creole territory.

It is also the world our house comes from: the colonial French Quarter architecture with its balconies and ferns, the jazz, the bourbon, the wallpapered rooms.

Cajun cooking: the country, the bayous and the roux

Cajun is the cooking of the Acadian French settlers — expelled from what is now Nova Scotia — who made their home in the rural bayous of Louisiana. It is country food: more rustic, built on what the land and the water around it give.

Its technical base is the roux, the toasted flour-and-fat mixture that thickens and colours its dishes, and it rarely uses tomato. That is the most useful shortcut for telling it apart from Creole. It is also the tradition of powerful spice blends, and that is where our chicken’s crust comes from: a spiced, cajun-style crust.

The summary, one line each

Soul food: African American cooking of the South. Fried chicken, long braises. The history of a community.
Creole: New Orleans the city, eighteenth century, European, African and Caribbean mix. Tomato, gumbo, jambalaya.
Cajun: Acadians in the rural bayous. Roux, spice, no tomato.

Why we insist on the distinction

Because respecting a cuisine and using its words as decoration are not the same thing. At Harold’s all three traditions are present, each in its place: the Creole world in the colonial house, the jazz and the fourteen bourbons; the cajun crust on the chicken; soul food in the sauces and in the idea that every recipe has a story behind it.

When someone asks us what kind of cooking we do, the honest answer is that: all three, knowing which is which.

Where to try it in Madrid

There are other places in the city working the Creole repertoire with gumbos and jambalayas, and they are very good. What there is nowhere else is a house specialising exclusively in Southern fried chicken, with the Louisiana recipe unmodified, inside a three-room colonial house, with live jazz one night a month. That is what we do, at C/ Alonso Cano, 60, Chamberí.

If it is your first time and you want to understand all of this in a single order: chicken pieces with bourbon sauce and a homemade bourbon lemonade. All three traditions are on that plate at once.