For most of the past year, I told myself I couldn’t write. First, there was a house, then a new job that consumed the spark of my very last neuron, then a wedding. I wanted to write. I looked at blank screens and ordered coffee table books instead. It wasn’t good. Well, to be clear: The house is wonderful, and the wedding was pretty close to perfect, and the job became the good kind of challenging. But taken as a whole, over the course of several months, it was very, very bad.
And now, for a whole bunch of reasons, it’s better. Then, last week, a strange kind of thunderclap of clarity: First, there was the shitty-awful-infuriating news about the latest Sports Illustrated layoffs, which made me all kinds of nostalgic for the years I worked there and the stories I wrote. Then, the next day, a colleague asked me if I missed writing, and before I could think of any halfway-measured answer, I confessed my impractical daydream about someday being a food writer.
I guess I’d better start writing about food again.
Last week, I got from the tarmac at the New Orleans airport to one of the best restaurants in town in 52 minutes. A few things worked in my favor — the fastest exit from an airplane in recorded history, an Uber driver schooled in weaving through I-10 traffic — but mostly, this was a feat of sheer will to eat at Galatoire’s.
My family was already there, and based on the way the six of them had spread out over the last two seats at the table, it’s safe to say they’d doubted my will to jog down Bourbon Street in heels to shave a minute off my arrival time.
These are the lengths to which I’ll go for Galatoire’s stuffed eggplant, the best bite of my four days in the best city on earth. I know: It sounds vaguely healthy, and there’s no place for health, vague or otherwise, in New Orleans. But let me assure you, this particular stuffed eggplant will do unspeakable things to your arteries. In fact, it’s barely even an eggplant at all. It’s mostly crab and tiny shrimp, breadcrumbs and béchamel, and if you root around long enough, you’ll find a lonely strip of vegetable that looks as if it landed there by accident and tastes like it’s in a committed and monogamous relationship with butter. Everything at Galatoire’s is great, and the menu is basically a glossary of Creole fine dining: étouffée, turtle soup, gumbo, sauce ravigote, everything au gratin. Stuffed eggplant reads like a typo. I promise, though, it’s there for a reason.
Next on my power rankings of gluttony: Bananas Foster at Brennan’s. You might say you’ve had Bananas Foster before, but if you haven’t had the dish made tableside at Brennan’s while a waiter tells you its origin story, I’m calling your bluff. This visit, when the man was finished spinning his yarn and the caramelized bananas and ice cream had been doled out across the table, my husband, who still has a lot to learn about New Orleans, turned to me. “Did he,” and here, my husband paused and dropped his voice, “make that up? Is that what really happened?”
The story — a last-minute request for a new recipe and some copycat pyrotechnics — is wholly believable, but sitting there in a pink-walled room, looking out over a lush courtyard through windows so crystal-clear you wonder if you’re not just outside, you might just taste the banana melting on your tongue and wonder if it all isn’t a fairytale.
The next bite on my list is really a sip — of Kool-Aid colored Hurricane at Pat O’Brien’s. It is, objectively, disgusting. My cousin’s husband left his untouched. Others in our group tried to isolate the flavors as they did a half-drunk mental calculus of whether this was very good or very bad. I worry they landed on the side of bad. And I worry that my own taste buds err too far in the other direction after years of being assaulted by this gussied-up jungle juice. To me, a Hurricane tastes like dozens of other blissed-out nights with the people I love, feeling a 70-degree breeze in February and listening to a rotund man named Alvin Babineaux play the tray in the piano bar.
If that hasn’t ruined my credibility, let me tell you next about the mussels at N7. Hidden behind a nondescript wall on a potholed road without streetlights in the Bywater, N7 may be my favorite restaurant in all of New Orleans. It’s only a few years old, and I’ve only eaten there four times, but I can’t recall even a mediocre bite. Before last week, I’d never had the mussels, but on the prix-fixe menu, there they were, steamed with sake, scallions and garlic and tasting just a little bit like whatever sandbar they were born in. Not a single one had even a hint of shrivel; they were fat and peachy-pink when I paused long enough between shell-cracking and mouth-shoveling to give them a passing glance.
I’ll wrap things up with another bivalve: the oysters at Cooter Brown’s. What kind were they? If you want specifics, I don’t have the faintest idea. They were from the Gulf, somewhere, and they were gargantuan, and they were shucked five feet from the beer tap. They were cold and a little briny and didn’t taste like much else besides what an oyster should.
And because I’m nostalgic and back home and hungry for food that doesn’t exist except along that sliver of not-quite-swamp between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, here are a few more excellent mouthfuls from my too-short trip: king cake by the sliver while sipping cold Canebrake out of a can; a spicy, peppery bloody Mary; N7’s pâté on humidity-puffed French bread; the same oysters at Cooter Brown’s, but fried; soufflé potatoes; hummus in a styrofoam container from Pyramid’s, the hole-in-the-wall Mediterranean cafe across the street from my brother’s house; frozen French 75s, with the perfect hint of fizz, from Superior Seafood; and anything at all sipped on St. Charles Avenue with a parade rolling by.
Wow, that was an excellent adventure through New Orleans👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻I am starving🥰