New Orleans!

NOLA has long been on my List Of Place I Want To Visit, but it never quite happened, until our friends Mario and Dirk got married and had one of their celebrations there (where Dirk’s family resides).

Physically, New Orleans reminds me of European cities — broad avenues and narrow streets, streetcars, elegant buildings often gone to seed from disaster or economic upheaval, places trying to find a purpose beyond being a tourist destination.

As a place to go, though, it’s very different from anywhere I’ve traveled. Usually, when I go someplace, there’s things to see. Natural wonders. Historic monuments. Museums.

NOLA has those for the most part. But that’s not why people seem to go there, and not why I’ll be going back.

You go to New Orleans to eat and to drink. (And to party, if one is so inclined. The whole Mardi Gras experience aside, anything is an excuse to party, from the Saints winning a game causing gridlock in the French Quarter (as it did) to a wedding party and a second line parade (which we got to do, too).

But the food and drink and hospitality business is key here.

As we did it at least, a day’s activities consist of:

1. Walk someplace.
2. Stop somewhere interesting-looking or recommended for a bite to eat and a cocktail.
3. Walk some more.
4. Stop someplace interesting-looking or recommended for a sweet of some sort and maybe some coffee.
5. GOTO 1

We did a (wonderful) breakfast at the hotel, but aside from that, we didn’t really do meals per se, just, “Hey, there’s that place we heard about, let’s go in there for a bit,” or, “Wow, my feet are hurting, that place looks intriguing to stop in.”

NOLA has signature cuisines — sea food, Creole food, soul food, Cajun food, lots of shrimp and rice and sausage and roux-based sauces, and bread pudding desserts (but with plenty of alternatives) — and plenty to wash them down with. The cheap bars that line the SW end of Bourbon Street will ply you with daiquiris and margs and cheap beer, but most bars of note will have both old favorites and some interesting signature cocktails. These may be tropical, they may be based on gin or pisco, or, most frequently, they start with bourbon or rye whiskey and go from there.

The Sazerac is the grand elder of cocktails here. I grew to like them, though I tried a variety of others.

NOLA, at least in the French Quarter, allows public consumption of alcohol. That usually means plastic cups and containers of garishly colored booze and beer. People tend not to stroll the avenues (not even Royal Street) with a Pimm’s Cup or Chicory Old Fashioned. (That just means you have to finish it up before toddling onto the next spot to try.)

It’s not, as I indicated all about eating and drinking. It’s also listening to music — live entertainment is all over the place during the evenings, and not hard to find during the day, even discounting the (often very talented) street performers, many of whom actually set up in the street due to the narrow sidewalks.

NOLA is steeped in history, starting its colonial period under the French and Spanish and French again, throwing around dates that make those British settlers on the East Coast sound like Johnny-come-latelies. There’s plenty of later history, from the War of 1812 (thus a legit excuse for Major General Andrew Jackson to have a square named after him, complete with horse) to the Civil War to being a Caribbean hub in the 20s and 30s.

Beyond the buildings and stories and museums about that, NOLA sports a very respectable Museum of Art (NOMA), convenient to the streetcar. It also is the home of the National WWII Museum, which is very US-centric (by mission), but an incredibly rich resource worth visiting.

Getting around is pretty easy; the blocks are relatively small, so hoofing it by foot is always a possibility for most things. The town has a very good bus and famous trolley system (currently hampered by a block of Canal Street being shut down to due to the partial collapse of the new Hard Rock Hotel, yikes). We ended up using all of the above, with Lyft filling in some gaps when we wanted to get someplace quickly(ish).

(I would not recommend renting a car, unless there’s things outside easy radius of foot and bus and streetcar that you really want to get to. NOLA drivers are very polite, remarkably talented at not hitting pedestrians, and somewhat insane, and too many areas are a twist of one-way streets to reliably navigate, even with Google Maps.)

It’s rare I go someplace and not want to go back, to explore new stuff and re-explore the old. To that end, I’d definitely do NOLA again. I can get the food and the drink anywhere, but there’s something kind of magical about the environment there makes it special.

Recommended Places to Eat/Drink:

• Palace Cafe: Elegant charm, good food, good drink, friendly staff. We ate a couple of mid-afternoon meals there.
• Sylvain: Some of the best cocktails we had, and decent if simple food offerings.
• Muriel’s Jackson Square: the food and service and setting for the reception dinner were all great. I’d like to eat there in and of itself.
• Bourbon House: We stopped there a couple of times. Remarkable bourbon list, and decent food.

Other Recommended Places:

• AC Hotel by Mariott New Orleans Bourbon: Where we stayed, just a couple of blocks SW of Canal St, in the street that turns into Bourbon when it crosses Canal. Modern rooms, fun building, faboo breakfast.
• National WWII Museum: Schedule at least half a day. Really.
• New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA): Fine midsize museum with an eclectic but solid collection.

Not-Recommended Places:

• 

  Sazerac Bar in the Roosevelt Hotel: The drinks were fine, the decor and ambience nifty, the bartender engaging. But those fine drinks were $18/pop. Maybe have one for the experience and move on.

Travel note: A lot of stuff (esp. museums and public buildings) is closed on Monday.