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03/10/10
Any city with a lot of Irish blood will get into the party spirit for St. Patrick’s Day. But New Orleans, forever proving that it’s not just any city, does things up in such a big way for Ireland’s patron saint that the March party calendar looks like some kind of St. Patrick’s season.
The ensuing revelry will tempt –– and surely in many cases break –– Lenten vows of temperance pledged in the grip of post “Lombardi Gras” hangovers a few weeks ago, and it will fill the streets with parades and beads and crumpled carnations. On Friday, the Jim Monaghan St. Patrick’s Day parade starts and ends at Molly’s at the Market, the pub founded by the...
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02/24/10
There will be longer Carnival seasons than the one we’ve just finished, but it’s hard to imagine one being more intense. The New Orleans Saints made sure of that, injecting spontaneous post-game party eruptions and that incomparable Super Bowl victory parade to the shank of Mardi Gras.
But finally things have calmed down, and we can shift gears. Perhaps we’re still a bit hoarse and dehydrated, with depleted wallets and a chorus of “crunk” ringing in our heads, so some downtime now comes as a bit of a relief. It seems like the right time to find the way to the Neutral Ground Coffeehouse.
Tucked away Uptown, just behind Isidore Newman School, the Neutral Ground is a coffeehouse cut from a...
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02/10/10
Wherever there is a Mardi Gras parade, a shower of beads and a supply of libations, there is a party. So now vast stretches of our major streets become linear party spots, extending for miles along neutral grounds and sidewalks.
But what happens when the final float has rolled for the night but the appetite for more good times still pulses? As the final fire engine chugs by, signaling the end of the procession, some start into Chapter 2 of the evening, perhaps hitting a favorite bar near the route, heading to a music club or just making for the come-what-may of the French Quarter.
But by the time Chapter 3 of the night has come around, many of the most resilient revelers have turned up at F & M Patio Bar, the Tchoupitoulas...
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01/27/10
Thanks to the famous axiom, we know that when we laugh, the world laughs with us, though when we weep, we weep alone. To this I’d add the recent lesson that when you scream “Who Dat!” with such fire and frequency on Sunday night that you’re reduced to a hoarse whisperer on Monday, the Who Dat Nation croaks its exhausted but euphoric allegiance along with you.
The volcanic rapture our city enjoyed on Sunday night was a communal one. We can all bask in it together because we all witnessed it together. Obviously, those lucky enough to get seats in the Superdome experienced the veracity of being there. But because the Dome can accommodate just a fraction of Saints fandom, it was up to the rest of us to turn whatever venue we had found into its own,...
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01/13/10
We have weeks to go before the big parades and community-wide abandon of Mardi Gras, but as momentum builds in New Orleans, the signs of Carnival season are everywhere. King Cakes are turning up in offices and classrooms. Krewes are building floats behind the metal walls of drafty, nondescript warehouses. People across town are singeing their fingers with hot glue as they assemble costumes.
And on the airwaves and in the music clubs, the familiar, sing-along sounds of Mardi Gras anthems are taking hold. One of the places where they ring most fervently these days is Ernie K-Doe's Mother-in-Law Lounge, especially on Monday nights when Three Piece Spicy is holding court on the tiny stage in the back room.
Led by Tom Worrell on piano, with Chris...
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12/30/09
In these post-flood years, New Orleanians have racked up an extraordinary amount of practice comparing then to now. From the look of childhood homes and favorite restaurants to the condition of entire neighborhoods, we've grown accustomed to the imprecise, often nostalgia-laced measurement of how things were before the levee failures, how the flood left them and what has become of them since –– for better or worse.
Such experience is helpful when entering the new Rock 'n' Bowl (née Mid-City Lanes Rock 'n' Bowl), the music club/bowling alley that for 21 years had done business about a mile-and-half up the road from its present address.
The original Rock 'n' Bowl suffered relatively little damage from the...
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12/17/09
The holiday season is my favorite time to be in the French Quarter. The Old World architecture and the narrow streets seem especially evocative. Strings of lights curl around wrought-iron balconies like ivy, carriageways are framed in green flocking, and some gas lanterns even wear red Christmas bows as their orange flames flicker away against brick and reflect on flagstone paving.
More than just the décor, though, there is a festive mood among the people drawn to the Quarter this time of year. Friends take time to gather for Reveillon dinners, and colleagues partake in extended holiday lunches. Shoppers rove around local shops with gift lists, and groups converge for such annual events as the
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12/02/09
The recently revived Sazerac Bar seems these days a bit like the character of Rip Van Winkle, the old colonial farmer who awoke from a magical slumber of 20 years to find a different world than the one he knew before his unnatural nap. The Sazerac Bar was out of circulation for four years during its unscheduled post-Katrina hibernation, and though today this downtown classic seems the same as it ever was, the world around it has changed a bit in the interim.
For one, there’s a new public interest in –– or at least awareness of –– its namesake, the great old New Orleans Sazerac cocktail. Thanks in large measure to campaigning by promoters of the annual Tales of the...
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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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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.
