Mardi Gras is Coming to New Orleans!!

Baby Jax!

New Orleans is a city of traditions.  Most places have a Baby New Year.  You know him.  He's awarded his sash from an emaciated old man with a long white beard and an exhausted hourglass.  In New Orleans, where nothing is forgotten, we have Baby Jax.

Jax Beer was brewed by the Jackson Brewery, a building that, like our house, is over 110 years old. 

Built in 1883

The old Jackson Brewery is off Jackson Square.  It's still standing.  They don't brew beer there anymore.  Since the 1990's the building has been home to a kind of a mall full of kiosks selling candy and baseball caps and sunglasses.  I have to admit we don't go into the mall very often.  We're not the vendors' target demographic.  We live here.  It's a beautiful building, though.

We welcomed Baby Jax and the new year this past weekend full of festivities and guests who make our profession a joy.  Good guests make good company and, as usual, La Belle Esplanade has been blessed by good guests and good conversation.

For 21 months in a row now, we've been rated the #1 B&B in New Orleans and in all of Louisiana on Trip Advisor.  Thanks again to all our past guests who have written reviews of their experience at our humble boutique inn.

That's a big crawfish

Crawfish (you can pronounce it crayfish if you are from where I'm from) season started the other day.  The warm wet weather we've had in southern Louisiana so far promises a bumper crop.  That means the upcoming crawfish harvest should be plump, plentiful and inexpensive.  Cross your fingers for this trifecta of best possible outcomes.

Crawfish do not get larger than a man.  They don't have a chance to grow that long before they are captured and boiled up.  They get about as long as a man's finger.  Henry Miller liked to call that finger his "stink finger."  Let's not dwell on what he meant by that. 

When a crawfish is as long as a man's good finger, it makes for good eating in its tail parts when the crawfish is boiled up in a spicy brine with sweet corn, garlic and potatoes.  You peel the shell off the tail and pinch the meat out.  You can suck the head if you choose to.  The spices soak into the head meat and make for a tasty niblet that goes well with a chase of cold beer.  I like to make mine Jax Beer.

We have a garden behind our house where guests are welcome to eat crawfish, which are sold boiled by the pound.  Please don't eat crawfish in the house.  They are very messy, as you will quickly learn, and they tend to stink up the whole house---even more than Henry Miller's finger.  Better the back garden stink of boiled crawfish than the bedrooms.  The cats out back like it better that way, too.

La belle d'Esplanade

New Year's Day has come and passed.  Mardi Gras Day will be here before you know it.  We still have some availability around Mardi Gras.  Remember, it isn't just a day, it's a season.  Between January 6 and Mardi Gras Day, New Orleans is an even more magical place than it usually is, and that's saying something.

New Orleans is always magical, but in the next couple of weeks the city and its citizens are going to be pulling out all the stops.  Between January 6 and Mardi Gras Day, New Orleans will be like a pretty girl sporting a pearl necklace studded with diamonds.  When she smiles, the whole world will smile with her.  It's nice to live in New Orleans.  We'll be happy to show you how much.

On behalf of myself, Frau Schmitt, Tammie the Housekeeper, and Baby Jax, on behalf of all New Orleanians, here and abroad, I would like to wish all of our regular readers a happy and prosperous new year and a happy and boisterous Mardi Gras.

It's not what you think.  It's better.  It's more.

À votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade
...where the rest comes easy!