Rougarou

Rougarou takes Southern food and refuses the clichés — no gumbo, no shrimp and grits, none of the dishes that have calcified into shorthand for the genre. Instead there's gas station chicken on a stick worked over with comeback sauce and pepper jelly, hot and sour catfish that pulls in an Asian angle without diluting the Southern backbone, and Granddad's braised chicken drowned in a tangy white barbecue sauce that tastes like someone's actual family recipe rather than a menu invention. Buttermilk pie closes it out, custardy and unfussy.

The bar isn't an afterthought here — it's the room's center of gravity, run by people who know cocktails, evident in a muffaletta martini that somehow tastes like tapenade and briny olive without losing the vodka. That's the kind of specificity that makes a bar program worth building a restaurant around.

Five Points gets a Southern kitchen with real ideas and the execution to back them, not a theme. The Bib Gourmand recognition isn't the reason to go — it's confirmation of what's already true at the table. Rougarou earned its spot the hard way, one plate at a time.