Food, music, swamps. A three-day trip to New Orleans
THREE days in New Orleans! “‘Let the good times roll’ is the motto of this city nestled along a crescent-shaped turn of the Mississippi River,” claims the official bumf. “More than a melting pot, New Orleans is a ‘gumbo’ of Native American, Spanish, French, German, African, Irish and Anglo influences”.
Yeah, whatever. In truth, for the short-term tourist New Orleans means the ‘French Quarter’, a riverfront neighbourhood the size of a small village with narrow streets and distinctive architecture – centuries-old two- and three-storey buildings, crammed together and painted in pastel colours. Most have wrought-iron balconies on the first floor, or metal staircases zig-zagging from ground to roof. Streetcars glide up and down Canal Street, delivering tourists to the edge of the Quarter.
“It looks like Europe, which is impressive if you’ve never been to Europe,” said a rather sardonic friend before I left. This is accurate, but way too harsh. In fact, though the Quarter has a touch of the theme-park, it’s a theme-park for grown-ups, with fine restaurants and a clutch of secondhand bookshops where I browsed away much of Day 1.
Of course there’s also Bourbon Street, a raunchy thoroughfare studded with girlie bars, transvestite strip-joints (“Men Will Be Girls”) and shops selling T-shirts with captions like “I Got Bourbon-Faced on Shit Street” (or, more bluntly, “I’m Here About the Blow-Job”) – but the sleaze, as in Amsterdam, is clearly a tourist attraction, not allowed to spill far beyond Bourbon. Much of the Quarter – especially the north and west – has the tranquil charm of a village, with traffic-free streets and locals sitting idly in the mild sunshine.
Some would say New Orleans is all about the food – Cajun and Creole, doing ‘fusion’ long before it became a trendy buzzword. There are three must-do food-related things for a tourist in the French Quarter, and I did all three. The first (and cheapest) is having beignets and coffee at the Caf? Du Monde on Decatur Street, a people-watching place whose menu is limited to… well, beignets and coffee. Beignets are fried balls of dough, rather like the Cypriot lokmades but not as syrupy. They arrive smothered in icing sugar, lifting off in a fine white cloud as you bite into them. You can tell the tables where customers have just left from the rings of icing sugar on the floor, not yet swept up by the young, mostly black waiters (73 per cent of New Orleans’ population is African-American).
More impressive (and pricier) is “Breakfast at Brennan’s”, a N’Awlins institution – and the Southern drawl is appropriate for this old-style restaurant, with its plush chairs and chandeliers and a leafy courtyard in the middle. The waiters wear jackets and bow-ties, while the menu explains it’s traditional to start with an “Eye-Opener” – like a Bloody Mary or a shot of absinthe – and a bottle of wine is de rigueur with the three-course breakfast. The first course could be turtle soup or gumbo, but the waiters recommend strawberries in heavy, vanilla-scented cream; then come poached eggs in Sauce Hollandaise with salmon or sausage – Brennan’s does them in a dozen different ways – then the famous “Bananas Brennan”, flamb?’d with rum and cinnamon (over in the courtyard as I ate, a chef was demonstrating the technique for a class of obese schoolchildren, getting their first taste of fine dining). It may be the most decadent breakfast I’ve ever had.
The third foodie excursion was K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, the restaurant on Chartres Street owned by Paul Prudhomme, pioneer of Cajun-style ‘blackened’ dishes. All I remember is a seat at the bar, a brilliant bread-basket – including Southern biscuit and sweet molasses bread – and of course Jim, who sat beside me. Jim is 66, lives in Santa Fe but comes to New Orleans all the time (he explained), and always eats at K-Paul’s. He has five kids, and they all live in Dallas. He recently had shoulder surgery, and can no longer play his daily two hours of tennis. He used to be an actuary. He also used to be an alcoholic, but hasn’t touched the stuff in 20 years. Clearly, the best part of visiting America is the many Americans one meets, pouring out the story of their lives at the drop of a cowboy hat.
Then again, maybe New Orleans is all about the music. There are doo-wop trios singing a capella, and jazz bands busking in the streets around Jackson Square, but I was fortunate enough to arrive during the Jazz Fest, an annual event second in its scale only to Mardi Gras. Held in the New Orleans Fair Grounds, it attracts nearly 100,000 people each day – and, despite the name, the music ranges beyond jazz to include funk, gospel, blues (BB King was the star attraction) and the wonderful zydeco, or Cajun music.
I toe-tapped along with the Savoy Family Cajun Band, singing songs about “le chagrin”. Zydeco features accordion and fiddle, coming across like a more wistful version of village-wedding music. I stopped for crawfish bread and a side of jambalaya at one of the many food stands (you can’t get away from the stuff), sidestepped the people selling programmes – because “It too hot to be walkin’ roun’ in circles axin’ questions” – and moseyed along to the Jazz Stage for an exuberant set by the misleadingly named New Wave Brass Band. How old-fashioned were they? So old-fashioned they dedicated one of their numbers to American servicemen in Iraq, to warm applause.
Food? Music? Actually, I’ve changed my mind: maybe New Orleans is all about the swamps. The city lies below sea level, kept from flooding by a network of dykes (called levees) – and on Day 3, mere hours before my plane took off, I finally did the Swamp Tour. This takes you about an hour outside town, where you get on a boat and chug down various narrow channels looking for alligators. In truth, you won’t see much unless you go in the summer; ’gators need Vitamin D (from sunlight) to digest food, so they don’t eat – or do anything much except float – below a certain temperature. An alligator can go for two years without food, explained our skipper; “I wish I could go for two years without food,” mused a woman from Illinois.
In retrospect, maybe I should’ve done the Plantation Tour. Still, the swamps are somehow integral to the New Orleans Experience – a city built on silt and sand and the muddy Mississippi, living on borrowed time, letting the good times roll while they can. It can’t be an easy place to live. Summers get impossibly humid, there are ghettos and seedy areas, the crime rate is among the highest in the US (though the French Quarter is apparently safe, even at night). For a tourist, however, it’s just about perfect. Three days? I could’ve stayed a month.
