Everything Looks Crummy in New Orleans

Louisiana maid

"The Spirit of Louisiana" is a painting that hangs in the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) at the end of our street (Esplanade Avenue).  Louisiana used to be a lot bigger.  Think of the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the size of the United States of America.  New Orleans is going to celebrate its 300th birthday in two years.  That's pretty old, depending on where you come from.  If you come from Iowa or Alaska, it's almost incomprehensibly old, like Mesopotamia.

Frau Schmitt chides me when I say it, and she is usually right about these things, but I like to say that things look crummy in New Orleans.  Do they?  Not to us, but we live here.  We're used to it.  If you're used to everything looking new and spiffy, well, New Orleans can look kind of crummy.  It's a city that's been lived in for a long time.  We just got a Panera, but we still don't have a TGIFriday's, an Olive Garden, or a Chipotle Grill.  You have to go to the suburbs or to another kind of city for these things.  We do have Popeye's.  

A dead lizard at Fort Pike, New Orleans

Even the new buildings look old.  That's what happens when you live in the tropics.  It's humid here.  If you walk the sidewalks at night, palmetto bugs, which look exactly like big cockroaches, will scuttle out of your way into the grass.  The condition of the sidewalks are atrocious.  Watch your step.  The views are beautiful.  They'll make your heart ache.  They'll make you wish you were staying longer.  They'll make you wish you live here.  It's a magical place.  It just looks crummy in some (most) places.  That's just the way things are.

New Orleans is beautiful on its own terms.

Be not afraid.  

Snapper turtles for sale

If you find yourself on Japonica Street, next to the Industrial Canal in the Upper 9th Ward, you can buy live snapper turtles.  It takes all day to make good turtle soup.  We made it once and we ate turtle soup for a month.  We eat it at restaurants, now, by the bowl; it's more efficient that way.  Make sure to ask for extra sherry.  Make sure it's made with real turtle meat.  Some places just use chopped up veal, thinking nobody will know the difference.  You know what kind of places those are?  

Places that look crummy are usually crowded.  Tourists don't even realize there's an open restaurant behind the boarded up windows.  Most people like it that way.  I'm agnostic on this matter, but I've made it my mission to find the best turtle soup in the city.  I have a couple places I like.  I like Jack Dempsey's, which is out of the way, in the Bywater.  The walls inside are unpainted particle board. Most people go to Bachannal instead.  To each his or her own.

Frau Schmitt and I tend to agree, except when the discussion turns to Mena's Palace.  Neither of us knows what to make of Mena's Palace.  It's in the French Quarter.  There's better turtle soup in plenty of other places.  We recommend Mena's Palace for other dishes.  The ones we like best at Mena's are dirty dishes.

A votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.