Louisiana is the home of three regional culinary traditions: the Cajun foodways of rural south Louisiana, the Creole foodways of urban New Orleans and its environs, and the Anglo-Southern foodways of rural north Louisiana. New Orleans food - commonly called "Creole"- is a mirror of the city's cultural complexity. Originally part of France's colonial empire, New Orleans is now a multi-ethnic city in which ethnic identity is often overridden by a pan-city identity, a distinctively New Orleans sense of place.