DEL.ICIO.USFROM ATLANTA TO ... NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans: Food, folks and all that jazz
Austin American-Statesman
Friday, March 27, 2009
NEW ORLEANS — Music pours from each pore of this city in an insistent, incessant stream of diverse melodies and messages.
A French horn bleats a Spartan “All of Me” as we walk across Jackson Square. A guitarist picks the theme from “The Pink Panther” while we chomp beignets at Cafe du Monde. The jukebox at Pat O’Brien’s rocks with the Stones’ “Paint It Black.” In a Garden District hotel bar, a singer swings into Dorothy Fields’ and Jerome Kern’s timely “Pick Yourself Up.”
Dave Martin / AP
Zydeco artist Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. is a fixture at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, which draws music lovers to the Crescent City every spring.
Dave Martin / AP
Elvis Costello doesn’t play jazz, but you’ll find all sorts of musical acts at the music fest, as well as crafts and a variety of foods.
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The music never stops here. Of course, New Orleans’ favorite musical dish is jazz, and it spills into the French Quarter’s streets from almost every doorway. But New Orleans’ jazz is in more than its music, and folks planning to attend the yearly New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (April 24-26 and April 30-May 3) can count on being electrified by its currents of food and culture as well as music.
It’s such an intense experience that I’ve always thought three days was exactly the right amount of New Orleans.
My husband and I started our own recent three by scampering to Acme Oyster House, where we scored two stools at the oyster counter (oh, lucky day). Each of us ordered a dozen on the half shell and a Dixie beer. There’s no better way to ease into the rhythm of New Orleans.
We checked in at Le Richelieu in the French Quarter. With a free parking lot in its courtyard, the stately Richelieu, part of which dates to 1845, is a great value. Its rooms start at $250 during Jazz Fest but can be had for as little as $120 during the off-season. There’s also a big two-room suite that includes a kitchen; Paul McCartney once stayed here with his family. The hotel, on a quiet edge of the Quarter, has a cozy bar and a little cafe that makes splendid banana crepes for breakfast.
A few blocks from Le Richelieu is the French Market, where I picked up my favorite Jazz Fest T-shirt. Nearby, the Old U.S. Mint historical landmark used to house a jazz museum. The building was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina and has been repaired, but the museum inside is closed for the construction of new exhibition spaces. Its artifacts were saved, though, and by 2010 the museum should be back and bigger, with a new performance venue on the third floor. The project is a joint venture of the National Park Service and the Louisiana State Museum.
Lacking that museum, we decided to explore two new museums that have nothing to do with jazz but, rather, Louisiana insects and food, both jazzy in their own way.
The new Audubon Insectarium is run by the Audubon Institute, which also presides over the city’s zoo and aquarium. Located just upriver of the French Quarter near Harrah’s casino, it offers a look at numerous insects • some pinned, some very much alive and thriving in cases furnished like their native habitats. (The cockroach habitat is a food pantry, and it’s really gross.)
Exhibits explain such phenomena as the culture of ants and bees, and there are interactive exhibits that kids will especially like. We petted a caterpillar • he was soft and velvety. We were offered the opportunity to eat some crunchy fried crickets but opted not to. I was told they taste like sunflower seeds.
There’s a room featuring Louisiana critters, including alligators and crawfish. Those aren’t insects, of course, but Louisiana never leaves out gators and mudbugs.
We walked from the Insectarium to New Orleans’ other new museum, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. It’s at the southern end of the Riverwalk Marketplace, a nicely lighted riverfront mall that didn’t have many people in it on a Tuesday afternoon • until we got to the food court.
This was no ordinary food court. It was filled with local offerings, and I dined on an excellent soft-shell crab from the Messina’s stand.
Only then did we venture on to the museum. Its exhibits explore the history of such local fare as shrimp, crabs, gumbo and boudin. There’s an area on the canning process as well as a film on the history of 104-year-old Galatoire’s restaurant, a favorite of mine where on this very night I wound up, going nuts on shrimp remoulade, almond-crusted black drum meuniere and a house flan in honor of my birthday. (On your birthday, you get the flan and a pen, so I make it a point to be there on my birthday.)
The food museum also now houses the Museum of the Cocktail, which used to be in the French Quarter. It covers the first mention of the word cocktail in the 1800s, the annoying time known as Prohibition and such debates in the cocktail world as who invented the margarita (the consensus: somebody in Mexico, though there’s one theory that it was invented in Galveston, Texas).
New Orleans drinkeries, of course, are a world of their own. Iconic ones include Pat O’Brien’s (I like the indoor long bar, but the hurricane crowd tends to gather in the courtyard) and Napoleon House, which also makes a fine hot muffaletta, though its hours are really sporadic these days.
Hotels house some of our favorite bars, such as the Hotel Monteleone’s revolving (not fast enough to hurt your head) Carousel Bar, the Prince Conti’s romantic Bombay Club and the clubby multiroom Victorian Lounge inside the Columns Hotel in the Garden District. We also enjoyed a cocktail on the Columns’ big veranda.
Just to get out of the Quarter for a day, we spent our third night at the Columns, a 20-room house built in 1883 by a tobacco baron and a great value at $120 weekdays and $160 weekends. (The rates are the same for Jazz Fest, but there’s a three-night prepaid minimum.)
I joked to my husband that the place has a fitness center. I was referring to the 54 stairs and four landings between the ground floor and our room. But that’s how it is in an old, rambling house. The hotel is on St. Charles Avenue, near a streetcar stop, and has a delicious free breakfast, right down to the grits.
What can you expect from Jazz Fest this year? A lot. Let’s start with Wynton Marsalis, Aretha Franklin, Joe Cocker, Tony Bennett, Bonnie Raitt and, of course, the Nevilles. Add a dose of Kings of Leon, Erykah Badu, Preservation Hall Jazz Band … the list is long. See it all at www.nojazzfest.com.
If you can’t make it for Jazz Fest, not to worry. Whatever the time of year, it’s impossible to avoid music in New Orleans.
One evening, after filling ourselves with barbecued shrimp (which really aren’t barbecued but soaked in butter and seasonings) at Mr. B’s Bistro, we retreated to the romantic Bombay Club. Music wasn’t even scheduled that night, but we were lucky enough to be treated to a hearty rendition of “Summertime” by a young woman who was hoping to work there. She was good. Hope she got the gig.
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