We’re here at long last, and better yet we’re staying right on the curve of that crescent bend in the Mississippi River, which gave the city one of its many memorable monikers.
Fortunately, our hotel is just far enough east of the French Quarter mayhem (our visit coincides with the last couple of days of the Jazz Festival, so the streets are jumping day and night), that we can dive in and out of the madness at will.
We’d been warned, but on this hot and humid afternoon, the unedifying spectacle of legions of the legless, (whether holdovers from the previous night’s revels or newly inebriated is unclear), is still a bit of a shock. Draft beers and Daiquiri slushies in an alarming array of day glow shades, are being liberally dispensed every few yards down Bourbon Street, into large ‘limited edition’ Jazz Fest plastic cups from enormous vats on wheels.
Deciding to limit our Jazz Fest experiences to after dark, we choose the cool breezes of a river boat trip, only to be reminded that beyond its lovely lace ironwork and romantic Spanish moss, this city not only has over a quarter of its citizens living on or below the poverty line, but is also a major centre for the petrochemical and bauxite industries. These ugly realities begin respectively in the Lower Ninth Ward just east and at Nine Mile Point, just west of that lazy crescent bend. Travel west upriver and you will see the city’s dark past and its industrial present karmically intermingle, as the massive pipes that carry the end product of these plants over roads and levees into giant waiting barges, sit cheek by jowl with the gorgeous antebellum mansions of former plantations. Without overdoing the analogy, New Orleans has something in common with Venice where the anything but serene ‘museum’ of ‘La Serenissima’ sits across the lagoon from the heavy industry of Mestre.
Fortunately, just as there is living, as opposed to staged history to explore a few blocks beyond St Marks Square and the Rialto bridge, the same is true of New Orleans tourist epicenters of Jackson Square and Bourbon Street. Escape their gravitational pull and everything, especially that unpleasant feeling of being constantly fleeced, slows down. Ceiling fans turn torpidly in stately, old fashioned restaurant dining rooms, plantation shuttered against the ferocity of the heat and humidity, eccentric antique shop owners seem to have all the time in the world to chat about their curios, quirky museums tell the story of local voodoo lore or (even scarier), period pharmacy and even the wrought ironwork tells a story (allegedly the Cornstalk hotel’s corn husks were a gift by the original owner to his wife, who was pining for the corn fields of her former Iowa home).
Of course, there are certain high traffic New Orleans institutions we simply couldn’t resist. Café du Monde lured us in morning and late night, (turns out icing sugar dusted beignets are just as delicious after jazz & cocktails and a highly effective hangover preventer). Antoine’s, arguably the French Quarter’s most famous and certainly the city’s oldest surviving restaurant (fire and flood have and will no doubt continue to take their toll), sadly scored high on atmosphere but poorly on food. Rita’s delivered on both and the evening we ate there was so balmy that they threw all the floor to ceiling french doors open to the street as the ceiling fans worked overtime, but it was the much less heralded Olivier’s which provided the Creole food highlight of our time here.
Jambalaya: Serves Six
Olivier’s soft shell crab was outstanding, but their Jambalaya is the best Creole version I’ve ever eaten (Cajun Jambalaya is made without tomatoes).
1 medium onion, diced
1 small red pepper, 2 cm diced
1 small green pepper, 2 cm diced
2 stalks celery, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
175g okra, 1 cm rounds
500g of either andouille sausage, smoked chorizo or kielbasa, sliced
500g chicken thighs, cut into 2 cm pieces
500g prawns, peeled and deveined
1 can chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup tomato purée
4 cups water
2 cups rice, rinsed
2 tbsp Cajun spice
Heat two tbsp olive oil in a large pot, add sausages ( I used half chorizo and half kielbasa) and brown. Remove, set aside, then add the chicken, cook until almost done. Remove, then add the peppers, onions, garlic and celery. Sauté until fragrant, add the tomato purée, cook for 2 minutes then the tomatoes and cook for another 2 minutes. Add the rice and water, stir through and bring to the boil.
Return the sausages and the chicken, stir to combine and bring to the boil again then reduce the heat to a simmer, stir frequently to prevent burning on the bottom. Simmer until almost all the liquid has absorbed, add the prawns and okra, stir to combine. Cook until the prawns and okra are done, check to see if the rice is cooked if not add another half cup of water and stir through. When the rice is cooked season with salt and pepper to taste.
As if Jazz, Cocktails and Creole cuisine weren’t enough, it’s also Crawfish boil season and we ate our fill of this Cajun classic at the bizarrely named Alpine Restaurant.
Ready to explore further afield, we take the museum piece streetcar down live oak and mansion lined St Charles Avenue to the Garden District, on what is surely America’s most beautiful public transport route. We peer though the grand entrance gates of Lafayette Cemetery Number 1 (only friends and family of the permanent residents here, are allowed to visit). Many of the city’s well to do and ne’er do well, denizens are interred in its austere mausoleums, (a miniature city of the dead which recalled our former home of Buenos Aires’s necropolis ‘Recoleta’, built at around the same time). Back in the Greek Revival streetscape of the living, this part of town though undeniably grand (it dates from the city’s 1850s heyday when fortunes were being made), is hugely enlivened by its student population, as Tulane University is close by, which happily dilutes the tourist presence. So, while you might conceivably see John Goodman the actor, or author Anne Rice of ‘Interview with the Vampire’ fame sipping mint juleps on the verandahs of their mansions, you can easily enjoy a deep fried oyster or roast beef Po’ boy sandwich with a group of Liberal Arts majors in Parasol’s, that classic bar.
Tomorrow we head south down the River Road to the shrimp grounds of the Gulf of Mexico, but there is one appointment first that our eleven year old daughter has been clamouring for, ‘Dr Wagner’s Honey Island Swamp Tours’. So we head north east across the corner of vast Lake Pontchartrain to the Old Pearl river to commune in a small boat on the bayou with some of the State’s estimated 2.2 million alligators, and its vast turtle and water snake population. Stands of Spanish moss heavy cypress trees and fishing shacks, among them the amusingly named ‘Redneck Resort’, cover the ‘ridges’ (anything five feet above sea level). All that was missing was a twanging banjo soundtrack.
Just another larger than life experience in ‘The Big Easy’.
P.S. No writer wants to be competing for attention with royalty. So with a certain global media event coming up, we thought twice about whether to wait out this week.
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Very evocative take on one of my favorite places on Earth. I got mugged on my very first visit, but I still have returned many, many times...THAT is how much I love it.
The Venice comparison is also on point. My latest issue is focused on the latter flood-prone city, if anybody's interested.
VIVA LA JAMBALAYA! 😋
What a city it is, Deirdre. Been a few times since, including after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and there really is no place like it.
And yes, you are so right about that poster!