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11/18/09
Thanksgiving is a time to partake in holiday traditions, but not all those traditions necessarily fit the Norman Rockwell image of the prayerful family gathered around a roasted turkey. For plenty of people without close family ties in the area, the Thursday feast might resemble something more akin to Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving, with friends pitching in a green bean casserole, a bottle of Beaujolais or a Hubig’s pie to help fill out a casual holiday table.
For years, if I wasn’t traveling to visit my scattered family for Thanksgiving, my own tradition called for an evening at Pal’s Lounge for drinks and repeat visits to a bar-top potluck cornucopia.
Pal’s is a small bar with a big heart, though it certainly comes from a...
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11/04/09
On early visits to the bar d.b.a., not long after it first opened in New Orleans, I couldn’t decide if I just didn’t fit in or if the bar itself was out of place. The owners operate another bar of the same name in Manhattan, and they replicated many of its features in their New Orleans expansion, from the dark woodwork to the blackboards dangling above with the bar’s high-end liquor selection scripted in chalk. It charged higher prices for better stuff, and the crowd veered heavily toward yuppies and suburban imports.
During that period, I was afflicted with the common and virulent New Orleans notion that shabbiness equals authenticity, as if every club in the city had to look like a Saturn Bar rummage sale to...
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10/21/09
Germans call it “gemütlichkeit,” a sense of brotherhood, of coziness and social warmth in a relaxing atmosphere. No, I’m not quite sure how to pronounce it. But I know how it feels because it has been on abundant display over the past few weekends at Deutsches Haus during New Orleans’ biggest Oktoberfest, an all-ages party with traditional Bavarian food, libations and playful dancing in the rejuvenating autumn weather.
As usual, the festival began the last weekend of September and will wrap up five weeks later, this Friday and Saturday, Oct. 23 and 24. It’s typical for attendance to build each consecutive weekend, with the biggest crowds showing up for the final edition when all those...
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10/07/09
Crossroads tend to be pretty interesting places, and the spot where Mimi’s in the Marigny sits is no exception.
This two-story bar of neat brick and weathered woodwork is squarely in Faubourg Marigny, but Bywater begins just a few blocks downriver, and Mimi’s falls along the portage route for people from these reliably off-kilter neighborhoods traveling to the rest of the city and back. The dynamics that make Mimi’s so interesting, though, go beyond urban geography. Rather, it’s a layered effect built on music, food and drink, and it stretches through the main barroom, around a tight staircase and up to a second-floor lounge.
Walk through the front door, and the place looks like many another...
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09/24/09
It's normal to find a yacht down a dead end street because they're typically perched at the water's edge. The Mid-City Yacht Club sits along an intersection of two dead end streets, but it is not typical. In fact, it's not even a yacht club.
Rather, the Mid-City Yacht Club is a neighborhood bar and a post-Katrina creation through and through. It opened during the summer of 2007, and its name is a whistling-past-the-graveyard reference to the levee failures that temporarily made its address waterfront property. More than that, though, the Yacht Club is an ongoing act of recycling and restoration, and one that's in tune with the themes of renewal and civic pride ringing through its neighborhood in these post-flood years.
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09/09/09
Louis Armstrong raises his Dixie. A few feet away, Alfred Hitchcock cradles a Dead Guy, and Bela Lugosi, silver screen star of Dracula fame, is across the room showing his Evil Eye. Meanwhile, by the pool tables, Jacques Cousteau hoists a Kingfisher, and Jimi Hendrix lifts a Purple Haze.
These famous names are a few examples of the gallery of small caricatured statues of dead celebrities displayed on the walls of Cooter Brown’s Tavern and Oyster Bar. Each statue poses holding a beer –– from the local Abita Brewing Co.’s Purple Haze to Kingfisher from India and Dead Guy from the Oregon microbrewery Rogue Ales.
There are more than 100 of the caricatures ringing the walls of the...
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08/26/09
When both cab drivers and city tow truck operators are sure that hanging around a certain bar on a certain night will be time profitably spent, you can be sure that bar’s special has caught on big.
That’s the case with the Bulldog on Canal Boulevard on Wednesdays, the tavern’s pint night. The unusual offer promises patrons that when they order a pint of beer, the glass is theirs to keep and bring home. By the time some have had their fill, they can be seen heading to the door with rattling, heavy glass sheaves of a half-dozen or so emptied pints.
Driving after such a feat, and with such extraordinary physical evidence of it clinking around in the car, would be unwise ––...
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08/11/09
Old Algiers Point seemed oddly quiet as we pedaled bicycles through its streets on a recent Wednesday. The early-evening sky looked mellow through the filter of the trees lining the neighborhood streets, and the houses were beautiful with their copious gingerbread details and neat front gardens. But it seemed odd that no one was about, not walking their dogs or pushing baby strollers as you might expect at this after-work hour on a weeknight.
Then, suddenly, it all became clear when we...
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08/03/09
A new day at the Avenue Pub
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07/01/09
Some Bourbon Street clubs employ barkers to all but drag unwitting pedestrians into their bars, where three-for-one drink offers, sweet liquor in plastic test tubes and similar promotions await their drinking dollar.
And yet, a few blocks away on North Rampart Street, it's easy to walk right past Bar Tonique without noticing it, a situation that in some cases probably suits both would-be patrons and the bar just fine. Bar Tonique isn't for everyone, after all, and a room full of clamoring drinkers would likely short-circuit the whole operation. It is a small, sedate place with dim lighting, brick walls, design-savvy style and fresh flowers along the bar top. Most of all, though, it promises a memorable and rewarding experience for those who approach cocktails...
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A transplant from his native Rhode Island, Ian McNulty quickly discovered how easy it is to strike up conversations with New Orleans people simply by asking about their favorite clubs and neighborhood joints.
