Dear Seattle,
As I write this, I have a suspicion you are enjoying your overcast morning – as we in New Orleans always do – with a hot cup of strong coffee.
That said, I imagine yours is a far different brew than mine. In fact, it strikes me how two places that are so similar can be so different.
The obvious geographical differences aside, I have always sensed a cross-continent kinship between Seattle and New Orleans. Both, for example, are known for their general dampness, even if yours mostly falls from above while ours is just as likely to rise up from beneath.
Both are also known for embracing – indeed, encouraging – weirdos, wackos and independent spirits of all description. Not coincidentally, both also boast robust art and music scenes.
True, Seattle is more well known in that regard for its role in the development of grunge music, but it also has a storied jazz scene. None other than New Orleans’ own Jelly Roll Morton spent considerable time in your Emerald City. He was even moved to write and record a rollicking footstomper called “Seattle Hunch,” which is really all the validity any city’s jazz scene needs.
When it comes to coffee, however, the similarities are but skin-deep.
In Seattle, the bitter brew is undeniably big business, as attested by the presence of that hippie mermaid logo on seemingly every street corner in the caffeinated world.
In New Orleans, however, coffee is something closer to life.
Ask anyone who remembers driving over the I-10 High Rise in those weeks after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city in 2005.
Back then, it was a wasteland, a surreal landscape of curbside refrigerators and mountains of debris piled along West End Boulevard. All anyone wanted was a sign, any sign, that the city was on its way back – that it even could come back.
In their hearts, most locals knew the city would return, of course. New Orleans is as much a spirit as a physical place. There was no option. It would endure. But the very fact that powerful people were openly questioning the wisdom of rebuilding the city was nonetheless unnerving.
Then, just a few weeks after the storm, came confirmation. It came in the form of coffee.
Specifically, it came in the form of “the bridge smell” – the eye-opening aroma of roasting coffee emanating from the Folgers Coffee plant on Chef Menteur Highway near the Industrial Canal that has for decades tickled the senses of motorists zooming overhead.
It smelled like recovery. It smelled like hope. It smelled like home.
Powerful stuff, that.
But, then, New Orleans has a longer relationship with coffee than pretty much anywhere in North America.
It started centuries ago out of geographical convenience. Given its proximity to coffee-cultivating locales in the Caribbean and South America, the Port of New Orleans has been the de facto entry point for untold millions of pounds of coffee beans dating to the late 1700s.
Coffee culture was quick to take root. By one count, 1850s New Orleans boasted more than 500 coffee shops and exchanges, and was importing more than a half-million bags of coffee beans annually.
It wasn’t just an industry, though. For some, it meant freedom itself.
That famously included an enslaved woman named Rose Nicaud, who sold coffee every Sunday – a day off for slaves – from a pushcart in Jackson Square and, later, in the French Market.
By all accounts, Rose – whose specialties are said to have been café noir and café au lait – made uncommonly good coffee. By the 1840s, at just 28 years old, she had made enough from her pushcart enterprise to purchase her freedom.
Some 184 years later, the sale, purchase and consumption of café noir and café au lait at the French Market is part of the city’s daily ritual.
So, yeah: In New Orleans, coffee is more than coffee. It is part of who we are.
Alas, this missive runs long – and here I have yet to get to the relative merits of chicory, café brûlot and our own collection of homegrown coffeehouses.
I eagerly await our next meeting so we can continue the discussion. I will make the coffee.
