North America Chevron. United States Chevron. Louisiana Chevron. New Orleans Chevron. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
We've been discussing the merits of Parkway 's po'boys and the old-school kitchen at Commander's Palace. We're talking in her studio, tucked away on the ground floor of an old bread factory in the Irish Channel neighborhood. 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.
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 and all that has happened since. 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. 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.
