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| Fun |
The next morning we were on the food
tour. We learned the difference between Creole and Cajun cuisine, both prominent in this region. Cajun
comes from ‘les
Acadians’, who were the French settlers from the Canadian Acadia region,
which today is up near Nova Scotia. When the British arrived in the 18th
Century, the Acadians were forced out and many settled all the way down in
Louisiana.
The Acadian people had to adapt to their new surroundings and made use of the very different geography, flora and fauna in Louisiana to devise a new type of cuisine. They learned to use every part of an animal, and came up with seasonings to enhance the food, making particular use of cayenne pepper.
The Acadian people had to adapt to their new surroundings and made use of the very different geography, flora and fauna in Louisiana to devise a new type of cuisine. They learned to use every part of an animal, and came up with seasonings to enhance the food, making particular use of cayenne pepper.
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| House of Blues |
Traditionally Creole people were descendants of French and Spanish settlers from back when New Orleans was ruled by the French. Over time Creole could mean someone descended from European settlers or someone of mixed race descent. Creole cuisine is a real fusion of all the cultures of the city and is regarded as being of a higher class than Cajun. Creole food was more diverse because of the mix of cultures and because of the ability to get more ingredients, being wealthier.
Our tour guide pointed out numerous restaurants specialising in a variety of different cooking styles with a range of prices. We spent some time in Antoine’s, a well-regarded French restaurant, which is rumoured to be the oldest restaurant in the US and which does a lunch special where the price is the current year, so this year it is $20.18 for 3 courses. It also does 25c cocktails, restricted to 3 per person. What a barg.
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| Antoine's oysters - not Rockefeller |
We had a full tour of the restaurant which is steeped in history. Opened in 1840, the restaurant can host over 700 guests in its 12 dining rooms, and was where the famous Oysters Rockefeller dish was invented.
The dining rooms each have different names, and the Mystery Room is so-called because there it was possible to get your hands on alcohol during prohibition by going through a door in the ladies toilet to get to the secret room and returning with a cup full of alcohol. If anyone ever asked where it came from, the answer given would be ‘it’s a mystery to me’.
Antoine’s has a huge wine cellar which holds around 25,000 bottles of wine. During Hurricane Katrina, the wine cellar was destroyed and rumour has it that the insurance company pay-out to Antoine’s was only around half of what the insurance company later got back through the sale of the salvaged wine.
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| French Market |
- pralines - a super sweet treat made from sugar, milk, butter and pecans;
- oysters;
- po’ boys - a type of sandwich on baguette type bread, with tomato, lettuce, pickles and roast beef, although there are variations on this, and takes its name from when there was a workers’ strike in New Orleans in 1929 when the strikers were referred to as poor boys;
- gumbo - which is a dark ‘stew’ with chicken, sausage and shrimp and apparently isn’t gumbo without okra or a roux according to many Louisianians;
- jambalaya - a one pot dish of seafood, sausage, chicken and veg, and made with rice;
- and muffulettas - which are round crusty sandwiches, with a marinated olive salad, salami, ham, Swiss cheese, provolone, and mortadella.
The final stop on the food tour was the French Market, via Café du Monde. Café du Monde was built in 1862 during the civil war when coffee was in short supply and chicory was added to it, which is still served today. The café is famed for its beignets, which are basically square doughnuts, covered in icing sugar and you can stand round the side of the café and watch the guys make them through the window.
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| Beignets in Cafe du Monde |
We decided to try beignets on Bourbon Street at Café Beignet. We were soon surrounded by little birds who were diving in and feeding off Baby D’s hands.
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| Beignets |
These sweet treats were delicious with a coffee but we were finding sugar in strange places for hours afterwards.
The French Market is situated at the bottom of the French Quarter, near to Frenchmen Street. The market sells all sorts of products; it is 6 blocks of clothes, food, Mardi Gras merchandise and toys in the flea market. A great food spot is French Market Produce, just inside the market where there is a wide selection of local, organic produce. We treated ourselves to a gator sausage which was a blend of alligator tail meat and pork. Greasy but tasty.
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| Gator sausage |
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| King cake |
We hightailed it to the Pharmacy museum for the 1pm tour, between our free walking tours. Exhibits included tampons containing belladonna and opium, heroin used in painkillers and cough medicines, baby’s soothing syrups containing opium, some horrific looking needles and other surgical instruments, and even voodoo potions.
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| Opium tampons in the Pharmacy Museum |
Entry was a bargain at $5 each and the tour was free. The tour was fantastic. The guide was a font of knowledge and his delivery was spot on. It was very interesting to learn about the history, diseases and the macabre practices before germ theory was a recognised ‘thing’ and the guide was hilarious in his descriptions.
New Orleans was a really nasty place in the 1800s, being in a swamp full of mosquitoes with no viable sewage system and hot summers. In fact, yellow fever claimed the lives of nearly 8,000 residents in 1853.There were only 154,000 residents, so this works out as 5% dead!
Music and arts tour
We started our tour
opposite the Louis Armstrong Park and as we walked through we got a brief recap
on the Voodoo history in NOLA, then moved onto the statue of the main man,
Satchmo, or Louis
Armstrong. He grew up in New Orleans
and in his early years was in and out of institutions having committed petty
crime. On the streets of Storyville - a district of the city, and in the
institutions, Satchmo learned his trade, playing the trumpet, and when he was
older, joining a jazz band and singing too.
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| Satchmo |
We walked into the French Quarter and our guide told us about the best bars and live music venues in the city, all the while playing jazz through his ipad. We were told about the music and live burlesque offered in the evening at the House of Blues, which also hosts a Gospel brunch on Sundays. Another one that piqued our interest was SoBou Legs and Eggs Burlesque Brunch also on Sundays.
We walked down near Jackson Square where our guide told us about Clementine Hunter, a folk artist from Louisiana and the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at what is now the New Orleans Museum of Art. Clementine was born in the 1886 and died in 1988. She only began to paint in her fifties and her subject area focused on life on the plantation including picking cotton, funerals and washing clothes and she was known for painting on all sorts of everyday items such as bottles, boxes and jugs. Although her early works were sold for 25c, her later work was going for thousands of dollars and in 1986, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by the Northwestern State University of Louisiana.
Walking through Pirates Alley we learned about the famous Sazerac cocktail. This is actually the official cocktail of the city, and is a combination of cognac, absinthe, Peychaud's Bitters, and sugar, or a variation of this.
We stopped briefly outside the Presbytère, part of the Louisiana State Museum, which is next door to the St Louis cathedral, and home to a hurricane exhibit, focusing on the devastation caused by Katrina in 2005, and a permanent Mardi Gras exhibition. More on this later.
We carried on through the French Quarter to Frenchmen street, where serious music lovers go, leaving the hen parties to Bourbon Street carnage, and where we ended the tour. We decided to stop at The Maison where the fantastic Swingin’ Gypsies were playing, whose music is a synergy of gypsy jazz, traditional jazz and swing.
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| Swingin' Gypsies - Frenchmen Street |
After the food tour and the music and arts tour the guides followed up with huge emailed lists of events, restaurants, gigs, bars and museums which was well beyond the call of duty. I’m not going to replicate them here because this blog would take about 5 years to read, and you should do the tour yourself to get the info.
That night we went for a great Vietnamese at 9 Roses Café – more importantly, it was cheap!
Cemetery tour
The final tour
was the tour of New Orleans’ oldest existing cemetery, the St
Louis Cemetery which was founded in 1789. The tour included a stop at Marie
Laveau’s tomb, which is said to be the second most visited tomb in the whole of
the US, although I’m not sure how true that is. (Michael Jackson? JFK? Marilyn
Monroe? Elvis??)
We have been inside the cemetery before on our last visit to the city, but we didn’t have a tour guide that time. Now, it is only accessible through a licensed tour guide.
We have been inside the cemetery before on our last visit to the city, but we didn’t have a tour guide that time. Now, it is only accessible through a licensed tour guide.
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| Marie Laveau's tomb |
Marie Laveau’s tomb is covered in X marks which is down to the legend that to get her to grant them a wish they would have to draw an X on the tomb, turn around three times, knock on the tomb, shout their wish and then if it was granted, they would have to come back, circle their X, and leave the Voodoo Queen an offering. The X is based on the belief that Marie Laveau was illiterate. In 2013 Laveau’s tomb was painted with pink latex paint by vandals. This was later removed by pressure washing which destroyed a lot of the old plaster. People still leave offerings at Laveau’s grave, like candles, pennies, hairbands as she was a hairdresser, and other items.
Another notable tomb in the cemetery currently lies empty and is in contrast to all of the other structures there. It is a 9ft tall white pyramid which sticks out like a sore thumb and is owned by eccentric actor Nicolas Cage.
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| Nicolas Cage's tomb |
In the 1800s when large numbers of poor immigrants settled in the US, benevolent societies were set up to help them find a place to live and somewhere to work. The benevolent societies also helped fund burials. One such society was the Italian Benevolent Society, which owns an extravagant tomb in the cemetery made of marble and cast iron, where many poor Italian immigrants were laid to rest. This tomb was made famous by the film Easy Rider which was filmed there without permission, after which the archdiocese banned all filming in the cemetery.
That afternoon we went to Antoine’s, the $20.18 lunch special restaurant, with a friend we met on the music and arts tour and had the lunch special and cocktails. There were three options for each course. My choices were charbroiled oysters with garlic and herb butter and topped with cheese to start, filet steak and mashed potatoes with a burgundy sauce for main, and dessert was pecan bread pudding. The 25c strawberry lemonades with vodka washed it all down nicely. This is definitely recommended to anyone visiting the city.
After lunch and slightly worse for wear thanks to 25c cocktails at Antoine's, we went to the Presbytère to see the hurricane exhibition and the Mardi Gras museum. When you walk in, the first thing you see is Fats Domino’s Steinway piano, which was a casualty of Katrina having sat submerged for weeks in his home after the hurricane. It is now a symbol of the disaster and its restoration signifies the city’s resilience and musical heritage.
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| Fats Domino's piano |
The exhibition gave a comprehensive overview of the destruction caused by Katrina, including first hand stories such as a diary kept by a man who was stuck in his attic for weeks who wrote on his wall, TV footage, photographs and belongings salvaged in the aftermath. It describes the rescue, rebuild and renewal of the city after the hurricane which flooded 80% of New Orleans.
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| Mardi Gras exhibition |
The Mardi Gras museum on the second floor showcases the history of the festival, and features costumes, parade floats and other memorabilia. The toilets are even made to look like festival toilets.
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| Mardi Gras exhibition |
It was the first day of Mardi Gras and there were masks for sale everywhere, so of course we needed to buy a couple.
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| Masks |
We found some for a fair price in the French Market, grabbed a great pizza at the nearby Louisiana Pizza Kitchen and then headed back into the heart of the French Quarter for more drinks before the parade started. The first day of Mardi Gras is sometimes known as the Twelfth Night and the second oldest krewe in New Orleans, the Twelfth Night Revelers organises a masquerade ball and parade. Other krewes put on parades and we saw the parade organised by the Krewe de Jeanne D’Arc, which displayed the story of Joan of Arc and gave out ‘throws’ which are small favours or treats such as wooden coins, gob stoppers and beads.
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| Joan of Arc parade |
As well as being the first day of Mardi Gras, it was the city’s tricentennial, or New Orleans’ 300th birthday. Founded by the French in 1718, the city was then destroyed in 1722 by a hurricane and the streets were rebuilt in the typical-US grid style. The city in those days really only consisted of the French Quarter and it wasn’t the nicest place to be. Due to the climate and the swampy land, it was rife with disease. New Orleans remained French until 1763 when it was handed over to the Spanish, before returning to the French in 1803. It was the wealthiest city in the US for a while in the 19th century especially being such an important port from the Mississippi. In the 20th century the city introduced jazz to the world.
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| Oz nightclub |
To celebrate, there was an impressive fireworks display
over the banks of the Mississippi, and we got chatting to a New Orleans local
who we ended up partying all night with in a gay club called Oz where we spent much of the evening in our new Mardi Gras masks.
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| Oz nightclub |
Checkpoint Charlie is a rock n roll 'dive' bar...in a good way. It seemed to be more of a locals hang out, but they were all real lively characters and super friendly. We hung out in the bar for a few hours, getting drunk again, being fed King cake and having our faces painted with glitter. I ran over to the French market to get a replacement mask after we smashed ours the night before, and I popped into Belles Diner to grab some food where I ended up having awesome cocktails with the staff; pecan pie whiskey with vanilla ice cream and caramel. Pretty decent end to our trip.
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| Belle's Diner |
Along with the tours we did, there are several other tours in New Orleans, including ghost tours, cocktail tours and vampire tours. We did a ghost tour on our last visit to the city so we gave it a miss this time, but I would definitely recommend it – New Orleans has many a scary tale to tell.
Another great thing to do is the swamp tour. You’re taken out in a boat for a couple of hours through the Louisiana bayous to spot alligators and other wildlife. One boat ride we haven’t done is the Steamboat Natchez Harbor Cruise which is a narrated cruise up the Mississippi, with music playing on the way back.
New Orleans has an insane number of festivals and there is something going on every day. Last time we were there we stumbled across the Crescent City Blues & BBQ festival in Lafayette Square which is a free festival selling great barbecue food and which has 2 stages for live music. Top of the list for us for our next visit will be to see a Saints game.
This is how everyone should finish almost 14 months of
travelling the world. New Orleans, always a pleasure. Apart from the inevitable
hangovers.
We are going home. I could cry. I probably will.
#neworleans #creole #cajun #antoinesneworleans #poboys #muffuletta #jambolaya #gumbo #marielaveau #voodoo #mardigras #bellesdiner #checkpointcharlie #cafedumonde #frenchmarket #antoinesneworleans #ozneworleans #freetoursbyfoot
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