Big eating in the Big Easy
The food and drink are like the music: everywhere, Southern-style, and glorious
New Orleans is as famous for its cuisine as for its jazz. Think about it: crawfish (boil or étouffée), bananas Foster, po’boys, jambalaya, gumbo, muffulettas, red beans and rice, blackened anything, beignets, Cajun spices, coffee with chickory, king cake, and absinthe, hurricanes and sazeracs—all portable.
It’s where diets and New Year’s resolutions go to die. Of bliss.
Now, if I’m honest, I’m not a fan of crawfish. They look like big bugs to me, without enough meat in them to make the horror worthwhile. (I really hate bugs and would not eat one even to get on a reality show; I have the same problem with lobsters and crabs, which are very big bugs that have nice meat but require an excessive level of DIY. I realize this is just me.) I’m also not usually keen on gumbo because okra is weird. There, I said it.
But oh, I ate brunch at Brennan’s once, and it was worth every penny—and there were many, many hundreds of pennies involved. I ordered a shrimp cocktail that came with not cocktail sauce but remoulade. Remoulade changed my life. I think remoulade is magic, because here’s the thing: Google it. Read a list of ingredients. Read another. Read another. NOBODY AGREES WHAT IS IN REMOULADE. It is creamy, yellowy-orange, and contains herbs and spices that make it the perfect sauce for seafood. You can buy it jarred, and each brand you buy will taste slightly different because NOBODY AGREES WHAT IS IN REMOULADE. But that remoulade at Brennan’s, on those sweet, melt-in-your mouth shrimp, was the best thing I had ever tasted. Right up until I had the bananas Foster.
Of course, you don’t have to shell out big bucks at Brennan’s to have an epic brunch in NOLA. I took the mouthwatering photo at the top at the Ruby Slipper, which has several locations around town. Expect to wait in line, and expect to be totally fine with that when you get your reasonably priced food. It’s quirky, relaxed, pervasively cheerful, and that Spanish omelet in the photo was a poem. Everybody loves the Ruby Slipper. It is the poster child, Exhibit A, in a city that wisely takes breakfast and particularly brunch (because brunch is breakfast with remoulade and cocktails, yeah?) very seriously. If I could have only one meal a day in New Orleans, it would hands down be brunch. Because if you sleep in and go big at brunch, you’ll be full until late in the evening.
One morning I wandered out of the Quarter and over to the Bywater neighborhood and found myself in need of a late breakfast or early lunch (is it brunch if it’s a weekday?). Glowing Yelp reviews led me a few blocks to Alma, a Honduran café with breakfast all day. I had some kind of amazing breakfast tacos with scrambled egg and avocado and lots of greens, and they made me so happy I just wanted to sit there all day and eat things while I slid from coffee to cocktails surrounded by friendly neighbors. As discerning travelers look outside the Quarter to Frenchmen Street, Marigny, and the Bywater for less-touristy and more authentic meals and experiences, more and more people you know will be discovering Alma.
For lighter fare, there are all the places that serve coffee and beignets. Now, Café du Monde is the mass-market French Quarter tourist experience, and it’s worth visiting once just to check the box. You can also take home a can of their signature coffee. But I’ve had better cups of coffee elsewhere in town, and my favorite stop for pastries is a French bakery on Ursulines Street in the Quarter called the Croissant d’Or.
Your local bakery at home, with its trays of cookies and croissants, is no match for the elaborate treats at Croissant d’Or. It also has great coffee and a sweet little courtyard to sit and savor your snack in. Very different from the noisy barnyard of sunburned tourists with shopping bags at Café du Monde. It’s also just a few blocks from the old Ursulines convent, which is well worth the price of admission to enjoy the garden and the history.
A good lunchtime nosh is the po’boy—assuming, of course, that you didn’t eat breakfast, because the legend is that it was invented during a streetcar strike and was meant to fill up a working man (albeit one temporarily out of a job). Northerners will recognize this sandwich as a Cajun cousin of the hoagie/sub/grinder/hero elongated sandwich, on a local French-style baguette rather than some kind of Italian bread. Ideally, the bread is local because it has to be fresh and downy-soft on the inside and crusty and chewy on the outside; whoever prepares the sandwich is going to cut the baguette in half, pull some of the fluff out of the inside, and pile the cavity with meat and various wet sauces or gravy, so the crust needs to provide some protection against leaky disintegration.
Po’boys iconically come in beef, chicken, and fried shellfish varieties (though modern chefs get creative and even vegetarian), and you can specify toppings or just order yours “dressed,” which means with everything on it: lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, ketchup, mayo, gravy (for beef), and/or anything else the assembler thinks you need. Sit down with that messy masterpiece and maybe get a side of red beans and rice (much, much more flavorful than it sounds) and an Abita. Probably not if you have big dinner plans, though.
Another signature New Orleans sandwich is the muffuletta, which you should just order (get a recommendation regarding where to get a good one; everyone says theirs is best, but there are lackluster ones out there, so get a trustworthy tip) without reading up on what’s in it. Because there is almost certainly something in it that you think you don’t like—but the whole is so much more than the sum of the many parts. (Obviously, if you are a vegetarian/vegan or have allergies or other dietary restrictions, OK, check it out first. But I mean if you just turn up your nose at certain things, get over yourself and bite in—there’s nothing horrifying like brains or tongues or eyeballs. That’s haggis.)
Roughly, it’s a stack of very thinly sliced Italian cold cuts and a little cheese on a unique flat round sesame-seed roll slathered—and I cannot stress this enough: SLATHERED—with Sicilian-style chopped olive salad (kind of like giardiniera with olives and garlic). The bread is the most tricky thing, because it’s not widely available and it has to be just right to keep the sandwich firm enough to hold together but not so tough that all the olive salad squirts out when you bite into it. It’s a bit like focaccia or ciabatta, but … better. For this purpose, anyway. Words cannot adequately describe this delicacy or do it justice, but I found a pretty thorough explanation of what makes a muffuletta so great here. (Warning: This will make you hungry for sandwiches and/or Italian food.)
Ordinarily, I recommend Mulate’s for its expansive menu of all this and more authentic NOLA food, but I must warn you that their muffuletta is nontraditional. I’m sure it’s delicious, but, being a Cajun restaurant, they’ve made it French instead of Italian. So if you go there and order it, love it or hate it, it doesn’t qualify you to pronounce judgment on the OG muffuletta.
For the real deal, I recommend the Napoleon House, on Chartres Street in the Quarter. I recommend the Napoleon House for several things, actually: interesting history and space, authentic menu and ambiance in the French Quarter without wildly inflated tourist prices or crowds of noisy drunk college kids and bachelor(ette) parties lurching in and out wanting a kiddie-pool of pineapple daiquiri or some nonsense, friendly locals at the bar (instead), and very competent staff. Not only did I have a fraction of a divine muffuletta there (a whole one on the right kind of bread is the size of a frisbee, so a fraction is quite sufficient), but I was finally seduced by the ubiquitous sazerac, the official cocktail of New Orleans. Like most drinks you think you don’t like, you’ve just never had a good one, and that was my story with the sazerac. It’s rye-based, tastes slightly medicinal (it was invented by an apothecary), and is very much a cocktail for grownups.
Those were my culinary highlights on my recent trip—but I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend a couple of delightful dives that are just plain fun and make you feel like a local. Port of Call, leaning on the edge of the Quarter on Esplanade, is a dark hideaway packed with locals and famed for its burgers (mine was indeed exceptional!); and the confusingly named Roosevelt Hotel Bar (which is NOT the official bar of the Roosevelt Hotel!) in the Central Business District is overflowing with character and drink specials. To be clear: The Roosevelt Hotel is a very nice hotel with a fancy official bar called the Sazerac Bar. It is the kind of bar where well-dressed people go to meet their new highly processed lovers after their very expensive divorces. The Roosevelt Hotel Bar, on the other hand, is a tiny hole-in-the-wall (there is supplemental outdoor seating if you’re not afraid to be seen) where the bartender will give you honest opinions and some random inebriate from Ohio will be your new bestie. Introduce yourself to the bouncer. He’s a good guy.