New Orleans, LA, USA
New Orleans, the city of Mardi Gras, the mighty Mississippi, jazz clubs, and creole food. We spent a few days in the city, and did our very best to get stuck into as much of the food, music, architecture and culture as possible.
We stayed at the excellent Hotel St Peter and Paul, just on the edge of the Marigny District, and a short walk away from the party streets of the French Quarter. As usual, we had a long list of food places to explore. We had beignets at Café du Monde, leaning over the table, our fingers sticky, covering ourselves in a mist of powdered sugar. We headed out in a taxi to Parkway Tavern, which is the place to go for po’ boys. It was a real big sandwich, the sort where the sauce runs down to your elbows and drips onto the table. I had beef and shrimp, dressed with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and mayo. It was oh-so-good, and well worth the trip out of town.
One of our Main Life Rules is not to eat oysters unless we can see the sea. We couldn’t quite see the sea in New Orleans, but there’s a big river nearby, it’s pretty swampy and there were enough people eating them that we presumed it would be fine. And it was more than fine – it was among the best oysters I’ve ever had. We went for the Oysters Rockefeller at Felix’s Oyster House, which sees them covered in butter and breadcrumbs then placed under a hot grill before being doused in glugs of Crystal hot sauce.
Oh, and the Crystal hot sauce. What. A. Sauce. It’s everywhere in New Orleans, and presumably much of the Deep South. It comes in a little glass bottle, with a white and blue label. It may not be artisan, small-batch type stuff, but it is superb, and seemingly goes with everything. It was so good that I later messaged their creative director on LinkedIn to ask for the hi-res artwork for their logo so I could paint it as a mural on our garage wall at home. He hasn’t replied.
Most evenings, after consuming far too much food and hot sauce, we’d head out to catch some live music. Most bars along the main streets of the French Quarter seem to have something on most nights, and while Bourbon St. is the most famous, it’s a little over-the-top, with most of the music blasting from speakers rather than live musicians. But just a few streets away is a little neighbourhood called Frenchman St., where small music bars compete with low entry fees, a lineup of live jazz, and cans of cold local beer for sale. We spent a few happy nights wandering in and out of the Spotted Cat, the Blue Nile, and d.b.a., seeing a whole range of jazz bands, duos, trios and even some sort of lindy hop dance thing, which was good fun.
At Glastonbury Festival a few years ago, we had seen a band called Hot 8 Brass Band, and by happy coincidence they were playing in New Orleans when we were there. They are joyous and chaotic and a right old rabble, and it was a lovely way to spend an evening. We were in the bar before the show when the sousaphone player wandered in, late, and clearly wasn’t feeling particularly well. My new minor claim to fame is that a Grammy Award-winning musician has coughed directly into my beer.
Having seen brass bands and visited small jazz bars, we also decided to visit the Preservation Hall one evening, for a ‘true jazz’ performance – the Preservation Hall is one for the purists, apparently – taking jazz back to its roots. Or possibly a tourist trap. No amplification, no air conditioning, no phones, no videos. Just a band and their instruments. And it turns out they take this very seriously indeed. At one point a French tourist standing near us tried to take a photo. The band leader did not like this, and immediately stopped the show to yell at this poor tourist. I get it, it’s nice to be in the moment, but the thing that ended up entirely ruining the show wasn’t the photo, but the angry trumpeter loudly berating a paying member of the audience.
Along with jazz, another tradition brought to New Orleans by West African slaves was voodoo, and Nicola was very keen to visit the Voodoo Museum. It was probably among the weirdest few rooms I’ve ever been in, with all sorts of dried animals and potions all over the walls. Voodoo obviously is in much need of some positive PR, as there is a lot more to it than putting pins into little dolls. The Voodoo Museum did a good job of this, with lots and lots of little paper labels which Nicola did her best to read very slowly and methodically, every so often running a short quiz to see if I had paid as much attention when I’d skimmed the same label 45 mins beforehand.
One of my favourite things to do when anywhere is to wander around and look at the nice houses. The Garden District is full of large wooden shuttered houses, wrapped around with wide wooden porches, and gnarly, mossy trees lining the fences. Some houses had started to string up purple and yellow beads, as Mardi Gras was just a couple of weeks away.
We were just thinking how it’d be good to have a look inside one of the houses, when we stumbled across a little board advertising house tours of the house of the ‘Women’s Guild of the New Orleans Opera’. Well why not? We walked up the footpath to this house, opened the door, and were greeted by the best tour guide I’ve ever met. She treated the people who’d lived and worked in the house as her friends, and had all sorts of spurious gossip about people from over 100 years ago. Our tour lasted three times as long as we’d expected, we were overtaken by all the other tour groups, and we had a fantastic afternoon learning about the history of the house, but mainly a little glimpse into the complicated relationships between the women and men of the New Orleans Opera. It was fantastic.
I’ve got a lot of time for New Orleans. If the brief was to get under the skin of the city, see some great live jazz, eat some incredible food, and meet some interesting local people, we succeeded in every way. I’d highly recommend a trip.
