NEW ORLEANS — Nini Nguyen’s kitchen is cramped and chaotic on a recent January night.
Nguyen, 36, lives in Uptown New Orleans, where the city’s notorious unruliness resolves itself into plotted blocks and rows of prim houses edged with lacy fretwork. She has half of a “double,” what most of America calls a duplex, and her small kitchen was not built to fit her and the two fellow chefs she enlisted to prepare dishes that would be photographed the next day for her first cookbook.
