Scenes and Bites from the 43rd Annual Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is massive. During its ten-day run, over 100 bands play on one of the dozen stages setup inside the track at the Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots on Gentilly Boulevard. For eight hours straight, from 11am to 7pm, it's nonstop music, food, booze, dancing, parades, charades, and all around muddy tom foolery. Yesterday was the end of this year's festival. We were there a week earlier and got caught in a bit of rain, but it was nothing the sprawling Blues Tent couldn't misdirect.

There were two main stretches where you could get food, but more than 70 vendors were setup around the fairgrounds. On the flight down, a native New Orleans man, who traveled with a trumpet and nothing else, sat next to us and hinted at the crawfish options we'd find inside the muddy grounds. "Oh yea, you can get crawfish anyway you dream," he said. "If you dream of crawfish." One such way was Crawfish Monica, a sort of Cajun twist on pasta alla vodka with lumps of sweet, spiced crawfish mixed into a creamy, tomato-based sauce. It was damn good, but it wasn't our favorite thing we had. That's reserved for the Cochon de Lait po' boy from Love at First Bite. Click ahead for that and everything else we ate at Jazz Fest on April 28th, 2013. 

Click to read more ...

Roast Beef Po' Boy at Domilise's In New Orleans

Spend three minutes online looking into the iconic food joints of New Orleans and Domilise's will show up at the top of your browser. The Uptown po' boy shop is a NOLA institution. We were torn between the fried shrimp, hot sausage, and roast beef, but settled on roast beef after flashingback to our plane ride with the trumpet player; remembering he had said something about "100 napkins" in regard to the sandwich.

Click to read more ...

Willie Mae's Scotch House in New Orleans

Treme is about 15 miles east of Kenner, where Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is. U.S. Route 61 will get you there from the airport, but taking I-10 East will shave a few minutes if you're in a hurry. Though if you are, you're in the wrong city. We took U.S. Route 61. Our windows were down and the radio was tuned to WWOZ, which was broadcasting brass band music that we played at a level just loud enough to rival our excitable voices clamoring in the warm breeze. We were on our way to St Ann Street, where Willie Mae's Scotch House serves "America's Best Fried Chicken."

Click to read more ...

Cochon Butcher's Muffaletta and the Warehouse District in New Orleans

The Warehouse District, or New Orleans Arts District, runs a dozen or so blocks north to south from Canal Street to the Pontchartrain Expressway and east to west from the Mississippi to Saint Charles Avenue. In the 19th Century, the industrial neighborhood served as the storage grounds for goods coming in off the Port of New Olreans. In 1976, the Contemporary Arts Center opened on Camp Street and gave rise to a shift in the neighborhood's dynamic. The Warehouse District was soon refered to as the "Soho of the South" and some of the city's revered chefs saw it as the perfect location for their forward-thinking, contemporary approach to cooking.

Click to read more ...

Today's Cajun Seafood in New Orleans

Today's Cajun Seafood landed on our radar after some unsavory locals sold the joint to us as the place to go for spicy crawfish and boiled turkey necks. So after a humbling trip to Caffin Avenue and the rest of the Lower Ninth, and after fried chicken livers and pepper jelly brunch at Elizabeth's in Bywater, we stopped by Today's for a pound of crawfish ($3.59) and a turkey neck ($1.80).

Click to read more ...