“New Orleans is a city of mood,” chef Serigne Mbaye tells me one Wednesday morning in September. We’ve been discussing the merits of Parkway‘s po’boys and the old-school kitchen at Commander’s Palace. While growing up in Senegal and New York City, Mbaye cooked with his mother, and his Uptown restaurant, Dakar NOLA, braids his memories of this time with his haute restaurant experiences and the deep-rooted African heritage of New Orleans.
“New Orleans is a woman,” declares Biba Islah. We’re talking in her studio, tucked away on the ground floor of an old bread factory in the Irish Channel neighborhood. An eighth-generation French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole New Orleanian, Islah does hair, makeup, and healing, and she reads tarot at Patron Saint, the wineshop and bar that my husband, Tony Biancosino, and I opened a year ago in the Lower Garden District. The night before we debuted our restaurant and tavern, St. Pizza, a couple of doors down from Patron Saint, she cleansed it with sage and rum. “New Orleans is empathetic. She feels everything,” offers Islah.
“New Orleans is a two-way embrace,” says Ben Jaffe, the director of historic French Quarter jazz-club institution Preservation Hall, when I ask him what it takes to endure here. “It comes with what I call the ‘New Orleans tax.’ ” This manifests not in the form of dollars, he explains, but in the responsibility to love and understand the city as it is.
It would be impossible to love and understand New Orleans without knowing its irrational, insouciant origins: a colony built on a swamp by three different countries; a yellow-fever-ridden, opera-obsessed port city central to the slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean; the fecund ground where jazz, America’s most original art, sprang forth from the minds of Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong; a mecca of both seafood and oil. A beyond-American place of portals waiting to be opened by pirates, pioneers, and anyone curious to dig beneath the oyster-shell-strewn surface. It would also be impossible to love and understand this city today without recalling the blazing hot days of late August 2005 and all that has happened since.
Eat and drink
New Orleans is a menagerie of culinary institutions, from Dooky Chase to Brigtsen’s and Clancy’s, but it also has room for newcomers likely to stand the test of time: Melissa Martin‘s deeply felt Mosquito Supper Club, one of the few true homes of Cajun cooking; Dakar NOLA, Serigne Mbaye’s modern ode to traditional Senegalese cooking that opened in 2022 and won a James Beard Award; 34 Restaurant & Bar, Emeril Lagasse’s first stand-alone in eight years and a temple to his Portuguese heritage; the Little House, a West Bank cottage café and wineshop-bar in Algiers Point; and Martha Wiggins‘s Café Reconcile, a teaching restaurant on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard that serves New Orleans cuisine—red beans and rice, catfish, smothered chicken—in an everyman lunch canteen.
Then there are the new neighborhood mainstays that visitors will want to leave the French Quarter for: Lagniappe Bakehouse, hidden in a breezy cottage where New Orleans native Kaitlin Guerin‘s pastries nod to Southern and African tides with benne-seed toffee cookies and corn-husk-wrapped honey-butter-adorned cornmeal muffins; Queen Trini Lisa, whose jerk chicken, oxtail, and pigeon peas and rice illustrate the city’s close ties to the Caribbean; and NightBloom, a Bywater cocktail bar from the Bacchanal team that serves seasonal drinks and hosts DJs late into the night. And indulge me for mentioning my own wine-shop and bar, Patron Saint, and pizzeria and tavern, St. Pizza, which my husband and I created to feel like extensions of our own home.
Twenty years ago Hurricane Katrina ravaged this sleepy, subtropical place of creaky cypress porches and pastel clapboard, scattering its citizenry, as if in a snow globe, every which way. “Ninety-six different zip codes,” chef Emeril Lagasse says he counted when mailing out post-hurricane checks to employees in 2005. Two decades later New Orleans has changed in ways both good and difficult, having become a shiny object in the lenses of an iPhone-wielding American public hungry to consume an exceedingly affordable city. It is today, like many American cities, pricier, hotter, and more riddled with infrastructural issues than ever before. And yet it persists as a city of singular reputation, whose name casts a universal spell; say “New Orleans” in Tokyo, Lagos, Sāo Paulo, or Paris, and watch as eyes light up with the recognition of all that this watery, crescent-shaped peninsula of fewer than 400,000 residents can mean. Burrow beneath the surface layer of mass tourism and you’ll find yourself in a resilient community deeply committed to its long-term health.
“I don’t know another city our size that has as much consequence in the food and beverage space,” says Joaquin Rodas, an owner of the legendary wine oasis Bacchanal and the new NightBloom cocktail bar, which sit at opposite ends of the Bywater neighborhood. Originally from El Salvador, Rodas moved here by way of Los Angeles as a helicopter mechanic with the Marine Corps in 1995. He credits GPS and smartphones for the eventual “12-year-overnight-success” of Bacchanal, which is located on a sleepy corner across from an abandoned naval base that is wrapped with chain-link fencing and barbed wire. In the years after Katrina, new hospitality folks and hurricane refugees who’d fled to cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco trickled back, eager to rebuild the city’s dining scene with the food, drinks, and techniques they’d learned elsewhere. As with the Spanish and French and Africans and Irish and Caribbeans who had come before them, they infused this fresh material into the city’s DNA. “Funny enough, the whole country kind of leaned into New Orleans,” says Rodas. Katrina drew focus on the city while reworking it into a kaleidoscope of new voices and ideas.
Shop
The city is full of old and beautiful things. There are the storied antiques emporiums on Royal Street, of course, but also highly curated shops like Century Girl (impeccable women’s vintage and jewelry), Webb’s Bywater Music Store (records and instruments), Lucullus Antiques (cookware and interiors), and Anthology (a trove of cool vintage gems). New Orleans is also peppered with the imaginative collections of local minds: Baldwin & Co., an independent bookshop and café committed to community-based action and literary accessibility; Freda, which brings together labels like Baserange and body oil from Mount Sapo; Lekha, a showcase for luxurious clothing handmade by women artisans in India; Jamboree Jams/Bar Pomona, a shop meets neighborhood café with a rotating offering of pastries and preserves; and Haus of Hoodoo, a Lower Garden District apothecary and botanica that curates a beguiling collection of remedies and spiritual services.
New Orleans’s consequence has indeed attracted the world to its sea-level streets; in the last six months we have hosted Taylor Swift, Super Bowl LIX, and Prospect.6, the sixth edition of an art fair that highlights local talent including L. Kasimu Harris and Abdi Farah and international artists such as Venuri Perera and Myrlande Constant. We throw legendary parties like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which attract 1.5 million people annually. But for every main event and decades-old institution, there are dozens of projects, pop-ups, and local businesses roiling with their own grassroots life.
“People here have the vulnerability to run with the experiment—to take a risk,” says Melissa Martin, the James Beard–decorated chef, writer, and owner of Mosquito Supper Club, an Uptown Victorian cottage offering bayou-born Cajun food five nights a week; her business started as a pop-up out of a space in the Bywater in 2014 with borrowed furniture and her mom’s and grandmother’s Magnalite pots. Here it’s possible to test-run a business without private equity but with the community’s full investment. “We can bootstrap it in a way New York would never dream of,” Martin says.
New Orleans is a city of flow, shifted and shaped by the wandering Mississippi River and the swampy alluvial soup of the Gulf of Mexico. A place where it’s possible and common to create informal and temporary businesses: a roving grill that specializes in Puerto Rican yakitori; an ad hoc vintage shop that sells old Jazz Fest posters and Venetian glass; a sourdough bread salon that traffics in democratic socialism. Patron Saint found its proof of concept as a pop-up in the late days of the pandemic on a sunny corner of the Lower Garden District, which my husband and I built into a brick-and-mortar establishment. Later we added St. Pizza during the thick of Mardi Gras and sold slices to feathered, bedazzled, painted passersby, experimenting to see what worked because in New Orleans such a thing is possible. “You can still be a dreamer here,” Rodas told me. Before moving here in 2019, I had no immediate plans to open a business, but New Orleans can change a person’s ambitions.
Someone recently described the city to me as an “economically depressed town with outsize cultural value.” This tension results in businesses that couldn’t exist anywhere else, including musical institutions owned and run by musicians themselves: the Mother-in-Law Lounge, a cornerstone jazz dive owned by trumpet player Kermit Ruffins; Tipitina’s, a legendary venue owned by the band Galactic; Preservation Hall, which is ground zero for the living memory of New Orleans jazz, owned by Ben Jaffe, who plays bass and tuba in the house band and also serves as its creative director, continuing the legacy of his parents, who began managing it in 1961. In 2021, Jaffe partnered to rescue the Toulouse Theater, a shuttered French Quarter music venue that originally opened in 1977. These places, Jaffe says, “are a part of your childhood and your education. You think, This is where Dr. John and Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers played—we have to make sure this place survives. It doesn’t seem extraordinary, but it is extraordinary.”
Stay
Imagine what life could be like living in a Garden District Victorian at The Chloe, an Uptown Queen Anne on the St. Charles Streetcar line. Each room is its own treasure chest of detail, with claw-foot tubs, cane rocking chairs, and the bathroom hidden through a wardrobe door, as in room seven. The Hotel St. Vincent on Magazine Street offers Lower Garden District luxury to a jet-set crowd, while the Hotel Peter and Paul in the Marigny is a quiet oasis arranged around a lovingly restored 19th-century church and school. To mingle with ghosts of Central City past, rest your head at Dew Drop Inn, a live music venue and hotel that’s been revived and channels the years when Irma Thomas, Fats Domino, and Little Richard played there.
See and do
There is no place more atmospheric than the old groves of live oaks at City Park. Scattered among these century-old Spanish-moss-hung curiosities are the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Botanical Gardens, and acres upon acres of grounds that include bayou trails, fields of wildflowers, and weekly farmers markets. Born of the tradition of Black brass-accompanied funerals and hosted by the city’s many social aid and pleasure clubs, New Orleans’s second lines are one of the most moving ways to understand the city’s African roots as translated through public dance, community participation, and unbridled joy. A celebratory street parade is held nearly every Sunday (except in summer).
Maya Visnyei
New Orleans is a calling, a vocation, a religion: It requires devotion, no matter the storm that strikes. New Orleans is an accidental invention, a corrupt little hotbed of seafood and cocktails and jazz, and a true bastion of regional character. And it is important to know all of this if you are going to visit, to truly see the place that has been dubbed the Big Easy, but which is neither big nor easy, as the local quip goes. Everyone here, if you listen hard enough, has their sayings and their own set of beliefs about this almost-island hanging off the heel of Louisiana. Each resident is a guide who will take you down streets both well trodden and hidden, to tourist sites (some of which residents also frequent) and seemingly abandoned buildings that light up on Sundays during second lines with crowds of neighbors, $2 beers, and smoking grills. The same locals’ list of recommendations might include McHardy’s black-pepper-flecked fried chicken, served from a counter in Mid-City; or the fried chicken pop-up at Pete’s Out in the Cold in the Irish Channel; or the golden fried chicken on a white-linen-swathed table at Dooky Chase in Tremé.
