Liuzza's By the Track: I Thank My Various Gods for Gumbo

Liuzza's By The Track
1518 North Lopez Street
New Orleans, LA 70119-3029
(504) 218-7888



Liuzzas by the Track is over by the fairgrounds, in the leafy, green, and blissfully ambling tourist free environs of Midcity. Liuzzas bills itself as a neighborhood cafe, and, unlike most joints that claim this status, actually is one: locals shoot the shit and watch sports on television here and get out of the heat. The kitchen speciality is po-boys and gumbo, with the barbecued shrimp po-boy given particular emphasis on the menu: I came here to try out the gumbo.

And I was hungry. I'd ridden a ways here from my apartment in the Garden District on my trusty and only slightly embarrassing BMX bicycle. More importantly, it was late May and New Orleans summer weather had really kicked in, inflicting Mumbai-like levels of blistering heat and humidity upon us poor permant residents. Not that I'd be a permanant resident long: I was packing up my apartment and heading back to Sacramento, prior to moving to, well, Cambodia. Long story short, this gumbo was sort of a last-gasp gumbo, a paen to New Orlean gumbos (if you will). That makes it sound real important.


Luckily, Liuzza's gumbo is awesome. It has a distinctive oregano heavy and very Italian flavor that works perfectly with the fatty and delicious andouille and shrimp and oysters. It's a light-textured gumbo with a lot of meat and a lot of delicious animal fat, and a good level of built in spice: I was pleased to find that I only had to add a smidgen of Crystal instead of my usual vigorous and extended shake-shake-shake. I dumped some saltines on top and horked the gumbo down, listening to folks around me discuss the oil spill, the horrors of the weather, and The Crazy Ass Things We Did Last Weekend You Won't Believe It: now that's what I call home, or at least something approximating a spiritual base, with gumbo at the center of it. I could see my bike outside. I had to sell it the next day. I didn't want to.

I am going to miss New Orleans, and I am going to miss gumbo. Maybe I can make it in Phnom Penh. Well, maybe.

Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House: Half-Shells Without the Grime?

Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House
144 Bourbon Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
(504) 522-0111

Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House is located in the oyster bar gulch at the confluence of Bourbon and Iberville, next door to Acme and across the street from Felix's. The Bourbon House, a part of the commodious Brennan's restaurant empire, seems to see its niche as the upscale alternative to the two stalwarts, boasting a fancily designed dining room, an impressive selection of bourbons (no kiddin') and perkier service then is commonly encountered at the other two joints. Basically, this is the oyster place you bring your boss or your uppity in-laws too. This is in itself a service. Us trashy college kids really enjoy wandering by the giant picture windows out onto Bourbon Street while carrying bottle s of trash vodka bigger then our heads, but sometimes we eat here too. When our parents are in town.

The menu offers refined variants on typical New Orleans oyster bar food: you've got your shrimp Creole, your turtle soup and seafood gumbo, and your fried seafood platters, offered alongside non-oyster related raw bar offerings (excuse me, Le Grand Plateaux De Fruits De Mer, you know what I'm talkin' about), steaks, and some interesting appetizers. (Including hummus. At a New Orleans oyster bar. Sort of freaking me out). There always seems to be specials stalking the perimeter here. The frozen Bourbon Milk Punch is absolutely delicious and absolutely bad for you, just like everything else in this evil, hateful city.



We began with the Oysters Rockefeller, Bienville, and Fonseca, three of my favorite old-hat NOLA specialities. These were really pretty superb, and definitely superior to the versions I've tried at Antoines and Felix's. The Rockefellers are of course the classic and were very good, with a rich spinach and cheese topping with just a bit of anise-y flavor. The Bienvilles and Fonsecas were also good, though the flavors were pretty much "cheesy meaty stuff on top of an oyster." Not actually a bad thing.



We also got some raws on the half-shell. Tasty little bastards. Don't get me started on the gulf oil spill or there will be even more swearing then usual on this blog.



I had the seafood gumbo, which I've had here before and enjoyed. It's a good, if not stand-out gumbo, with a fairly dark roux and a smooth, gentle texture. The addition of oysters is paramount here and gives it some briny character. Definitely requires a substantial whomp of hot sauce.



For my main, I picked the startingly tasty Chop Salad Louis with grilled gulf shrimp and "Avery Island" dressing. (This means it done got Tabasco in it). A really fantastic dish: crisp romaine with big, sweet, head-on prawns and a bit of avocado to add a good dose of creaminess. Shelling the little beasts at the table was not entirely in keeping with the fancy interior here, but was definitely New Orleans like. If you don't eat the heads, you are foolish indeed.



My dad had a fried shrimp po-boy, which was quite nice: lightly fried shrimp and the requisite Leidenheimer bread. My aunt had the Shrimp Creole, which was all right - in a very chunky and very tomato-heavy sauce, with more of an Italian flavor then a distinctly New Orleans one. Then again, I agree with Tom Fitzmorris's belief that shrimp creole is never, ever all that good.



My cousin ordered the alligator burger, because she is very fond of alligators, even when this fondness extends to eating them. It tasted like ground alligator, which is to say like spiced and slightly fishy chicken, and was served with some fine sweet potato fries. I suppose if you're into that kind of thing. Unfortunately one does not become filled with the badass essence of gator after eating gator.

On the whole, the Bourbon House is a nice, upscale choice for oysters on the half shell and accompaniments on Bourbon's Oyster Gulch. Felix's is my pick for slamming down oysters and Jagermeister prior to wandering out into the night to do naughty things, but Bourbon House is where you go to have a civilized and tasty meal minus, say, annoyances such as drunken Florida State frat-boys in straw hats. Not to mention there's never any line, unlike at media-darling Acme Oyster House. Nice work, Brennans. Keep doing what you're doing.

Addendum: I also like the Bourbon House because I met one of its chefs on the streetcar a while back. I had run my bike into a swiftly-moving car the day prior and was experiencing some muscle pain: it was also 3:00 AM and I was feeling sort of pissed off about going out drinking instead of staying in bed and recovering, although of course this was all my fault. The chef and I discussed New Orleans bars, the magic of weird seafood dishes, and how awesome Spanish food was during the ride home: he also offered me a sorely needed Advil. Perhaps one should not take pain-killers from people you meet on the streetcar (maybe, quizas, maybe), but he sure was a nice guy. Thanks, guy!

Mandinas: Old School Creole Food, Epic Fried Oyster Salad

Mandinas
3800 Canal Street
New Orleans
(504) 482-9179

Mandinas is one of those New Orleans institutions, the sort of restaurant that has been around since roughly the dawn of time (well, 1932) and has cultivated an equally antique customer base. Serving Creole classics, Italian dishes, po-boys and steaks to an always-considerable crowd, it's difficult to believe that this stalwart was almost brought down by Hurricane Katrina. Believe it: the restaurant was flooded and nearly destroyed during Katrina, but the resilient Mandina family rebuilt, remodeled, and reopened in the original location on Canal Street. The menu and interior ambience were changed as little as humanly possible. This is a city that values old stuff.


My family and I headed to Mandinas right before Newcomb-Tulane's equally oldy moldy Under the Oaks Ceremony. I would, perhaps inadvisably, be receiving an award recognizing my Newcomb Grant last summer. There was no question of chowing down before hand. (I would later be the only person at the ceremony not wearing a cap and gown because no one had told me such was the dress code. But at least I had a swell lunch).



We began with the shrimp remoulade, which was a very generous serving of perfectly boiled shrimp in a thick, creamy, and just spicy enough sauce. Remoulade is one of those things that can be horrifyingly manhandled by lousy restaurants, but Mandinas demonstrates how to do it right: a nice interplay of tangy flavors in tandem with sweet shrimp meat. Aces.



Most of us had the gumbo. The gumbo, much to our surprise, tasted almost exactly like the Dupuy family recipe, right down to its appearance. I have to wonder if our family recipe and the Mandina family recipe perhaps hailed from the same source somewhere in the mists of time - both families were, after all, resident in New Orleans during the same era. Needless to say, I liked this light-colored tomato gumbo a whole lot: plenty of shrimp, plenty of okra, tomatoes, oysters, and sausage, without a ton of dark roux flavoring. Needed to be kicked in the ass a little bit with some Crystal, but this is also true of the almighty family recipe. Not everyone likes their mouth to burn when consuming gumbo. I do maintain that these people are wusses.



Miss Hilda's Salad is one of the restaurant's stalwart recipes, and the ginormous "side" salad didn't disappoint. It's basically a New Orleans chef salad with a couple kinds of cheese, anchovies, diced ham, turkey, and salami, egg, shrimp, and various herbs, served on a bed of greens. A gravy boat of dressing is provided on the side. Not sure I want to know what happens when you let them dress it. In any case, excellent and a nice fresh counterpart to the other menu options.



This fried oyster salad was slightly monolithic. The crisp, fresh fried oysters were very good specimens of the genre, and we enjoyed them. Except there were so many that we almost couldn't finish them, which is a remarkable and perhaps unheard of phenomena in this oyster obsessed family. I picked up the slack on the crispy bivalves of course, being a giving sort of gal. Call me the 102 Pound Garbage Disposal, and you'll pretty much be right on.

Mandinas is confident enough to shun credit and debit cards at the register. Bring cash.

The Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival And Some Rumination on Southern Identity and Hipsters (Also Gumbo)

The Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival is a 30 year old and inexplicably ginormous festival, held smack-dab out in the swamps outside New Orleans. It is devoted (startlingly enough) to strawberries, strawberry flavored foods, swamp-type music, and the many exciting ways one might combine booze and the little red fruit into one exciting package. The clientele is, well, rural Louisiana.

Living in New Orleans and attending Tulane - a school whose student body is made up mostly of people from Long Island with fake tans and extremely white teeth - it's easy to forget that one resides in the South.

The South where people wear overalls un-ironically, baseball caps with Harley Davidson insignia on them, and purchase things like Confederate flag string bikinis. That variety of South. A King and a Queen of the Strawberry Festival are always appointed, ostensibly to promote healthy eating. Mostly to wear tiaras. There's a strawberry eating contest which I think I could have showed pretty well in, but we missed it.

My friends are hipsters and I am a hipster in a hipster tribe - we frequent hipster bars and go to hipster shows and sit around being Ironic Hipsters on campus, congratulating ourselves on how avant garde we are. Such is my lot, I've made my peace with it. But the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival functioned as a very needed reminder that an entire universe of totally unironic human beings is out there, people who really could not give two shits about noise music or the state of molecular gastronomy in Portugal or the best place one might acquire rare dub records from the late 1960's. And I am sort of glad that they exist.



There were chocolate covered strawberries everywhere at the festival, and it seemed like people from miles and miles away had flocked here to sell their particular variant on the theme. The chocolate covered strawberry is ultimately one of mankind's better culinary ideas. There was also strawberry, tutti-frutti, and cotton candy flavored popcorn on sale. Which tasted aggressively chemical, but perhaps you're into that kind of thing.



Be it known that I am Southern, was born in Florida (this mostly counts) and am descended from people from Louisiana, Kentucky, and North Carolina. That I can mock the South and associated people because such materials are what I am sprung from, that (really) any superiority complex I might have needs to be amended by reality. People shall have their ATV's and tremendous smokers, and I will try to judge them minimally. (My father has a very large BBQ smoker in the backyard which probably makes him think of the Smokie mountains and addresses some primal need within his soul. We can never totally escape ourselves). Is the disclaimer I am adding here.



We sampled Italian Jambalaya from these nice people with their big old rice pot, and it was awfully good.



The usual stuff prepared with Italian sausage, sun dried tomato, mushrooms and artichoke hearts, just right. New Orleans has a strong Italian tradition and such melding of cuisine is pretty much standard issue: more power to them.



This gumbo was only acceptable. Had a nice dense flavor with lots of okra but there just wasn't enough stuff in it: seafood gumbo needs to have more going on then just some anemic shrimp.

Strawberry daiquiris were sweet and highly rum-infused. Everyone was drinking them out of what appeared to be buckets. It was hot outside. I had some delicious grilled corn with some cajun seasoning on it and it stuck in my teeth for a day but I didn't mind. There was an unimpressive prime-rib sandwich and some satisfying strawberry shortcake. No one could summon up the bravery required for the deep-fried strawberries. Charbroiled oysters were deemed uniquely tempting but ultimately unwise in 80 degree and humid weather. This was how it went.


Someone is making a mint off these.

Strawberry wine is promoted heavily at the Strawberry Festival and apparently tastes satanically evil, or that is what I figured out from hearing people talk about it. I guess you can draw your own conclusions.



There was quite a bit of music of the zydeco sort, played by big guys with beards and a Harley Davidson themed collective uniform. It was hot outside.



These two had it figured out.

As we left the festival, we walked down the road to where we had parked our car, a good half mile or so from the center of town and the center of activity. Strawberry stands had been set up all along this path, and we all determined we didn't want to carry a large flat of strawberries the whole back to the car. One seller assured us that the strawberries further back were disgusting and heinous and that we should buy from him, it was worth carrying his fine and delicious strawberries the whole back to our car.

We ignored him and kept on walking.

"There won't be any strawberries to buy," one member of our group said. She was gently ignored.

We keep on walking. The strawberry vendors slowly begin to peter out. The berries grow more and more anemic looking. The aggrieved member of our party begins to grow visibly distressed - and the car is spotted, and we've bought no strawberries. "Just over there," someone says, "There's someone selling them. Everything is saved." (Growled, a bit).

And we walk over.

"Are those Ponchatoula strawberries?"

"No, ma'am. They grown a parish over, but they just as good." A woman with cut-offs who looks far older then she probably actually is.

"But they're not Ponchatoula!" (Anguished voice).

"No, but they good," the seller insists.

"We'll have to buy them. We won't have bought any strawberries if we don't." (This said with some firmness. No one can say otherwise. Or dares). So we buy them, a big old flat.

And what do you know, we drive about four minutes and there's someone selling PONCHATOULA STRAWBERRIES, a big old sign. The real thing.

"We have to buy another flat!"

We do. The Real Actual Ponchatoula Strawberries are judged to be (in muted, slightly horrified tones) to not be noticeably better then the now disfavored One-County-Over-Berries. It is rather as if an edifice has been toppled. More importantly: there are tons of strawberries in the back seat, there are more berries then can be believed, we will be eating strawberries until we all are dead and no more.

This I do not mind.

I brought strawberries and cereal to lunch every single day this week. And I did not regret it or mind it in the slightest. I could not differentiate between Ponchatoula Strawberries and next parish over impostors. Both were adequately delicious.

Franky and Johnny's and Giant Stuffed Artichokes

Franky and Johnny's
Neighborhood Restaurant & Lounge
321 Arabella Street
New Orleans, LA. 70115
(504) 899-9146


Franky and Johnny's is a classic-style New Orleans neighborhood restaurant, featuring red checkered table clothes, large and stolid waitresses, and a menu hitting on just about every Louisiana-type treat there is. It's an excellent place to take company if you find them clamoring for a Real New Orleans meal: this is it, down to the electronic poker machines, the omnipresent Jager shots, and the crowds of folks horking down boiled crawfish when the season is right and Jupiter aligns with Mars. This is of course alluring, and thus, my buddy Cassidy, his (awesome) mother and our friend Pieter visited Frankie and Johnny's on a recent winter evening.



I love boiled shrimp to distraction, and Frankie and Johnnie's does the best version I've had in the area thus far. They pick extremely large shrimp, they keep them in the shell, and the spice combination used is just plain delicious. My only gripe is that I sure wish they served them warm - but it's damn hard to find a warm boiled shrimp in this city, unless you're at Big Fisherman at just the right time of day. What's up with that?



This monstrosity is a stuffed artichoke, which translates as "an artichoke coated in enough breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, and herbs to kill most mammals." Needless to say it's a pretty tasty dish, although the breadcrumb filling can get rather monotonous after a few intensively carby bites. Here's the recipe, helpfully provided by the delightful Gumbo Pages. There's bacon involved. God bless Louisiana.



Red beans and rice with sausage, the classic, Monday-morning and evening succor, you get the picture. I'm going to fess up and say I don't quite get red beans and rice, not really. I'm not a big carbohydrate devourer, and as this dish is the epitome of inexpensive carbos, doesn't quite get my motor runnin'. But this was a pretty good rendition of such, with a good smoky flavor and a grainy, greasy and indulgent hunk o' sausage on the side. Could have been spicier but I guess that's why the baby Jesus invented Crystal hot sauce.



Gumbo, go figure, of course I'm going to get the damn gumbo. This was only okay: there was plenty of seafood in it, yeah, that was nice, but it was too thick and didn't quite possess the intense, deep dark flavor I demand from my gumbo. I might try it sans rice next time I'm here and see if that helps out with the texture any.


On the whole, Franky and Johnny's is a nice option for New Orleans food in the uptown Garden District, which can be curiously bereft of local-style food in the university area. It's an ideal place to screw around with a bunch of friends when you want some inexpensive local-style food and don't particularly care about the ambience, and we all need a little of THAT in our lives.

Bourbon House New Orleans, Cold Ass Weather

Bourbon House
144 Bourbon Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
(504) 522-0111

On a recent mind-blowingly cold Saturday, a friend and I decided to stop in for lunch at Dickie Brennan's Bourbon House, another outpost of the eponymous patriarch's restaurant empire. It's a beautiful space, located on Bourbon just about right off Canal - the dining room is huge and bathed in yellow and cream tones, with a huge granite oyster bar, and luxuriously appointed fittings for the rest of the space. The menu hits on the usual armada of New Orleans classics, with slightly higher prices then is perhaps standard. You're paying for the room, in the end. But the food is good, high quality, and nicely thought out, and the oysters on the half shell come from P&J and surely qualify as The Good Kind.



We tried the crab fingers Bordelaise as a starter, which came out in an uber rich and delicious lemon-butter garlic and parsley sauce. A really nice dish with a commitment to the cholesterol that made this city grand. Only complaint - could have been a teeny bit warmer.



I had the gumbo. I always have the gumbo. That's my MO. This gumbo? Pretty good, but not a standout in the category - there just wasn't enough STUFF in it. I wanted more meaty bits of seafood, and I wanted less in the way of a thick, thick roux, I wanted more down and dirty flavor. This was a refined gumbo, that you might take home to meet your mama, but I don't really want that. There was an interesting almost boozy flavor to this, that I couldn't properly identify.

We also had a delicious frozen bourbon milk punch, the sort of boozy, milky, semi-evil beverage that defines something essential about the New Orleans pysche. This aspect of the psyche may be encapsulated by the phrase, "Fuck-it-this-tastes-good-even-if-it-kills-me."

(Cold weather is an affront in New Orleans, a smack in the face to the laws of reality, something that cannot and should not be borne in any reasonable or just universe. Everyone walks around with thousand mile stares, dressing in fifteen different layers, since most people don't possess hi-performance parkas, everyone is gazing up at the sky with expressions of hatred and repentance, everyone is wondering if this will ever end. The palm trees look defeated and so do the rhododendron, so does everything, and people sit closer together on the streetcar then they normally would, making small talk. Yes, I hate cold weather in New Orleans, I hate it.)

airport gumbo: praline connection

Airport food is generally a black and depressing void in the culinary landscape, but some exceptions exist. One grows tired of pre-fab salads, warmed-over McDonalds fare, and stale bagel-wiches - but the New Orleans airport humanely provides an outpost of the Praline Connection, Frenchman Street's soul-food emporium. It's not fine-dining, but the availability of real Southern food in the airport context is a wonderful thing.



Collard greens with Crystal hot sauce on top. Salty, meaty, pot-likker infused, finely cut. I really enjoy these greens. Even more so in the airport with a bunch of rubes eating Subway sandwiches sitting all around me. Should have grabbed some cornbread to crumble up in these but you can't have it all.



File gumbo. The lady asked me if I wanted a gumbo crab. Oh hell yes, woman, I want me a gumbo crab, perhaps two or three. I messily devoured the gumbo crabs in the dining area, after taking roughly half a roll of paper towels with me: I may or may not have used pretty much all of them. I like the Connection's gumbo because it is funky and because it has Stuff in it, much of it difficult to identify. There's usually bone-in chicken, sausage, shrimp, and meat-bits in this particular gumbo. Zap it with some Crystal and you're good to go. I can think of few better calorie sources prior to a cross-country flight to somewhere far away from good New Orleans food.

Napoleon House New Orleans: Good Food, No Napoleon

Napoleon House
500 Chartres St
New Orleans, LA 70130-2110
(504) 524-9752


The Napoleon House in the 1930's.

The Napoleon House is old. As the legend goes, the 200 year old building was first occupied by one Nicholas Girod, the mayor of New Orleans from 1812 to 1815. Ever the altruist, the ardently French Girod offered up his humble Louisiana dwelling to the exiled French conqueror. The potential adultation and publicity that Napoleon's entry into the Crescent City might have brought was, presumably, secondary in his mind. Girod even went so far as to commision the ship Seraphine - an integral part of a plan to rescue the Emperor from St. Helena by way of Dominique. Napoleon never showed and the plot never went through, but the Napoleon House soldiered on, becoming an iconic and never-changing bar, restaurant, and hangout for an assemblage of bums, writers, and tourists. Mostly tourists.

The place does have a faded, oldy-moldy ambience that's extremely pleasant, with dressed-up and efficient staff and a nicely considered menu. Even better? Prices are startlingly cheap, a minor miracle in the ridiculously marked Quarter. There's usually a line - goddamn vacationers, curse them and their economic- stimulating dollars! - so plan accordingly.



Pimms Cups are the Napoleon House's signature drink, a deceptively simple mixture of British gin, lemonade, a bit of Sprite, and cucumber. They're pretty things, served up in a tall glass, and are remarkably refreshing on a hot day - as last Saturday was. Hot days in November are about 95% of why I am going to school here.



My never-ending seafood gumbo quest saw its continuation with the Napoleon House's version ($6.95). I was extremely pleased. I love super-thick okra gumbo with lots of stuff in it, and this didn't disappoint, with a consistency more like a thick, unctuous, roux-thick sauce then a soup. It even came with half a gumbo crab, and gumbo crabs always fill me with love and celestial tolerance for my fellow man, which is a pretty goddamn rare thing around here. My only complaint is it coulda been a bigger portion.



We shared a large Greek salad ($6.75) with balsamic-honey dressing, marinated red peppers, sesame seed, and feta cheese, on a bed of spinach. An unorthodox salad but pretty damn tasty, and you could tell they were using nice cheese on this sucker. The salads here are quite interesting - they really seem to think them out and go beyond the usual "slap some romaine on a plate" routine". Aces.



My friend opted for the perennial favorite of a loaded baked potato. Big as yer head and covered in bacon and cheese, this was gooooddd. The British call these things "jacket potatoes". Further proof they're probably not actual humans but instead despots from Planet Zarg.

I think I'll definitely be back for a reprisal of that tasty, mighty thick gumbo. The rest of the menu sounds like primo up-scale bar snacks as well - antipasto salads, cheese plates, charcuterie boards, and a lovely looking toasted muffaletta. Conclusion? Sometimes those damn tourists know a thing or two. Come on down, order some booze, eat some food, and sit back and enjoy the Quarter.

You can even pretend to be Napoleon in a reprisal of every movie insane asylum scene ever. (Seriously, why do they do that?) They'll probably kick you out, but the choice? Baby, it is yours.

Fiorellas in the French Quarter

My gumbo journey through the French Quarter continues. It's been an interesting wander through the FQ's eateries, all in search of the perfect gumbo, the gumbo of my dreams, an Fiorella's was my latest mark. How does the place stack up?

Fiorella's is known mostly for fried chicken and a general assortment of Louisiana food. It's a small, funky place inside, and the outside usually hosts a healthy number of folks engaging in New Orlean's favorite sport: chain-smoking, drinking, and eating fried food. They're known for fried dill pickles. Haven't tried em'. (What do they say about this place? "After a New Orleans meal, you're always sure of your gallbladder?" Think I lifted that from Sarah Roahen's Gumbo Tales...)

I sat down and ordered me some gumbo and a Greek salad. Took a bit longer then I felt might be required to do gumbo and a Greek salad, but the servers were cute/heavily tattooed (as a good French Quarter waitress dang well should be).



The gumbo was the andouille, shrimp, and chicken variety. Verdict? Too dang thick for my tastes, without a ton of the rich, roux-a-riffic flavor that really gets my motor going. Wasn't bad, just too nondescript for my tastes, and wasn't hot enough temperature-wise either. That's a common complaint with gumbos. I am biased against andouille, as I come from a family that does ham instead. A few shrimps up in there, maybe could have used more.



The Greek salad was surprisingly delightful, with a small mountain of stinky grated parmesan, lots of feta, and a nice herby vinaigrette that probably had more cheese in it. A pretty nice effort and rather authentic to American style greek salad (ie, YUM CHEESE).

Coop's Gumbo Revisited, Phone Operators

Coop's Place
1109 Decatur St
New Orleans, LA 70116-2605
(504) 525-9053



Coops Place is renowned as one of NOLA's best places to get fried chicken. The kitchen churns out huge quantities of spicy batter-fried bird at regular intervals, feeding a mixture of big-eyed tourists and pissed off looking, mildly soused locals. It's a fine place to down a couple of drinks and eat some interesting, if not always successful, bar food. Specialties include rabbit jambalaya, marinated crab claws, lamb ribs, and whatever the chef is in the mood to scrawl up on the blackboard. Good conversation too, and jars of pickled okra.

Met a guy at Coops the other day, who used to work the switchboards for a major phone company, I'm not going to tell you which one. He told me about how he'd listen in on Christmas Eve, to parties all over the world. One night he heard the oompah band and the click of beer steins from Hamburg, in his Metarie office. Saudi Arabian men would always call him "Dear," in gentle voices, regardless of the date or holiday. O Holy Night. Someone's got to keep the phones working.



Regardless. I came in for Coop's to grab a bowl of gumbo and chat, and that's what I got. Coop's gumbo wasn't that great this go-round. I had it before and it was really tasty, some of the nicer seafood and okra gumbo I've had in the quarter. This was a bit lukewarm and didn't have too much of that unctuous voodoo flavor. Asked the lady for extra seafood, which you can do for a buck extra, and I guess she didn't hear me. No Crystal hot sauce on the table either. When you're forced to use Tabasco, it's kind of a cognitive shift. But I made it on through.

The search for the gumbo that will break my heart/and or end my life/some combination therein continues. I suspect the end of the quest resides in a shack somewhere in a dark swamp, a shack that can only be reached by charming a five legged albino alligator.

I think I'm too lazy.

Deanies Seafood, Awesome Art Cars

To the Quarter again for weekend nosh? But of course. I don't care if it's full of tourists and drunken LSU students and transvestites, I like the French Quarter. I like the nasty daiquri shops, I like the street musicians, I like the freaks who pretend to be voodoo queens and the freaks pretending to be god-knows-what, I like it all. I enjoy acting as an impromptu tourist guide for lost people from Utah. I like watching drunk people attempt to pet 6 foot tall police horses. I like seeing the cops come and drag away yet another drunk and disorderly punk - because for all the total dysfunction of the Quarter, it's still a ton of fun. If that makes me a tourist, then such shall I be.

Anyway.


I had heard good things about Deanies on Iberville street, in terms of gumbo, which are terms I am always highly alert to. After some inefficient looking, I found Deanies on the OTHER side of Bourbon and wandered on in. I was startled to find that it was clean, neat, and orderly inside. The front desk lady had a big smile on her face and didn't even glare when I asked for a table for one.

I ordered the seafood gumbo with a side salad combo. 11 bucks.



This was some mighty fine gumbo, says I. Coulda been a little hotter, temperature wise. Otherwise: not too watery, not too thick, nice chunk of crab, nice chunks of shrimp. Good, rich, dense flavor. Didn't chuck too much rice in there. Livened up with a bunch of Crystal, this was a mighty fine gumbo experience. I also very much liked the honey-fig balsamic that came with the salad, although otherwise, I don't dig iceberg wedges very much. Even if they involve bacon.

Deanies also is reputed to have tasty po-boys, stuffed crabs, and broiled oysters, which I'll have to return to try. Other good news: prices are quite reasonable. And no one seems really pissed off.

I wonder what gumbo tastes like without Crystal. I don't think I care to know.

Today was a really darn nice day, the warmest since summer faded away. It was in the seventies today. A little overcast - which thwarted my photography practice plans - and I felt a raindrop or two, but it was generally just great. Tons of people were wandering around looking startled and happy in their summer clothes. I bet I looked just the same.



Tried to take a picture of Jackson Square. Well.

This art-car (and former hearse) was a total hoot. I think it's got a very poorly conveyed Jesus theme but it doesn't matter too much. I want to drive a car like that someday. Maybe when I'm 80 and have nothing better to do then glue Happy Meal toys to my fenders.