New Orleans will stick in your mind.

Dooky Chase's Restaurant since 1941

Awright, I'm just going to crank out an installment on autopilot if you don't mind.  Let's see how this winds out.  Yo.

Today's soundtrack is provided courtesy of Taco.  Prepare yourself for some difficult listening:


I'm not watching the video as I write this.  Once was enough.  I am listening to the song play in another window as I go along here.  Again, I'm treating you to another big radio treat from when I was a much younger humble narrator.  Based on my research, Puttin' on the Ritz by Taco, while a top ten hit nationally, never cracked the top 50 in the New Orleans market.  New Orleanians have better taste. 

That Taco is pretty creepy looking, isn't he?  Top ten hit.

We like to send people who stay with us to Santa Fe, a Creole Southwestern restaurant up the street from us, about a 15-20 minute walk away on a very beautiful street.  Esplanade Avenue is the second-most beautiful street in New Orleans.  

Santa Fe is our go-to place to eat out when Frau Schmitt and I can't agree on somewhere else.  It is Creole Southwestern food.  What does that mean?  They have tacos and burritos, but they incorporate a lot of crawfish and seafood.  It's the crawfish and seafood that make it Creole.  The owner is Portuguese, so take a close look at the specials.  If you still have room for desert after your meal, Santa Fe has the best Tres Leches Cake in the city, hands down.  They also serve the second best sangria in the city.

Want a hot tip?  If you have an appetite, order the Chicken Maximillian at Santa Fe.  You won't regret it.

And, so, what this all boils down to is the fact that we have a restaurant on our street that serves crawfish tacos and this fact is really the only justification that I can muster to include an old dated video by a musician named Taco from over 30 years ago.  I know.  I'm shameless.  Even I don't want my MTV.

Professional blog writers will tell you to include five links to outside websites in every post for search engine optimization.  I don't normally pay attention, but maybe, today, since I'm just running on auto-pilot anyway, that's what I'll do.  Old habits die hard.  I'm not promising anything.  You can count the links as we go along.  They're gonna be real mind-stickers, I'm sure.

Whenever I think of Taco in the 1980s, I think of Falco.  Their names rhyme and one was really pretty much as good as the other.  Fasten your seat belts, folks, this is going to be a painful ride.  This next video is much better than the official Falco version that tormented those of us alive in the 80s.  The footage comes from an Academy Award nominated movie.  It wasn't The Princess and the Frog.

I sometimes think of Falco when I'm walking through City Park which is on the lakeside end of Esplanade Avenue, just past Beauregard Circle, which is just over the bridge that spans Bayou St. John.  I think about Falco because there are plenty of falcons that fly on the sly over the empty spaces in City Park.  

City Park is a well-manicured urban oasis, with plenty to see and do.  It is very romantic up there.  But, there are also plenty of wild places in City Park, places that most casual visitors don't see.  Some parts of New Orleans' City Park, which is larger than Central Park in New York City, are veritably forest.  Here there be hawks.  Here there be falcons.

There is a falconry club that meets on Saturday mornings in the middle of one of the abandoned golf courses in City Park.  It's pretty informal and I don't think they have a permit.  The members just show up with leather jerkins and gauntlets and hooded falcons, then they let a rabbit loose in the field and they have their sport.  The more I think about it, the less I think they have official permission to do this.  I expect that the City Park Board of Directors would worry about bad publicity from PETA.  You never know what you'll find in the out-of-the-way niches of New Orleans.

Wille Mae's Scotch House, corner of St. Ann and N. Tonti Streets

Some people like to come to New Orleans and go all high hat.  It's really more of a casual city.  Unless you're wearing a seersucker suit, it's not a suit and tie kind of a city.  With nine and a half million tourists a year, how many of them do you think pack a suit and tie?  Very few who stay with us, I can tell you that.

When I lived in New England, I wore a three-piece suit every day---bespoke.  Since moving to New Orleans, five years ago, I rarely go formal.  There just isn't any need.  If you are wearing a Saints jersey, you can go anywhere.  A New Orleans Saints jersey is carte blanche.  People wear them for their court appearances to influence the jury in their favor.

I was going to end this installment with a clip of Puttin' on the Ritz from the original 1930 movie of the same name starring Fred Astaire.  The sound quality was bad so, instead, I'm offering up a remix version.  Some people think I'm a purist and that I don't like anything new or remade.  That isn't necessarily true.  I live in a city that is old and being remade as you read this, trying to keep what is best about New Orleans and building off that while trying to stay true to the city's spirit and genius.  New Orleans has a tourist-based economy, but it isn't Disneyland.  It is something else, altogether.  It is something hard to describe.


You can put on the Ritz, or you can dance like nobody is watching.  You can stay at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Canal Street, or you can stay at La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast on Esplanade Avenue.    Either is delightful in it's own way for different reasons which are very much the same.  Both places aim to delight you and to introduce you to a magical city we all call home.

À votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.


P.S.  Above, I mentioned that our links today would be real mind-stickers.  What did I mean by that exactly?  I meant they should stick in your mind like a girl who keeps her shape in good shape with Tab.