New Orleans has always been near the top of my bucket list. Even though there are fancier, further away places I want to go, New Orleans was always in the top five on my list of must-go places. For me, there was just always something so appealing and colourful about the character of the city — the blending of French, Spanish, Creole, Cajun, African, and Native American cultures created a lot of beautiful elements in New Orleans: the spicy food, the Old World-style architecture, the creative cocktails, the sparkling festivals, and of course, the jazz.
Since Katrina, New Orleans has been steadily rebuilding, but you can still see leftovers from the devastation that hit the city. In many neighbourhoods, particularly in areas in the Treme, the oldest African-American neighbourhood in the United States, you can still see ruined homes and holes cut in roofs where homeowners had to climb on top of their homes to wait for help. However, the beauty of the city still remains, and it is heartening to see so much energy and music in a city that has gone through so much.
We arrived in Louisiana in early March, knowing that Mardi Gras had been early this year, in February. Although I am a bit curious about seeing Mardi Gras in New Orleans, for a first visit, I think it was probably better to miss it. As I was going to the city with my mother and sister and not a bachelorette party, we planned on mostly eating and wandering around rather than drinking heavily on Bourbon Street and watching people get flashed for green and purple beads.
We checked into the Soniat House on Monday evening, a beautiful 1830s Creole mansion in the French Quarter that had been redone into a hotel. Located on Chartres Street away from the rowdier areas of the French Quarter, the Soniat was a beautiful and relaxing retreat, complete with hand-picked antiques, an old Parisian-style elevator, a lounge with an honour bar, and old-fashioned Southern hospitality.
Our first stop that night was to Arnaud’s, a restaurant that had been open since 1918 and was known for its “jazz brunch” and French 75 bar. Arnaud’s was romantically lit, with a jazz trio stopping by tables to play, made up of a cellist, a trumpet player, and a banjo player. They called themselves the “Gumbo Trio”, a cute name that was likely aimed at the tourists, as we are all obsessed with gumbo when we visit New Orleans.
Since the bar attached to Arnaud’s was the French 75, I ordered a French 75 cocktail, a drink made from gin, champagne, lemon juice, and sugar. It was a lovely first taste of New Orleans, golden and sparkling and tasting of France’s influence on the city.
For an appetizer, I did in fact order the gumbo, which is not always served in a huge bowl in New Orleans. Often I’ve found on menus, gumbo is also served as an appetizer or a side. The one at Arnaud’s was made from chicken and andouille sausage, a common gumbo combination. Gumbo is a stew/soup made from a mixture of roux (flour and oil/fat), cooked with the holy trinity (bell pepper, onion, and celery) and whatever meat happens to be on hand. I will discuss gumbo a little further below, when I get to the New Orleans School of Cooking. The gumbo at Arnaud’s was warming and tasty, though not particularly photogenic (below).
For my main course I ordered the shrimp and grits. I have heard some people say that New Orleans has four seasons: crawfish, crab, shrimp, and oyster. I managed to eat them all during this trip, but shrimp was probably the one I had the most often. Grits, for those not from the south, is maize/ground corn grains boiled to make a porridge-like substance, kind of like polenta. Grits are often served with cheese and are served with a variety of different foods, such as breakfast (eggs and bacon), gravy, or fried fish. Shrimp and grits is a common combination, and I quite enjoyed the two together at Arnaud’s, where the shrimp was fried and the grits were cheesy and served with chopped scallions and a tasty sauce.
We left Arnaud’s stuffed and excited for the next few days. We had a few things planned for our vacation: a tour of the city outside of the French Quarter, a day trip to see alligators in Cajun Country, an evening of jazz Preservation Hall… but we began our first full day with some more Southern hospitality from the Soniat house. They delivered breakfast to our room: a basket of freshly baked biscuits with butter, preserves made from Ponchatoula strawberries, chicory coffee that came in a silver pot, and freshly squeezed orange juice.
It was a perfect and cozy breakfast. Apparently, chicory coffee is ground coffee mixed with roasted and ground chicory root. Traditionally, chicory was mixed with coffee in order to help coffee supplies stretch. The flavour is different but similar to coffee, and the practice of mixing the two has continued as people began to develop a taste for it.
We ate our biscuits in our room, although we could have also taken them downstairs, to the Soniat House’s beautiful indoor courtyard. Many old houses in the French Quarter have beautiful gardens, although in the past, courtyards used to be used for more practical purposes, such as for drying clothes.
After breakfast, we spent the day exploring the basics of the French Quarter. We passed lines of colourful French-style buildings with wrought-iron balconies until we came to Jackson Square, the main hub of the neighbourhood. There, we saw the St. Louis Cathedral, a statue of Andrew Jackson, the famous Café du Monde, and a view of the Mississippi river.
The best thing about Jackson Square, of course, is the buskers. Buskers are often frequent touristy areas worldwide, but in New Orleans, they are particularly fun to listen to. In the French Quarter, we managed to see several brass bands, a well-known clarinetist Doreen Ketchens, and a band that played strange electronic music with unique-looking African instruments. Below was one of the first bands we watched in Jackson Square.
On this day, we also glimpsed the infamous Bourbon Street for the first time, and saw the cast and crew of NCIS: New Orleans playing somewhere off St. Louis Street.
For lunch, we had initially planned on having po’boys at a place called “Killer Po’Boys”. However, we ended up getting a bit confused and lost, as actually, the po’boy place didn’t have any sign indicating po’boys. It turned out that “Killer Po’Boys” is at the back of a bar called the “Erin Rose”, but we did not realize this at the time. Because of this, we went instead to a more famous but apparently less highly-reviewed place called Johnny’s Po’Boys. Apparently, despite not being the “best po’boys in town”, Johnny’s still sells the most po’boys in New Orleans, due to its location near the tourist centre in the French Quarter. Despite being touristy, though, I had heard it was fairly authentic, and I really enjoyed my sandwich anyway.
Johnny’s was a crowded place with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, a menu board listed with every kind of po’boy filling you could think of, and a hard-working staff that seemed undaunted by the crowds of people clamoring for sandwiches.
Po’boys is a contraction of “poor boy”. According to legend, the sandwich was created when strikes were taking place in 1929. Bennie and Clovis Martin, who had opened up a restaurant and coffee stand in the French Market in 1922, showed their support to strikers by providing large sandwiches to them. Whenever they saw a striker coming, one of them would say “Here comes another poor boy”. Then the name apparently passed on to the sandwiches themselves.
What makes a po’boy a po’boy is the bread, cut out of a baguette or other French-style bread. You can get it “all dressed” (onions, tomatoes, lettuce, mayo, pickles) or not, and the fillings range from ham to oysters to alligator. The most popular are roast beef or shrimp.
My mother, sister, and I ordered catfish, oyster, and shrimp, respectively, and bought a small side of gumbo. Each po’boy was delicious, though think my favourite was the catfish. Everything was deep fried but still delicious.
After more exploring of the French Quarter neighbourhood, we had dinner at NOLA, which my family had visited for their first trip to New Orleans. Raving about the place, they booked a spot again.
NOLA (named for an abbreviation of the city) is one of Emeril Lagasse’s restaurants, which opened in 1992. The restaurant is big enough that we had to take an elevator to get to our table, and the menu was hugely creative.
To drink, I ordered a Sazerac, which is legally declared the official cocktail of New Orleans. It is made up of a Herbsaint-lined glass (whatever that means), Peychaud’s bitters, Sazerac rye whiskey, simple syrup, and a twist of lemon. Lately, I have been into stronger drinks, so I quite like getting a Sazerac. The presentation to me looked a little weird — the glass was not even filled halfway so it looked like they were cheaping out on the booze. However, during my time in New Orleans I ordered more than one Sazerac, and it looked like this both times.
Looks kind of stupid to me, but whatever.
For my main course, I ordered NOLA’s buttermilk fried chicken, though I was tempted to get shrimp and grits again. My sister and mother both ordered the shrimp again, which was sautéed instead of fried and served with cheddar grits, smoked bacon, and crimini mushrooms. It was in my opinion slightly better than the shrimp at Arnaud’s, though I had enjoyed Arnaud’s shrimp just the same.
I was pretty satisfied with my fried chicken, which was served with a side of fancy “macaroni and cheese” (not actually made with macaroni pasta), skillet greens, and rosemary gravy. Though not particularly photogenic, everything was delicious, with the chicken nice and crisp, the greens sweet and flavourful, and the gravy light enough that it didn’t make me feel gross or get the chicken all soggy.
We couldn’t resist getting some dessert, as everything looked so tempting. Between the three of us, we ordered two desserts: the banana pudding layer cake and the sticky toffee bread pudding. Bananas are used in a lot of New Orleans desserts (traditionally New Orleans is a port between the Caribbean and South America), the most famous one being Bananas Foster. Bread pudding is also very common on New Orleans menus, as it is a way people in the South like to use up old bread.
The banana pudding layer cake was both light and chocolatey, made with a graham cracker crust, fudge sauce, and chantilly cream. I essentially always enjoy bread pudding, and this one was no exception; it had that sweet, caramalized crust on top and was served with cranberry compote, cinnamon-toffee ice cream, and cranberry curd. As I said before, NOLA was very creative with their dishes!
On Day Two, we had an interesting activity planned for our first day. We went to the New Orleans School of Cooking on St. Louis Street, which we had seen across from Johnny’s Po-boy’s the other day. Passing a Voodoo Makeup store and a sign advertising a haunted condominium, we went into the Louisiana General Store, where we browsed the shelves of hot sauce, dirty rice seasoning, and packaged pralines while we waited for our names to be called.
The New Orleans School of Cooking offers both hands-on and demonstration cooking classes. We were just taking a demonstration, which would be shorter and meant we could be lazy and learn to cook without actually cooking.
Our teacher was a large man and former football player named Kevin, who liked teasing his audience and calling his food “baby” to get it to cook well. He would be teaching us how to make four dishes in just a few hours, and he started with bread pudding.
The first lesson that he taught us is that New Orleans cooking isn’t really all that strict. Anything can go into a gumbo or jambalaya, as these meals started out as poor cooking where people would just use what they had. By putting their ingredients into a gumbo, you could stretch out a bit of meat to feed a large number of people. Even bread pudding wasn’t that strict, even though baking usually is more of an exact science.
“Salted or unsalted butter?” Kevin asked the crowd, as he started on the bread pudding. He heard a mumble of both replies. “The answer is,” he went on, “It doesn’t actually matter.”
Apparently, Kevin’s grandmother had made a lot of bread pudding with raisins in his youth, so he usually opted for puddings without them. He began mixing together wet and dry ingredients until it resembled “oatmeal”, and then started on making it into a Bananas Foster Bread Pudding. He did this by mixing in ripened bananas and banana liqueur.
Pictured below (the finished product had a caramelized crust of brown sugar, which was added near the end, and a rum sauce).
Popping the pudding into the oven, Kevin then got started on the gumbo and jambalaya.
Both gumbo and jambalaya required a mixture of the “holy trinity” (bell peppers, onions, and celery), which gave the dish moisture. According to Kevin, it is this moisture and not a huge amount of spices that give New Orleans dishes their character. He started on frying up the holy trinity for the jambalaya before he got to work on the gumbo.
Gumbo, as I mentioned before, is begun by making a “roux”, a mixture of flour and oil/fat. Depending on taste, you can either cook your roux until it gets to a peanut-butter colour, or a dark, chocolate brown colour. The chocolate brown is often more preferred, but that can take a long while of stirring. According to Kevin, most people burn their roux on the first try.
In his gumbo, Kevin added the trinity, a whole chopped chicken, and andouille. He did not add okra, a green vegetable that was apparently brought over by African slaves to America, although to some people, a gumbo is not really gumbo without okra, which is the ingredient that gave gumbo its name. However, because Kevin was cooking for a large group, he did not add it, as some people find that okra can get a bit slimy.
As for the andouille ingredient, andouille is a smoked sausage which was brought to Louisiana by French immigrants and the Acadians (exiled French-Canadians from Canada’s east coast). Andouille is pretty difficult to find outside of the American South, and according to Kevin, replicated andouille tends to be over-spiced. According to Kevin, andouille adds so much flavour to a gumbo that extra spices are not necessarily needed.
In the jambalaya, Kevin used a regular kielbasa sausage. The main difference between gumbo and jambalaya is that gumbo has the roux, and jambalaya is a rice-based dish. Gumbo can have rice in it, but jambalaya more or less needs it to be jambalaya. Other ingredients can vary in the two of them, such as meat and/or spices.
Both the gumbo and the jambalaya were delicious. Kevin had been right about the andouille — though no hot sauce or spices had been added, the gumbo was beautifully spicy. Despite this, I added a bit of garlic hot sauce and gumbo filé powder, which is often added at the last minute to Creole and Cajun cuisine. Gumbo filé powder is made of the powdered leaves of the sassafras tree, and has a spicy, fruity flavour.
The jambalaya was also quite good, though I preferred the andouille to the regular sausage. Still, the rice dish was great with a side of garlic hot sauce!
The last thing that Kevin made was pralines, which is a popular sweet in New Orleans. Pralines are essentially just butter, sugar, and pecans baked in an oven. I think there were a few more ingredients than that, but that is what they tasted like.
Pralines were based on the French dessert of the same name, which were essentially almonds covered in sugar or chocolate. In Louisiana, however, due to the Mississippi river and bayous, pecans were plentiful in the state. As a result, they were used instead in their own version of the praline, which is now much different from the original French praline. New Orleans pralines are best served fresh and warm, and are not as good taken back in a box.
After stuffing ourselves at the New Orleans School of Cookery, we took a tour around the other neighbourhoods of the city.
First, we headed into the Marigny/Bywater district, where many Creole and Caribbean communities settled. There, we saw many shotgun houses, named for the fact that the buildings were very narrow, with rooms arranged one behind the other and doors at each end of the house. If you were to shoot a shotgun through the house, it was said, the bullet would go through the whole house and out the other window to shoot a chicken in the backyard.
Aside from being shotguns houses, many of the homes were very colourful and reminiscent of the Caribbean, painted in bright pinks, yellows, blues, and greens.
From here, we also passed through the Musician’s Village, a neighbourhood set up after Hurricane Katrina in order to help musicians who had lost their homes. The Musician’s Village offered affordable rent for musicians and set up the Ellis Marsalis Centre for Music, a school where kids could learn to play music for cheap, with instruments that were one hundred percent donated.
After Marigny/Bywater, we toured the Lafayette Cemetary #3, the New Orleans City Park, and the Garden District. The cemetary was huge and impressive, while the city park was calm and relaxing, filled with old trees growing Spanish moss, and an interesting sculpture garden.
The Garden District is where many of the huge antebellum mansions are, many of which are owned or formerly owned by celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Nicolas Cage, or Anne Rice. The garden district was also lined with many trees still glittering with the purple, green, and gold of Mardi Gras beads. Though Mardi Gras beads are meant to only be worn and thrown around actual Mardi Gras, the beads are still seen all over the city year-round — around tourists’ necks, in shops, and mostly, hanging off trees, wrought-iron balconies, and even on electric wires.
As we’d had a pretty long, busy day, we relaxed at the Soniat House before heading out down Magazine Street to Uptown, where we had dinner reservations La Petite Grocerie.
La Petite Grocerie was, as its name suggests, a French restaurant, one that had been converted from an old grocery store. The building was painted a cute, cheerful yellow colour, and the interior was cozy and romantically-lit by candlelight, but best of all was the menu, which really highlighted Creole cuisine and Louisiana game.
To start, I had the blue crab beignets. I am from the West Coast of Canada, so blue crab is pretty unknown to us (we often eat dungeness). Unlike dungeness and other kinds of crab I had eaten, blue crabs are native to the Atlantic ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. It is apparently best eaten in a crab cake, which is lucky, as that was essentially the filling of the blue crab beignet. I quite liked it; blue crab is quite sweet and the mixture was quite tasty.
As for the outside, beignets are a French doughnut that are usually eaten sweet. So, in this case, as I was eating a savoury beignet, I was basically eating a blue crab fritter, except the dough was a lot more pillowy and cakey. Overall, I enjoyed the appetizer a lot, though there was a bit too much fried dough for me! I might have preferred it as a regular crab cake.
After taking a while to decide between this and a shellfish stew, I ordered the alligator bolognese as my main dish. La Petite Grocerie hand-pulls their own pasta, and I wanted to try alligator at least once while I was in New Orleans. I had had it before, in Vancouver, but I knew it would probably be better here as it would be much fresher, and the South probably knew how to use it better.
The bolognese was great, served with a deep fried egg and lovely bucatini. Served bolognese-style, the alligator tasted a bit like pork.
Lastly, the three of us split a lovely cherry clafoutis, a French-style cake, served warm with vanilla ice cream and powdered sugar. The whole meal was delicious!
On Day Three we woke up early, as we would be heading into Cajun Country that day, to go on a swamp tour and hopefully see some wildlife. Since the tour wouldn’t be providing meals, we decided to beat the crowds and check off the “must-do” of going to Café du Monde, where they only served beignets and coffee.
For some reason, going to Café du Monde is one of the most touristy things to do in New Orleans, which is funny since there are so many different foods to try, and so much jazz to listen to. So we lined up at the green-and-white striped café and got a table in the crowded room, watching frazzled waitresses run around, wiping powdered sugar from tables and serving mounds of the French doughnuts to tourists in dorky shorts.
We ordered two orders of beignets to split between the two of us, and three cafés au lait.
I’m actually not a huge doughnut person — though I obviously love to eat, doughnuts are usually something I can either take or leave, but can also stop myself from eating if I’m feeling fat. And since Café du Monde was super touristy, I expected the beignets to be pretty overrated.
However, it turns out I really like beignets, and don’t actually think they’re that overrated at all. Unlike the doughnuts I am familiar with, which can sometimes be overly sweet, heavy, and greasy, beignets are light and cakey, and though they are served under excessive mounds of powdered sugar, you can control how much of the sugar you actually want to keep on the fritter. I’m not saying they were healthy or anything, but they tasted great and I enjoyed every bite. The café au lait too, made from chicory coffee and milk, was a good complement to the beignets, washing down all of the sugar.
Filled with fried goodness and coffee, we got on our bus which would take us out of the city and into Cajun Country. New Orleans, though it is filled with Cajun and Creole culture, is not actually Cajun Country itself. To get there, you need to head across Lake Pontchartrain to get to the lush countryside, filled with bayous, wildlife, and, sadly, a few homes recovering from Hurricane Katrina.
Our tour was through the Honey Island Swamp, an area that got its name from Tupelo honey. Tupelo honey is harvested from swamps including Honey Island Swamp, and is a special kind of honey because it never crystallizes.
Touring the swamp was a bit surreal, knowing that everywhere you went there was hidden wildlife, trying to camouflage with the Spanish moss, lilies, and rice plants. Apparently, there are over eighty alligators in the Honey Island Swamp. Unfortunately, because it was an overcast day, we only saw one, swimming hidden beneath the lilies. Usually, when it is sunny, alligators like to sun themselves on the banks or rocks, but that day I guess was too cold.
However, we did see a raccoon, turtles, birds, a snake, and a whole family of wild boar. The group was mostly females, led by a bossy great-grandmother boar that shoved the others out of the way for food.
When we got back to the French Quarter, it was around 2:00pm, so we were quite hungry. Walking around the French Market, we stopped by the Market Café to get some lunch. Inspired by the bayou, where apparently the raccoon we had seen was fishing for “mudbugs” in the water, we ordered two appetizers of boiled crawfish to split between the three of us, and were treated to the marvellous feast below.
Actually, despite the size of the plates, this was actually a good amount of food for us, and not because we are pigs like it may seem. In fact, crawfish are quite small and their heads, which take up the majority of the crawfish’s body, are not to be eaten, as they are filled mostly with guts. The meat is only in the tail, so once you remove the head, there actually isn’t too much meat in a single crawfish. Nevertheless, it was a fun, messy, and delicious meal, which we spent mostly in silence, figuring out the best technique to rip the heads off so we could get at the sweet meat. The crawfish was served with lemons and a bottle of “Crystal”, a Louisiana hot sauce which we used to dip our crawfish.
Afterwards, we went briefly to the Treme, which is a neighbourhood that is somewhat difficult for tourists to access. My mother was looking for a cookbook shop called “The Kitchen Witch”. The Kitchen Witch used to be in the French Quarter, but due to rocketing prices of rent, they had to move out to the Treme, where their business has gone down by 80% due to the lack of foot traffic.
The Kitchen Witch, though, was an absolutely gorgeous shop, decked out in dazzling New Orleans colours of magenta, emerald, fuschia, and gold. Everywhere you looked there was colour; sparkling fairy lights lining a cover of old jazz albums, blue and orange carpets lining the ground, rainbow paintings hanging on the walls, and sashes of red, yellow, and orange hanging from the ceiling. The shop was run by an adorable couple (and their pets, which included a kitten and a sweet, eleven-year-old lab named Sophia), who owned an impressive amount of cookbooks. I picked a few jazz albums from their music section, and my mother bought a few cookbooks to support their business. I encourage you to check it out if you’re in town!
Back in the French Quarter, for dinner we had our most expensive meal of the trip (and probably of our lives). It was at the restaurant Antoine’s, the oldest restaurant in New Orleans, open since 1840. Antoine’s is a New Orleans institution, still run and owned by the same family that owned it in 1840. The restaurant business is taken very seriously here; waiters have to do an apprenticeship before they become a server, and then they often end up serving there for their whole lives. The team of waiters, dressed in black and white, sometimes pass their jobs down to their descendants as well. Our waiter, Eddie, had been there for thirty years.
To start with, I ordered the oysters. The order consisted of six oysters: Oysters Rockefeller, Oysters Thermidor, and Oysters Bienville. Antoine’s is most famous for the Rockefeller, which many restaurants have apparently tried to replicate. Other restaurants, Eddie explained, often tried to use spinach in order to replicate the recipe, but there is no spinach in the dish. The recipe is a closely guarded secret, but he could tell us that they used mustard greens and celery, and that’s about all he would say. The Oysters Rockefeller sauce was apparently created in 1889.
As for the others, Thermidor was baked on the half shell with a bacon and tomato sauce, and Bienville was baked on the half shell with white wine, onions, pimento, and fresh peppers. I think I liked the Bienville the best, but the Rockefeller was quite good as well, although I’d read in some guidebooks that it was overrated. But what do I know — actually, I think it was one of the best things I had tried the whole trip.
For my main course, I had the Pompano Pontchartrain — a delicate white fish from the Lake Pontchartrain, served with lump crabmeat sautéed in butter. The fish was delicious, with a nice white meat and crispy skin.
Also impressive, in terms of theatrics as well as taste, was the dessert. We ordered the cherries jubilee to split between the three of us. Eddie made a show of flambéeing the cherries in front of us, pouring the flaming mixture from a high altitude several times before drizzling a little around the pot, to show us how cool the flames were. He then spooned the cherries over rounded scoops of vanilla ice cream. Though I don’t ordinarily eat a lot of cooked fruit, I enjoyed these ones. You could still taste the booze despite the fact it had been mostly burned off.
The meal was delicious, but it was also great because it was an experience. After dinner, Eddie took us on a tour of the restaurant. We had been eating in the Main Dining Room, but Antoine’s has many differently-themed dining rooms, such as the 1840 Room, the Dungeon, the Rex Room, the Escargot Room, and Last Room. The Rex Room was the most beautiful, decked out in green and gold and a crystal chandelier. Apparently, this room is meant for the Mardi Gras King.
In addition to the many dining rooms, photographs of celebrities line the walls, to show off who has eaten there. Eddie told us he had personally waited on celebrities such as Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage. When I asked what Nicolas Cage was like, Eddie told us that “he had a lot on his mind”, whatever that means!
Antoine’s also has an impressively large wine cellar, which we also had a chance to see.
That night, we tried to get into Preservation Hall, but the line was a bit too long. Preservation Hall can only fit about a hundred people at a time, so you have to line up at least an hour early if you want to get tickets. Because of this, after dinner we just got a drink at Pat O’Brien’s instead. Pat O’Brien’s is famous for their bright pink, syrupy Hurricanes and their flaming outdoor fountain. It’s apparently a tourist “must-do”. To me, it wasn’t a huge deal if you had to miss it, but I had a great time sitting in the outdoor courtyard before it rained, drinking gigantic passionfruit cocktails.
On Day Four, we spent a leisurely morning walking around the French Quarter, taking in the sights. We passed the LaLaurie Mansion and the Cornstalk Hotel, which are apparently both haunted (although, apparently no good New Orleans house is not haunted). In the Cornstalk Hotel, you can apparently hear children running around, and there have apparently been guests who have woken up with photographs taken of them, asleep. The LaLaurie Mansion is even creepier, as apparently the LaLaurie couple tortured slaves in hideous, Human Centipede-style ways there.
For an early lunch, we went to the Napoleon House, a beautiful, atmosphere bar/restaurant, which apparently makes the best muffuletta in town. It has a lovely, old-fashioned interior and bar, where their speciality is serving cocktails made from Pimm’s.
We sat outside in the courtyard, enjoying the balmy, not-yet-humid Louisiana climate as we ordered our food. I had a Pimm’s ginger julep, made with Pimm’s, soda, mint syrup, and ginger beer. We also ordered a muffuletta sandwich to split between the three of us, with a side of red beans and rice.
Muffulettas are huge sandwiches, made from a huge wheel of French bread. They are sandwiches that were originally made to last a person throughout the day, so we thought it would be best to split one. Muffulettas are made with ham, Genoa salami, pastrami, swiss and provolone cheese, and olive salad, baked in an oven until the cheese melts. Our sandwich was served with pickles and pickled peppers, and sliced three ways. I’m not sure if it was the best muffuletta in town, but it was definitely one of my favourite meals in New Orleans. The red beans and rice, too, which is a popular dish throughout New Orleans, was also delicious and a great complement to the sandwich!
Afterwards, we toured a few museums, including the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, an old 1823 apothecary which was converted into a museum to teach people about traditional medicines and bitters. The museum included exhibits on the discovery of cures as well as superstitious, religious, and incorrect treatment of diseases. There was even a section on voodoo cures included.
After wandering the streets and checking out a few more buskers, we actually went to a voodoo museum, which was intended to teach people about the historic origins of voodoo and correct misconceptions. The museum was actually quite beautiful as it was filled with a lot of bright colours and altarpieces covered with offerings. Unlike in religions such as Christianity, voodoo is not opposed to idols. To appease certain spirits you were meant to leave offerings at altarpieces, some offerings that were specific to the spirit. One spirit, for example, was childlike and liked childish things like candy, as well as adult vices like liquor and tobacco. On other altars, there were more generic offerings, such as green, purple, and gold Mardi Gras beads, candles, and coins. I even saw some Body Shop mist left there by someone.
Afterwards, we hung around the French Market, buying strawberry lemonades and browsing souvenirs. Nearby, there was even a shop for babysitting dogs, which we stopped in because we are unnaturally obsessed with dogs. There was one dog there that was completely ridiculous, dyed in Mardi Gras colours.
We then headed to St Peter street, which is a street off Bourbon Street (and next to Pat O’Brien’s). There, we got in line early for Preservation Hall, which is a historic jazz club that exists to preserve traditional New Orleans jazz. As mentioned before, Preservation Hall only fits about a hundred people, and not all of those people will get to even sit down. Preservation Hall is a small room with wooden floors and no bathroom, no drinks served, and no air-conditioning, but it still sells out practically every night.
We arrived about an hour early on a Friday and got probably the best standing tickets in the room, as we were able to see pretty much everything, with no one standing in front of us. It was a wonderful, intimate space, and once the musicians arrived, we could see that they also had no electricity. No amps were plugged in, and no one spoke into a microphone (which was tricky for me at the time, as my eustachian tubes in my ears were plugged, and I couldn’t hear as well as I normally could!) Yet listening to the Preservation Hall band was one of the best musical experiences of my life. The five musicians, playing the trombone, drums, trumpet, piano, and clarinet, were all fantastically talented, and they played both familiar and original music, such as the songs “Clarinet Marmalade” and “That’s My Baby Girl”.
We were not allowed to take pictures while the musicians were playing, for fear that someone would record the music and post it online, but that in a way was much better. That way, I didn’t have to squint past a hundred glowing iPhone screens to try and watch the musicians, and I could concentrate on the music without worrying about how to preserve the experience.
Afterwards, we emerged into the chaos of Bourbon Street on a Friday night. We got to see a street shut down and a bridal parade march down the street, which was pretty cute to see. The bride looked so happy, and it was nice to see everyone dancing, even though I felt sorry for those wearing heels.
To end the night, we stopped by the Camellia Grill to get a last catfish po’boy, a couple root beers and a cream soda, and bowl of gumbo. It was a comforting space, with a couple long, connected counters that created a very social environment. I’m sure it would be a great spot to eat while trying to sober up, and an equally good place to eat to nurse a hangover. It was essentially a diner with many ordinary options such as burgers, chili fries, and cream pies, but it also had typically Louisiana items such as the po’boys and gumbo. It was interesting to see how much gumbo varied in the four different spots I had eaten it, even though the ingredients didn’t change too much.
Afterwards, we went back to the Soniat House. We hadn’t spent too much time in the lounge there, so we went there to get a couple glasses of wine from the honour bar. As the Soniat has a mostly classy clientele, they leave it up to their guests to write down whether they grabbed a cocktail or a glass of wine, but they don’t actually measure out how much liquor, wine, or beer you end up taking. As we are nice people we each got ourselves a nice full glass, and relaxed in the lounge, listening to the calming classical music.
We woke up on our last day feeling pretty sad that we had to go, but happy that our flight was late enough in the afternoon that we could spend a last few moments revisiting some of our favourite spots. We strolled the streets, taking in the beautiful French/Spanish architecture, the glittering beads on the trees, and the sounds of jazz drifting down the street. Finally, we had a last leisurely meal of beignets and cafés au lait at Café du Monde, then headed back to the Soniat to await our taxi.
Hope to be back in the Crescent City soon!
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