C'mon, C'mon, Come On To New Orleans

It's déjà vu until it's ennui

Remember the last installment when we featured an Elvis song to describe what it's like to be in New Orleans?  Well, here we go again, folks.




One of the people who appears between 1:45 and 3:00 stayed with us recently.  We'll leave it up to you to guess who it was.  It wasn't the ballerina.

There are some things that your humble narrator never gets tired of.  Some of those are oysters with caviar at the Bourbon House, the pan roast at Pascal's Manale, a hot cup of black Community Coffee, and, last but foremost in my mind, Esplanade Avenue.

Click this link.

We think it's very nice that the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation used a picture of our house as the illustration to exemplify our neighborhood.  It's not so nice that we don't get any credit for being here.  I see Degas House is named as a place to stay in our neighborhood.  Café Degas gets their business mentioned under their picture.  So does Lola's.  What about La Belle Esplanade?  We're just so much wallpaper to NOTMC.

I wrote to them the other day about this.  Didn't get a response.  We're just so much wallpaper to NOTMC.

We're more than wallpaper.  Ours is a house in which good memories are born, the kind of good memories that last forever.  I'm not going to cry over it.  Next week, after all, will mark the date when we will be rated the #1 Inn in New Orleans and Frau Schmitt and I take a simple pride in that.  Not that the NOTMC seems to care about how we're following our own personal NOLA by being goodwill ambassadors for the city.  We're just so much wallpaper to NOTMC.

Howzat for sour grapes?  Thanks for letting me get that off my spleen.  Let's continue in our usual loopily chipper fashion....

There's no resistin' that Manchu chicken

We've been talking a lot about fried chicken recently, including with that recent guest who wasn't a ballerina.  As I'm sure I've mentioned previously, we live in the city's "Fried Chicken Triangle."  We are centrally located between the vertices of said triangle, in fact.  It's a picturesque five minute stroll to end of either the adjacent, the opposite, or the hypotenuse.  If this last sentence didn't make any sense, you shouldn't have slept through high school geometry.

People who stay with us tend to eat fried chicken for at least one of their meals, and not necessarily at Dooky Chase's, Willie Mae's, or McHardy's.  Yesterday, John had fried chicken at Jacques-Imo's, which is on the other side of town.  A lot of people get the fried chicken wings at Manchu.  After they get them once, they usually get them a second time (twice).  They say those Manchu wings taste mighty nice.

That's not wallpaper

If you are interested in honest-to-goodness Tennessee sausage, we've recently received some memorabilia from a reputable Tennessee sausage maker to include in the odditarium in our lobby.  Memorabilia isn't the right word since these brands are still in production using time-honored recipes.  I think the word our benefactor used was, "swag."

We got some Tennessee sausage swag in the mail today and, let me tell you, we're going to put it to good use.  We try to keep the contents of our lobby interesting for our guests.

As innkeepers, we meet very interesting people every week.  They aren't all ballerinas, to be sure, but we don't hold that against anyone.  Come as you are.  New Orleans will love you.  You know where you should stay.

À votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade
...where every morning is a curated breakfast salon.