Hodgson-Rigsbee Ryan - All dat New Orleans: eating, drinking, listening to music, exploring, & celebrating in the Crescent City

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES

Eat Dat New Orleans

Drink Dat New Orleans

Fear Dat New Orleans

Hear Dat New Orleans

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What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens in New Orleans goes home with you

Laurell K. Hamilton

How to Use this Book

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P rior to telling you what this book is (or was intended to be), Ill begin with how to use the book.

The key to reading All Dat is to put it down. Unless you are the most vapid, platitudinous person on the planet, and you come to New Orleans just to check off your list that you (1) ate a beignet at Caf DuMonde, (2) took a selfie next to a busker who was pretending to be a statue (hint: in the photograph youre both going to look like statues), and (3) spent a night on Bourbon Street because you think you sort of have to when you come to New Orleans, then youre going to completely miss the essential lessons this city and this culture has to teach you.

New Orleans is not about bucket lists or following someone elses opinion (including mine) as to where to eat or drink, or which musical performers to see. This is a city where youre supposed to join the parade, not just watch one from the curb. This is a city where you should talk with as many people on the street or seated next to you on a streetcar and not have your nose buried in a guide book or some travel app loaded onto your phone.

Unlike New York City, where I lived for 27 years and where visitors are warned not to stare up at the skyscrapers because thats a telltale sign youre a tourist, here you want to be seen as a visitor. Stand on a street corner or, look lost while fiddling with a map. New Orleanians will come up to you and ask you if you need help. As they answer your immediate questions about direction needs, theyll also shower you with unjustifiable opinions about where to eat and hear music, as well as details about if there are any upcoming parades or festivals, where they went to high school, and offer at least ten reasons why we should fire the LSU football coach. Again.

New Orleans is a city for participating, not just reading about its history or looking at its sights from a tour bus window. Each chapter of this book has an active verb used as the title, Eating, Drinking, Exploring, or Fitting In. I added the chapter Shopping with some reservations. I want you to know about Boutique du Vampyr, the only brick and mortar vampire shop in America. I feel you need to know where you can buy authentic voodoo charms or potions and not the made-in-China stuff that clutters much of the French Quarter.

But the best way to do New Orleans is not to fill up your suitcase with consumer knickknacks and doodads, but to fill up your mind and your soul with one-of-a-kind experiences.

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To get to New Orleans you dont pass through anywhere else.

Allen Toussaint

2018 marks the 300th anniversary of New Orleans, or what you might call the citys Triennial or Tricentennial or Tercentenary celebration, depending on which of the almost never-used terms you choose to use. Choose carefully, because you wont get to use it again for another 58 years, when the whole United States celebrates its own 300th birthday.

Yes, New Orleans is 58 years older than the country. Thats if you accept the story that is was first founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the explorer from Montreal. Bienville is said to have selected the site because it was relatively high ground in an otherwise swampy area prone to flooding. The sharp bend in the river, right about where Caf Du Monde has been shoveling beignets since 1862, serves to form a natural protective levee. The site that became New Orleans was also adjacent to the trading route used by Native Americans and trappers as portage between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartain, and it was a safe distance from Spanish or English settlements down river. With this pocketful of reasons, Bienville claimed the land and named it La Nouvelle-Orlans in honor of the then Regent of France, Philippe II, Duke of Orlans.

But Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, also from Montreal by way of Rouen, France, was actually here 36 years prior. He came across the Atlantic to set up trade with Native Americans; his brother, a Jesuit priest, came to convert them to Christianity. After expeditions to Erie, Pennsylvania (called either the Gem City or Dreary Erie) and Louisville, Kentucky (home of a wax statue of Colonel Sanders decked out in a suit really worn by the real Colonel Sanderswhos not really a colonel), La Salles journeys brought him all the way down the Mississippi.

In 1682, he buried a metal plate and a cross claiming all the land at the base of the Mississippi River for the king of France. French explorers buried lead plates all over North America. The first was one planted at Conewago Creek, Pennsylvania. These plates claimed the land for France that was already occupied by various Native Americans. Itd be like some family from Germany coming into your house and placing stickers on pieces of your favorite furniture that said, This is MINEonly the stickers would have read Das Ghent MIR.

La Salle set out to return to New Orleans in 1684 with 300 colonists to establish and develop the city. Of the original four ships that carried them, one was seized by pirates, another sank, and a third ran aground. La Salle and his congregation then wandered on foot, looking for his plate through swamps infested with poisonous snakes and yellow fever-carrying mosquitos. They never found it. When the original 300 had been whittled down to 36 survivors, they killed La Salle on March 19, 1687, and started walking back to Montreal. I doubt they made it very far.

Theres a story that a fisherman in the 1930s actually found the metal plate 240 years later but, not being able to decipher the inscriptions, he melted it down to use for fishing weights and buckshot.

Fast forward 300 years and, with considerably less fanfare or historical significance, I arrived in New Orleans. Like so many others, on my first visit I was immediately seduced by New Orleans unique, some might say twisted charms. The actor John Goodman said of his first time in the city, If I could put my finger on it, Id bottle it and sell it... I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like itthe climate, the smells. Its the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that theres an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here.

New Orleans was so unlike anywhere Id ever been before. Musician Sunpie Barnes claims that, It takes 30 seconds to fall into New Orleans and realize youre in a different place. The John Goodman and Sunpie Barnes quotes are joined by many others at the back of this book, where I collect what I consider the 300 best things ever said by New Orleanians or about New Orleans. I, myself, am fond of saying (far too often) that New Orleans is as far as you can get from America while youre still in it.