New Orleans Museum B&B

Breakfast is about to be served

Recent guests have noticed some changes in the dining room when they are nibbling on fresh baguettes spread with fig preserves made in St. Bernard Parish.  When they are sampling the crawfish bread, or taking a bite of red velvet from Blue Dot Donuts on Canal Street, they look up at the shelves and notice the shelves are getting crowded.

Dining room shelves in New Orleans

We are assembling a cigar box museum.  We leave it up to you, gentle reader, to decide who had this bright idea.  I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Frau Schmitt, who is usually right about these things, and it wasn't Tammie, the housekeeper.

A gentleman from Stillwater, Minn., who was staying with us with his lovely wife and lovely daughter, noticed the cigar boxes and asked about them.  Just last week, they all held American-made cigars that are still manufactured in the good old U.S. of A.  "Do they have a good reputation?" he asked.  He suspected, correctly, that all those cigars hadn't smoked themselves.

New Orleans' latest collection of curiosities is located in a historic New Orleans bed and breakfast inn.  Let's focus in on one of the shelves.

You never know what you'll find in New Orleans

Let's get a bit closer, between the jam jars and the oversized jar of powdered crab boil spice on the bottom...

A cigar by any other name smells just as sweet

The gentleman from Minnesota was seated directly under our latest acquisition, a box of Sam Houston Churchill Cigars.  The box isn't much to look at, but the linking of Sam Houston's name and reputation with Winston Churchill's  is a thought-provoking, conceptual juxtaposition.  We put a couple of Sam Houstons in the lobby humidor for interested people to sample, outdoors, if they are truly curious.

"I'm not a smoker, myself, but I'm curious," the gentleman from Minnesota said.  La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast's curator explained that cigar connoisseurship often outweighs patriotism.  These are not high-dollar cigars, just American-made.

"When you love New Orleans, you're a part of the best part of America," the curator said while he waved an unlit cheroot (no smoking indoors, remember) while he sat on a stool decorated with a mosaic of bottle caps.  It was like a scene out of a novel written in Algiers.

A historic plaque

The sign is located outside this house:

509 Wagner Street, Algiers (New Orleans), LA

We can't predict how extensive the cigar box museum will become, but we do know that our inn is full of curiosities and curios.  There is a story everywhere you turn.  There are stories everywhere you turn in New Orleans.  While you are in New Orleans, that story is yours.

Enjoy your stay.

A votre sante.