“New Orleans is a city of mood,” so says Chef Serigne Mbaye, who I’m sitting with one morning in September. We’ve been discussing the merits of Parkway’s po’boys – those iconic Louisiana sandwiches – and the old-school kitchen at Commander’s Palace. Growing up in Senegal and New York City, Mbaye would cook with his mother. His Uptown restaurant, Dakar Nola, weaves together childhood memories with his haute restaurant experiences and the deep African roots of New Orleans.
“New Orleans is a woman,” declares Biba Islah. An eighth-generation French, Spanish and Haitian Creole New Orleanian, Islah does hair, make-up and healing, and she reads tarot at Patron Saint, the wineshop and bar that my husband, Tony Biancosino, and I opened a year ago in the Lower Garden District. We talk in her studio, tucked away on the ground floor of an old bread factory in the Irish Channel neighbourhood. The night before we debuted our restaurant and tavern, St Pizza, a couple of doors down from Patron Saint, she cleansed it with sage and rum. “New Orleans is empathetic. She feels everything,” suggests Islah.
“New Orleans is a two-way embrace,” offers Ben Jaffe, creative director of French Quarter jazz club-institution Preservation Hall, when I ask him what it takes to endure here. “It comes with what I call the New Orleans tax.” This manifests not in dollars, he explains, but in the responsibility to love and understand the city as it is.
It would be impossible to love and understand New Orleans without knowing its irrational, insouciant origins: a colony built on a swamp by three different nations; a yellow-fever-ridden, opera-obsessed port city key to the slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean; the fecund ground where jazz, the USA’s most original art, sprang forth from the minds of Buddy Bolden, King Oliver and Louis Armstrong; a mecca of both seafood and oil. A beyond-American place of portals waiting to be opened by pirates, pioneers and anyone curious to dig beneath the oyster-shell-strewn surface. It would also be impossible to love and understand this city today without recalling the blazing hot days of late August 2005, and all that has happened since, most recently the tragedy on Bourbon Street. Considering its outsized cultural reputation, from the outside, New Orleans may appear to be a large cosmopolitan city of resources. However, any resident will say that this is a village. Everything that happens here happens to everyone – distributed according to socioeconomic inequity in many cases – but we are a feeling city; “resilient”, as the platitude goes, but we feel everything deeply.
Twenty years ago Hurricane Katrina ravaged this sleepy, sub-tropical place of creaky cypress porches and pastel clapboard, scattering its citizenry every which way, as if in a snow globe. “Ninety-six different zip codes,” chef Emeril Lagasse says he counted when mailing out post-hurricane cheques to employees in 2005.
Two decades later, New Orleans has changed in ways both good and bad, having become a shiny object in the lenses of iPhone-wielding international and domestic tourists keen to consume an exceedingly affordable city. It is today, like many US cities, pricier, hotter and more riddled with infrastructural issues than ever before. And yet it persists as a city of singular reputation, whose name casts a universal spell. Anyone who says “New Orleans” in Tokyo, Lagos, São Paulo or Paris, will watch as eyes light up with the recognition of all that this watery, crescent-shaped peninsula of fewer than 400,000 residents can mean. But burrowing beneath the surface layer of mass tourism reveals a resilient, ambitious community deeply committed to its long-term health.
“I don’t know another US city our size that has as much consequence in food and drink,” says Joaquin Rodas, co-owner of legendary wine bar Bacchanal and new NightBloom cocktail joint, which sit at opposite ends of the Bywater neighbourhood. Originally from El Salvador, Rodas moved here by way of Los Angeles as a helicopter mechanic with the Marine Corps in 1995. He credits GPS and smartphones for the eventual “12-year overnight success” of Bacchanal, which is located on a sleepy corner across from an abandoned naval base wrapped with chain-link fencing and barbed wire. In the years after Katrina, hospitality entrepreneurs and hurricane refugees who had fled to cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco trickled back, keen to rebuild the city’s dining scene with the food, drinks and techniques they’d picked up elsewhere. As with the Spanish, French, African, Irish and Caribbean people who had come before them, they infused this fresh material into the city’s DNA. “The whole country kind of leaned into New Orleans,” says Rodas. Katrina drew attention to the city while simultaneously working in a kaleidoscope of new voices and ideas.
New Orleans’s iconic status as a city has attracted the world to its streets: in the past six months we have welcomed Taylor Swift, Super Bowl LIX and Prospect 6, the sixth edition of an art fair that has shone a light on local talent such as L Kasimu Harris and Abdi Farah, along with international artists including Venuri Perera and Myrlande Constant. We throw enormous parties, such as Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which bring in 1.5 million people each year. But for every big event, or decades-old institution, there are reams of projects, pop-ups and businesses brimming with grass-roots energy. It’s a place where it’s possible – and common – to create something informal, temporary: a roving grill that specialises in Puerto Rican yakitori; an ad hoc vintage shop that trades in old Jazz Fest posters and Venetian glass; a salon selling sourdough bread, and touting democratic socialist ideals too. “People here have the vulnerability to run with an experiment and take a risk,” says Melissa Martin, a decorated chef, writer and owner of Mosquito Supper Club, an Uptown Victorian cottage that doles out bayou-born Cajun food five nights a week. Martin’s business started as a pop-up in Bywater in 2014. She made use of borrowed furniture and her mother and grandmother’s Magnalite pots. “We can bootstrap it in a way New York would never dream of,” she says. Indeed: it’s possible to test-run a business here without a private equity injection, but with the community’s full investment. As Rodas says, “You can still be a dreamer here.”
New Orleans is a city of flow. It has been shifted and shaped by the wandering Mississippi River and the swampy alluvial soup of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a city of possibility and poetry. Before moving here in 2019, I had no real plans to open a business, but New Orleans can change a person’s ambitions. My wineshop started out as a pop-up, too, on a sunny corner of the Lower Garden District in the late days of the pandemic. My husband and I then built it into a bricks-and-mortar establishment. Later, during the fever of Mardi Gras, we added St Pizza, and sold slices to feathered, bedazzled, painted passers-by, experimenting to see what worked – because in New Orleans, such things are possible. Someone recently described New Orleans to me as an “economically depressed town with outsized cultural value”. This tension results in businesses that couldn’t exist anywhere else, such as musical institutions owned and run by musicians themselves. There’s Mother-in-Law Lounge, a cornerstone jazz dive owned by trumpet player Kermit Ruffins; Tipitina’s, a legendary venue owned by the band Galactic; Preservation Hall, ground zero for the living memory of New Orleans jazz, owned by Jaffe, its creative director who also plays bass and tuba in the house band. He’s continuing the legacy of his parents, who began managing Tipitina’s in 1961. These places, says Jaffe, “are a part of your childhood and your education. This is where Dr John and Professor Longhair, and the Neville Brothers played – we have to make sure this place survives. It doesn’t seem extraordinary, but it is extraordinary.”
New Orleans is a calling. It is a vocation that requires devotion and the ability to weather a storm, know your neighbours, and be part of this village. New Orleans is an accidental invention, a corrupt little hotbed of seafood and cocktails and jazz, and a bastion of regional character. And it is important for visitors to know all of this to truly see the place that has been dubbed the Big Easy, but which is neither big nor easy, as the local quip goes. Everyone here has their sayings and their set of beliefs about this almost-island hanging off the heel of Louisiana.
Each resident is a guide who will take sightseers down streets well trodden and hidden, to tourist sites that locals frequent and seemingly abandoned buildings that light up on Sundays with crowds of neighbours, $2 beers and smoking grills. Their list of recommendations might include McHardy’s black-pepper-flecked fried chicken, served from a counter in Mid-City; or the fried chicken pop-up at Pete’s Out in the Cold in the Irish Channel; or the golden fried chicken on a white-linen-swathed table at Dooky Chase in Tremé.
It’s best to set aside judgments and preconceived notions, leaving behind what you know to be true in other places. This is what Mbaye means when he calls New Orleans a “city of mood”. But it depends on the day, and what you need from it. Some days, it’s a po’boy from Parkway, others it’s jerk chicken from Queen Trini. Others still, a martini lunch at Commander’s. “It’s not fair,” he says, “to compare New Orleans to anywhere else.”
Nola know-how
Where to stay
At The Chloe, set in a Victorian-era house in the Garden District, each room is a treasure chest of detail, with claw-foot baths and cane rocking chairs. Hotel Saint Vincent on Magazine Street promises Lower Garden District creature comforts, and Hotel Peter & Paul in the Marigny is a quiet oasis arranged around a restored 19th-century church and school. For mingling with ghosts of Central City past, Dew Drop Inn is a revived live music venue and hotel. It channels the years when Irma Thomas, Fats Domino and Little Richard played there.
Where to eat and drink
New Orleans is a display cabinet of culinary institutions, from Dooky Chase to Brigtsen’s and Clancy’s. But it also has room for newcomers that might stand the test of time: Melissa Martin’s heartfelt Mosquito Supper Club, one of the few true homes of Cajun food; Dakar Nola, Serigne Mbaye’s modern ode to traditional Senegalese fare; 34 Restaurant & Bar, a culinary temple to the Portuguese heritage of Emeril Lagasse, owner of much-loved Emeril’s; the Little House, a cottage café and wineshop-bar in Algiers Point; and Martha Wiggins’s Café Reconcile, a teaching restaurant that serves New Orleans cuisine in a workaday lunch canteen.
New neighbourhood go-tos include Lagniappe Bakehouse, where Kaitlin Guerin’s pastries nod to Southern and African influences, with benne-seed toffee cookies and honey-butter-adorned cornmeal muffins; and Queen Trini Lisa, whose jerk chicken, oxtail and pigeon peas and rice highlight the city’s close ties to the Caribbean. NightBloom is a Bywater cocktail bar from the Bacchanal team that serves seasonal drinks and hosts DJs until late. My wineshop and bar, Patron Saint, and our pizzeria-tavern, St Pizza, were created as extensions of our home.
Where to listen
On any given day, there are a hundred different musical acts -performing in dive bars, hotels and venerated music halls. WWOZ, the best radio station in the world, plays traditional jazz, Brazilian samba, 1950s R&B and rare soul, plus the day’s live-music line-up recited every hour. No one ever regrets attending a gig at famed trumpet player Kermit Ruffins’s Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge (“I’m sitting right where jazz was born,” he’ll tell you in his characteristic rasp) or a show at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter, and the newly revamped Chickie Wah Wah. No regrets going far afield, either, to Bullet’s Sports Bar for a live music night, Saturn Bar for a mod dance night or a Cher-themed party, or just wandering down Frenchmen Street, where jazz pours from every open doorway.
Things to see and do
There is no place more atmospheric than the old groves of live oaks at City Park. Scattered among these century-old curiosities hung with Spanish moss are the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Botanical Gardens and acres upon acres of grounds that include bayou trails, wildflower fields and weekly farmers’ markets. Born of the tradition of Black brass-accompanied funerals, and hosted by the city’s many social clubs, New Orleans’s famous second lines, or parades, are one of the most moving ways to understand the city’s African roots and unbridled joy. These celebratory street affairs are held nearly every Sunday, except in summer.
Where to shop
The city is full of old and beautiful things. There are the storied antiques emporiums on Royal Street, of course, but also highly curated shops such as Century Girl (impeccable women’s vintage and jewellery), Webb’s Bywater Music Store (records and instruments), Lucullus Antiques (cookware and interiors) and Anthology (a trove of cool vintage gems). New Orleans is also peppered with imaginative collections. Baldwin & Co is an independent bookshop and café that’s committed to community-based action and literary accessibility. Freda stocks labels such as Baserange and body oil from Mount Sapo. Lekha is a showcase for quality clothes handmade by women artisans in India. Together, Jamboree Jams and Bar Pomona form a shop-meets-neighbourhood-café with a rotating array of pastries and preserves. And Haus of Hoodoo is a Lower Garden District apothecary and botanica that curates a beguiling collection of remedies and spiritual services.