This is Part I of a two part write-up of Valerie & my Christmas week trip to New Orleans
Day 1, Travel: Our
idea was to get a super-early start to minimize the amount of airport craziness
we had to deal with flying on Christmas Eve. It worked – and all we had to do
to make it work was to leave the house at 4 AM! Thanks to Valerie’s newly
minted TSA Pre-Check card (I already had one) we sailed through security at the
airport and were quickly on our way to Atlanta, where we got the Christmas
present of having arrival and departure gates which were actually close to each other.
When we got into New Orleans we went straight to our hotel
(timeshare) where we were able to check in right away to a really nice, newly
renovated unit. Checking in immediately was a big plus in two ways: first, it
gave us a chance to lay in a supply of food, since we knew that not very much was
going to be open in New Orleans on Christmas. Second, it gave us a chance to
nap to make up for having woken up super-early.
Our first New Orleans activity was a bus tour out to see the
Christmas
Eve bonfires along the levees in the rural parishes outside of New Orleans.
This ritual is alternately described as descending from a pagan ritual and as
lighting the way for Papa Noel who, according to one Louisiana tradition,
arrives in a pirogue pulled by alligators. When you come down to it, I think that
whatever the origins, at this point it’s primarily an annual opportunity
for a bunch of Cajun rednecks to indulge their biggest pyromaniac fantasies.
There’s a line of bonfires, each maybe 20 feet high, stretching miles along the
levees. Many of the bonfires are packed with firecrackers and so for the first
minute or so after they’re lit they make a deafening amount of noise as all the
firecrackers go off nearly at once. The locals also seem to be able to get
their hands on professional size fireworks, and the evening also features a
continuous hail of fireworks coming from all over the place. Not an
organized display in any way, more like an artillery barrage. Christmas Eve was
also the first night of Chanukah and we viewed the event as an unusual and
distinctly Louisiana way to celebrate the “Festival of Lights”.
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| Fire on the levee |
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| Fires along the levee |
Day 2, Christmas:
It’s a long-established routine that I start every day on vacation stumbling
around in the dark. Valerie’s and my natural rhythms are off from each other
and I naturally wake up several hours earlier than she does. Our unit in New
Orleans had a small kitchenette and I was able to get dressed by the light of
the cooktop light and then slip out the door. The hotel has a surprisingly nice
gym, where I went for a run on a treadmill and watched the beginning of the
movie The Big Short.
Our first full day in New Orleans was Christmas Day. We knew
it would be a slow day in terms of tourist activities, but had done enough
research to have figured out things to do. First, we took the St. Charles
Avenue trolley to a funky little coffee shop called Hey Café, which is located
diagonally across the Garden District from our hotel. Hey Café is unusual in
that they have both a small roaster and a large rooster. Actually, it’s a pet
chicken, but that’s not as alliterative. Rooster, chicken, pullet, whatever –
the place makes a freakin’ amazing latte. And they gave me a free cup of coffee
to take with me when we left. Since I had of course had a cup of coffee in the
room before I went running and another in preparation for going out for coffee,
by the time I finished my latte and my post-latte coffee I was pretty darn buzzed.
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| Valerie with Hey Cafe's pet chicken |
We stopped in to try to secure a reservation at Shaya, a
high-end nouvelle Israeli restaurant
which we had heard was offering a Chanukah menu and which happened to be up the
block from Hey Café. With most places closed and with it being Chanukah they
were pretty booked, but were able to score a dinner reservation on the early
side. We then occupied a few hours with a self-guided walking tour of The
Garden District and its incredible antebellum architecture – made even prettier
by being done up for Christmas. Our
wanderings eventually led us back to our hotel, where we had a light lunch from
the food we had purchased the day before, then relaxed for a bit.
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| In the Garden District (this house belongs to actor John Goodman) |
Dinner at Shaya was amazing. The weather was warm – a warm
spell even by Gulf Coast winter standards – and we sat in the restaurant’s very
pleasant courtyard. The food was wonderful, except for the main course. That’s
not as big a negative as it might at first sound, since by the time we got to
the main course we had eaten a tasting platter of Middle Eastern spreads (baba
ganoush, a Romanian eggplant dish, and tershi, a pumpkin spread, all served
with fresh pita), plus potato latkes with apple butter, sour cream and caviar
(we skipped the prix fixe Chanukah dinner but were able to order the latkes a
la carte), and an order of their duck-based matzoh ball soup. These dishes were
all amazing and by the time our main course of Moroccan chicken arrived I was
so full that I was practically relieved to find that it wasn’t all that good
and so I didn’t feel bad about having enough appetite to eat only a part of it.
After dinner we Ubered over to The Rock N Bowl for their
annual Christmas Day show. Rock N Bowl is a wonderful New Orleans place. A
neighborhood institution since the 90’s, it’s still primarily a local Ninth
Ward scene. Not touristy, not overly hipster or funky, just a place the locals
go to dance to good music. It’s big – maybe 20,000 square feet. Bowling lanes
on one side, stage, dance floor and bar on the other. We got there early,
during Benny Grunch and the Bunch’s traditional Christmas Day performance and
so admission was only $2 per person! Benny Grunch and the Bunch is apparently a
Ninth Ward institution in and of itself. The band members are all 70-ish years
old but they’re still cranking out a good New Orleans sound, with particularly strong
vocal harmonies. Their set was a mix of Christmas songs and New Orleans
standards, but they seemed best known for their original novelty songs. The
biggest of these, with which the locals sing along, was “The Twelve Yats of
Christmas”, a version of The Twelve Days
of Christmas adapted with shout-outs to local institutions. Valerie and I
didn’t get most of the references, but I appreciated the cleverness of the way
they alluded to the numbers without always literally counting (for example,
“Tenneco Refinery” in place of “Ten Lords a’Leaping”). The Bunch also has a
song called “Ain’t Dere No More”, a nostalgic rap paean to stores and
institutions long-gone from the neighborhood (by the way, only in New Orleans
could a bunch of septuagenarian white folks successfully pull off a rap song),
as well as a song about how there’s no place to pee during Mardi Gras (there
are t-shirts for this one!). Perhaps weirdest of all was "Norris the Nocturnal
Nutria". In case you’re unfamiliar, nutria is not the name of an organic energy
bar – it’s an invasive rodent from South America which has been wreaking some
degree of havoc in the southern U.S. Norris the Nocturnal Nutria is a Christmas
song about a nutria who has trouble sleeping, but Santa can’t come until he’s
all tucked in. When the band played the
song someone came out dressed as Norris, acted out the song, and danced with
the crowd! The song, which
you can hear for yourself, is catchy in a horrible sort of way and I spent
the rest of the week singing little bits of it, giving it to Valerie as an
earworm again and again. She claims she didn’t sleep at all Christmas night as the
sounds of Norris the Nocturnal Nutria danced through her head.
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| Norris the Nocturnal Nutria |
After Benny Grunch was done, the main act came on. Geno
Delafose is a top zydeco act and let me tell you, he hit the stage in high gear
and the place immediately went wild with dancing. I love scenes like this! This
wasn’t funky New Orleans, drunken New Orleans or freaky New Orleans. Just
regular folks who love music and dance, out for a good time. Most folks there were pretty regular looking, but
there were some standouts: the tubby middle-aged guy in jean shorts and cowboy
boots, the African American cowboy in the sleeveless shirt who danced with one
partner after another, mugging and exaggerating every step along the way, the
woman in the Daisy Dukes who looked like she could have been the runner-up Miss
Louisiana some decades ago, the couple dancing off by the bowling lanes executing some very dainty steps which seemed incongruous with their rough-hewn
appearance, the requisite New Orleans meshuginah – a guy in a fright wig, and
outsized little girl dress and tights (he was so strange that during Benny
Grunch’s set he was snubbed on the dance floor by a large nutria). During
most of the numbers people were doing a variety of steps on the dance floor but
miraculously, every time the band played a waltz, everyone, whatever step they
were doing, promenaded in synch counter-clockwise around the room. The music on
stage was great and the show on the dance floor was just as good. I’m glad we
got to see some Zydeco since, as I learned, Zydeco is really a Cajun country
thing centered around towns like Lafayette and Mamou, not a New Orleans thing.
After a while we started to fade a little and so headed out.
Total damage for cover charge, a beer, and a bottle of water was ten dollars
and fifty cents.
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| Geno Delafose |
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| The Rock N Bowl |
Day 3, The French
Quarter: With things coming back to life after Christmas, we headed into
the French Quarter. We were starting to get the hang of the St. Charles
streetcar which, by the way, still uses the original 1920’s cars. The drivers vigorously pump various
handles in what looks like the way a child would mimic driving a car. After watching for a while I figured out that the main left hand control is a throttle, which most drivers seem
to treat as All-On/All-Off, though some drivers with more nuance use the
intermediate settings. The main right-hand control is the brake, though for the
life of me I couldn’t figure out how the vigorous left and right pumping of
that lever actually works the brake. But maybe only a geek would lavish that
much attention on the streetcar controls …
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| St. Charles Ave. Streetcar |
We rode the streetcar to its terminus at Canal Street. As we
walked down Canal we immediately noticed a shop with some elegant Judaica in
the window. We went in and found that the place was owned and staffed by
Israelis. As we continued to shop we discovered that Israelis seem pretty well-represented
the jewelry businesses in the French Quarter. This was just one was in which we
were surprised by how Jewish New Orleans was. There were also things like the names of the clothing stores along Canal Street (Rubensteins! Meyer the Hatter! (more on
that store later)), the unexpected menorah in the lobby of our hotel, and the big
Happy Chanukah on the cover of the New Orleans newspaper. The woman behind the
counter at that first store told us that her boss also owns another store
further into the quarter, and that the other store had an even greater
selection of Judaica. To make a long story short, we wound up buying a silver filigree
Chanukah menorah at the second shop.
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| Street performers |
All told, we spent a fun day just wandering the French
Quarter – just browsing the variety of shops, watching the scene, listening to
street musicians, and of course, getting beignet at Café du Monde, where we
were somehow able to skirt the huge line of people waiting for takeout and go
right to a table (hint: on really nice days, the indoor tables are less in
demand). Valerie had never had beignet before and found them quite yummy! On
the way back to the streetcar we poked our heads into the various hotels to see
how they had decorated for Christmas. A lot of really pretty lobbies!
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| Coffee and beignet! |
That evening we went out to Commander’s Palace, conveniently
located walking distance from our hotel. Commander’s Palace is a
destination restaurant – a century-old establsihment, winner of many culinary awards, and so on. To tell you the truth, to me it was a big disappointment. Part of it was
the fault of my dietary restrictions. I don’t eat shellfish and I didn’t want
to eat meat (so I could eat a dairy -based dessert!), and so I was left with
exactly two menu choices. I ordered a redfish dish, which turned out to be
rather lackluster. I’ve had better fish at the decidedly downscale Darwell’s Café in Mississippi. We waited longer than I felt was appropriate
for someone to come take our order. Our
waiter seemed annoyed that we weren’t going to order the big bread pudding
dessert – or maybe it was that we expressed an interest in the bananas foster dessert, which
meant extra work for him, as the waiter prepares it table-side. The bananas
foster was good, but the home-made ice cream had chunks of ice in it.
Don't get me wrong: it wasn’t
a bad meal. In fact, Valerie said her food was delicious. It was just not the superlative
dining experience I had anticipated. I liked Shaya better. I was also sick for
about three hours immediately following the meal, but I don’t blame the restaurant
for that. I'm pretty sure it was some sort of food intolerance or random stomach upset on my part;
too soon after the meal to have been any sort of food poisoning.
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| Bananas Foster |
And can I be my old fuddy-dud self about something else? The
restaurant has a dress code, which I applaud. “Business Casual. Jackets are
preferred for gentlemen.” The guy at the table next to us wasn’t wearing a
jacket, and it bothered me. I think a restaurant of this caliber should require
jackets, just like restaurants in New York used to do when I was a kid. But then
again, if it was up to me I would institute a dress code for flying on
airplanes, too. I am a relic of a bygone era, one I barely lived in myself.
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| My vision of what air travel should look like |
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