new orleans (the last): cafe du monde

 

In the sense that there is a bit of Disneyworld in the French Quarter, I'd say that Cafe du Monde could be considered the food court. Right there in the middle of it all, there is most likely a line of sunburned and drunk/ hungover tourists extending down the street, waiting not so patiently for their tiny plot of land in vast expanse of powdered sugar covered tables under the open air pavilion of the Cafe du Monde.  I am conditioned to stay away from these sorts of places--I pride myself in being a traveler who searches out the real thing, who ducks the waving elbows of the tourists who stay firmly on the beaten path.

We were in New Orleans for exactly 54 hours, and over that time, we went to the Cafe du Monde 3 times.  So much for being that kind of traveler.

Because really, it's a fabulous fabulous place.  When we arrived in New Orleans on Friday night after an entire afternoon of near misses (looks like you'll be staying the night in Hartford... Oh wait, we'll get you a seat on another airline... looks like you'll be spending the night in North Carolina... oh, just kidding, the plane is working after all!), it was midnight, and we dropped our bags in the shower, checked the bed for bedbugs, and ran out into the night.  Joey led me directly to the Cafe du Monde, just a few blocks from the hotel.  Late as it was, there was no line, but nearly all the 200 or so tables were filled with revelers and whoever else, and we ordered two cafe au laits and 2 orders of beignets.  There are only a few choices to make as you slide into a table and brush the powdered sugar from the last customer off the table.

"Will you have your own order of beignets, or will you share?" (own!)

"Will you have your cafe au lait hot (small or large), or iced, or frozen?"  (hot, and small, as the small comes in a perfect ceramic coffee cup, and the large comes in a styrofoam cup)

That's it.  That's all you have to decide.

Then the hurried waiter or waitress in a paper hat will come, and your order and four other tables' orders will be stacked on one tray, and it will be a magnificent pile of fried dough and milky coffee. And as the plates descend onto the table, they do so in a gentle flurry of powdered sugar that blankets the entire place, the entire neighborhood, even.

Joey first went to the Cafe du Monde with his grandmother when he was 14.  He has loved and searched out beignets ever since.  We made them at home with very little success a few years back, and every time we go to Portland, Maine, there is a stop for beignets.  But this, this is the home of the true thing, and as we arrived on that Friday night, he glowed through the haze of the powdered sugar mist with the joy of finally eating real, true beignets with me.  It was the best midnight snack I can ever remember.

 

We were back again the next day, because we had to bring Alice.  We braved the lines, and the beignets were just as good in the middle of the afternoon.  Then the next morning, Joey's birthday, we snuck out at 7:30 into the quiet city, and we ate beignets and drank milky chicory coffee for the third and final time.  Each time, the dough was fried to perfection, so light and crisp that it tasted only like pure loveliness.  When fried is fried right, it's an entirely different animal, or donut, shall we say.  Because a beignet is donut, but better, more filled with joy and love and air.  It's for coffee in the afternoon with a low cut dress so that the powdered sugar dusts the curve of the cleavage better than pressed powder ever could.  Which is why, I suppose, that I had no hope of recreating this at home, no hope of recreating it outside of the city even.  

Some foods are better to stay in their safe places, so that I can yearn and wish to travel for them.  I miss tea in Turkey, but I know it's there for me when I go back.  I miss coffee and sweet milky yogurt in Greece, and oranges in Morocco.  And beignets and cafe au lait, piled on a tray for someone else's table shaken in a snow globe of powdered sugar.

new orleans part 2: tonique and the pimm's cup

 

I left the blooming azaleas back in New Orleans, but I took the Pimm's Cup back home with me.

It tastes just as good here as it did there, even though we are on the eve of an impending April 1 snowstorm, even though you can't walk two steps without hearing reference to "mother nature's April fools joke,"  even though there is not a drop of humidity and when the temperature got up to 42 degrees today, we all took of our coats as if it were truly warm.  Even though all of these things, still, the Pimm's Cup is just the drink for the day.

 Of course I came to it like most things, peering in from the sidelines, checking out what everyone's doing.  Like kosher salt and vanilla beans, I got it from gossip first- then waited for the right moment.  I'd never heard of the stuff when Molly wrote about it last summer, and then it came up again here and there, and then my friend Naya sent me a few emails that turned out to be our primary guidebook to the city, and there it was again: "have a pimm's cup."

And so there we are, and it is Saturday.  We've started our in depth perusal of the road food festival and  there appears our friend Alice, who, superhero that she is, decided to fly standby from Providence so that she could spend four hours eating in New Orleans with us before getting back on a plane to go back to graduate school.  This is Alice.  I have known her for a long, long time, and she continues to surprise me in a good way.

And so we ate.  And when it was time for Alice to go, we walked her back to where she had parked her funny looking rental car, which was almost all the way out of the French Quarter, and across from Louis Armstrong Park, which still remains eerily and firmly closed since Katrina. And we hugged and said goodbye, and when kisses were blown and she was on her way back to the airport, Joey and I let out a collective sigh at the shortness of the visit.  I looked up, and there was a little sign, and I said, "isn't this that bar that we were supposed to find?"

And of course, because it was New Orleans where all of the places seemed to find us, it was.  It was only 3 o'clock, earlier than usual for a drink in my usual life, but it was New Orleans, and so really, we were late to the party.  And so we slid into a little white leather booth, and I swear to you that the air smelled sweet and the music was perfect.  And I said to Joey, "I'm so glad that we don't have anywhere even remotely this fabulous near us.  I'd drink here everyday."


The drink menu read like an epic poem, and I wanted to order every single thing, just for a taste of each.  Of course, I never had to think about what I would order.  It was time for the Pimm's cup.

 

Pimm's #1 is a British liqueur for sunny days, and it can be mixed with many things, but the classic is ginger ale or 7-up.  My Pimm's cup at Tonique was my first of several over the next 36 hours that I had left in New Orleans, and I studied the differences.  What made Tonique's cocktails so special, besides the perfection of the place itself, was it's ice.  I was so moved by the ice, and I marveled at it's squareness and stability within the drink.  I tried to contain myself, but I had to ask the lovely tattooed bartender how she made such ice.  "We have a special machine," she said, and although she told me the long and scientific name, I was drinking at 3 o'clock, and I don't remember what it was called. 


That first Pimm's cup was fantastic, but later there was one with sliced cucumber.  It seemed like a pretty garnish, but what it really did was infuse the whole drink with coolness.  I would imagine that if it were Summer, and I were sitting on my porch, I would pick a bit of mint and smoosh it up in there too.  I've heard rumors of strawberries if the time is right.  I think that the possibilities are endless.

And what does a  Pimm's cup taste like?  Besides summer itself, I'd say there's a bit of fruity iced tea in there.  My first thought was that although I've always hated the whole Dr. Pepper/ Moxie family of sodas, this would be how they would taste if they actually tasted good.  Don't get me wrong- this is not an April kind of drink.  This is not an eve of snowstorm kind of drink to sip while you are stirring soup to get you through the hunker down.

Except that it might be.  If you're like me and you're timings a little off, if you come late to the party or laugh a beat after the joke is over.  Screw timing.  The winter has been long, and we need summer any way we can get it.  It will come, friends, and by the time it does, you will be an expert at mixing your perfect Pimm's cup.

Pimm's Cup
(partly from the back of the bottle, and partly from my favorite parts of my varied New Orlean's Pimm's cups)

Start with a tall glass.  Fill it half way with ice (from a special machine!).  Add about 1 1/2 to 2 ounces Pimm's #1.  Then fill it most of the way up with ginger ale (Reed's brew is a winner here).  Add a hefty squeeze of lemon, a hefty squeeze of lime, and stir.  Top with slices of cucumber.  Acceptable to drink with a straw.

butcher

 

Like any other tourist destination, New Orleans has a neighborhood where the tourists hang out.  

The French Quarter is amazing in its own right--people stay there because it is beautiful and creepy and filled with gas street lamps and little restaurants. But it is also a party all of the time, and walking down Bourbon Street at two in the morning, pushing past teenagers holding their bong-shaped plastic cups made especially for some New Orleans specialty drink with the especially classy name of "the hand grenade," carefully stepping over the running brook of vomit through the street, one can't help but feel stuck in a perpetual college spring break.

It's no wonder that every time we talked to someone from New Orleans on the street (which was a lot, as people actually talk to each other on the street there), they would inevitably take our shoulders and turn us around as if we were blindfolded and headed towards the pinata, and they would point us in the right direction, and with a loving shove, say "go there- out of the quarter.  Keep walking until you find this."  We had a few recommendations too, a few emails from friends suggesting that we "try the drinks here!" or find this place.  We never did our homework, we never mapped out the city to find these mysterious locations, and we rarely employed the gps on my phone.  We just wandered.

We met a woman on our last night in New Orleans, an artist named Bobby who had lived in the city on and off for 30 years.  We had seen her earlier when she was volunteering at the Tennessee Williams Festival, and she had steered us off the street into a theater so that we could witness the drunken finally of the festival, the annual "Stell-ahhh!" competition where anyone can enter with their best channeling of Stanley Kowalski.  We saw her later outside of a lovely bar called d.b.a. (best music I've heard in a while, everyone dressed in their best to dance) in the Marigny neighborhood, and we thanked her for pushing us into the Stella competition.  We got to talking, and we told her about how we had found Butcher the previous day, and about how we kept running into the places that people had told us to find even though we never actually stopped to figure out where there were.  This happened over and over, that we'd be walking for an hour and end up in some new neighborhood, and then we would look up and see that restaurant that our friend Luke had told us that we should find.  It all had a bit of a fairy country feeling, like we just had to wander enough, and as soon as the heat really started to get to us, the place that we needed would appear.

 

Bobby said that New Orleans had always been like that, that it just made sense in the strangest way, and that you couldn't walk five feet without experiencing some sort of magical coincidence.  She said that after the storm, nothing made sense.  The city lost that quality, you couldn't actually find anything, and nothing really matched up.  She said that the city was just starting to make sense again, and that our experience enforced that.  She said that even though there are still neighborhoods entirely without power and running water, even though some of the streets are nearly impassable by car, even though there are hospitals and hotels that remain empty and over half the population of the city has left for good, the fact that the city had shown us that old quality of magical coincidence was a sign that it was coming back to life.

There are two adjoining restaurants in the Warehouse district that occupy one corner.  The first is Couchon, a lovely sit down restaurant with an exciting menu crafted by its owner and rising star of a chef, Donald Link.  Next door, he has opened Butcher, a cafe that is mostly a meat counter, but it has tables so that you don't have to wait until you get home to tear into your little package of sopressata or chorizo.  Butcher has a small menu so beautiful that it is necessary to order one of everything and a beer list that fits on a chalk board comprised mostly of Louisiana beers. We sat down at one of the high bar tables, and before we even ordered we had made friends on either side of our table.  To our right was a couple that included a woman who was born and raised in Berkshire County about 30 minutes from our house, and to our left sat an older couple, two teachers from Memphis who got into a passionate conversation with Joey about Memphis bbq.

We sat at Butcher for hours, talking to people, eating, and admiring the assortment of meat hanging behind the counter.  I had a charcuterie plate of fennel sausage, chorizo, and sopressata.  It was simple- sliced thick with a side of grainy mustard and house-made bread and butter pickles. A scoop of pork rilletes in the center without any ceremony, and a pile of crunchy, seeded flat bread crackers.

 

It blew my mind, and I don't say that lightly.  I begged the waitress for more pickles.  Joey admitted that he had just consumed the best hot dog of his life.  We finished our beers and wandered home, hoping that it would appear to us in the same way that the restaurant itself had.

And of course, after a few more adventures of the night, we found our way back and there was our hotel in front of us again.  I said, "maybe we should go back? across the expanse of city just for one more taste?" Our dreams were filled with perfectly smoked meats and sweet and sour pickles, and I must admit that those dreams are still with me.