Wanna help my favorite city get back on its feet?

[thatcrazycajun]

Courtesy of National Public Radio's Morning Edition, a link to a new website designed to encourage people around the country to patronize small-to-medium-size businesses in New Orleans, LA and help the city come back from the destruction of Hurricanes Katrina & Rita; listen to the story here. At shopnola.org, set up with help from Shell Oil Co. (which has offices there), you can buy Aunt Sally's pralines, Tabasco's famous hot sauce and other products, fine wines, fine art and much more. You can also donate to local recovery-involved nonprofits. Do some good and your holiday shopping at the same time!

Comments

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

We're actually going to NO the second weekend in December, to visit some friends who moved down there this year. Any suggestions on places to see?

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Two to start with: the Audubon Zoo in the garden district, and Café du Monde's original location in the French Quarter (you MUST have some beignets!). If you're there in December, you should also set aside an evening to drive through City Park and see the annual "Christmas in the Oaks" holiday light display.

Depending on how much time you have, there are also St. Louis Cathedral (the nation's oldest functioning Catholic cathedral), the Cabildo and Presbytere (these last three are pretty much adjacent in Jackson Square), Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World tour on the West Bank (his company makes lots of floats for the parades) and the Aquarium of the Americas downtown (there is a "Zoo Cruise" you can take on the river between that and the Audubon Zoo and kill two birds with one stone). If you're into antebellum homes, there's also Nottoway, Asphodel and Oak Alley Plantations. Oh, and the National World War II Museum in the central business district. That enough for you?

[tovahs.livejournal.com]

I think you ment the D-Day Museum not the National World War II Museum

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Yes, thank you for the correction. The National D-Day Museum shows one of the key military watercraft used in the invasion of Normandy that was manufactured in New Orleans, among other exhibits.

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I dig both zoos and plantation-style homes, so that's a very helpful list. :) What about best examples of fancy iron-work?

Looks like Michael will be staying on for a few days, to help Habitat for Humanity rebuild homes (they took *weeks* to call him back, but finally). Me, I am hoping to be busier at work again, so I only alloted a long weekend and I'll have to settle for donating tourist dollars. :)

I'm a little worried about restaurants, frankly, at least anything with "local specialities". My food preferences may be kinda quirky¹, but at least they're not religiously-mandated, and I can eat hamburgers multiple times in a row if absolutely necessary² ;). Michael's one experience with a Cajun seafood place here in DC occasioned one of my favorite "reading the menu Michael-style" stories³. So I sure hope he doesn't get sick of blackened [insert kosher fish name here], because that may be the only safe dish in some places! He does love fish, though, so he may not mind too much. :)

¹For some examples, I love any style of potato -- including raw -- except mashed. I vastly prefer caramel or butterscotch over chocolate, and if it must be chocolate, then much rather be liquid in form. (Ice cream will sometimes do if the weather is really hot.) I absolutely have to drink my tea sweet enough to make anyone except the hardest-core Southerners gag... but most desserts are way too sweet.

²Ok, I think good plain hamburgers -- no cheese, just ketchup and mustard -- are one of the world's greatest foods. Course, I also like _raw_ ground beef, which always worries Ethiopean waitresses no end if they haven't seen me before. "I'd like the kitfo. And I want it raw, please." Worried waitress: "You sure?!" There was this Korean place once...<sup>4

3</sup>If you remember R.T.'s down in Alexandria, it was recommended by one of his co-workers. I was a little dubious :), but hey, he wanted to try it, so... we sit down and start scanning the menu, and his face starts to fall. Having had my suspicions beforehand, I say, "There are exactly 2 things on this menu you can have, right?" "Right." "Do you want to leave?" "Um... let's hear the specials first." Fort, the daily specials doubled that number to 4.

⁴Actually, this place was trying to do Chinese/Japanese/Korean, well before the phrase "Pan-Asian" came into broad usage, and it was up in East Baltimore, which was NOT an ethnic hotbed in the late 80s (and probably still isn't now. Solid English, German, East European lower middle class. My own "ethnic", basically. :) ). So my boyfriend at the time was Greg, a 3/4 Swede-1/4 German apparently Southern redneck [actually a very smart guy with multiple Master's in chemistry plus a deep interest in history... but boy, he looked and sounded like a serious redneck] with short blond hair and a bushy red beard. We ordered an appetizer: I forget the name of it at present, but it was raw ground beef PLUS a raw egg on top. "Are you sure?" Greg: "Yes." "It's not cooked, you know." Me: "We know. It's ok." After we ate it, the waitress came by to specifically ask how it was (yes, it was good), and told us point-blank, "You're the first white people ever to order that dish." Heh.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Okay, I haven't heard about any problems with unsafe food in NOLA restaurants since Katrina, but I do understand your wanting to be careful. Lee's Hamburgers on Veterans Blvd. in Metairie or Bud's Broiler in Mid-City and Kenner are the best places in the city for burgers, bar none. As for other types of food, you can't go wrong with Copeland's for Cajun food (which doesn't only mean seafood, btw), and this is their home city. You might also consider Angelo Brocato's for Italian ices and cannolis as dessert options. And there are lots of good places to eat in the French Quarter if you don't mind paying a tad more.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

You can see examples of fancy ironwork almost everywhere you look in the French Quarter; I couldn't point to specific examples, though Bourbon and Royal streets seem to have the most. ("French" is actually a misnomer for the architecture there now; it was rebuilt during the Spanish occupation when a big fire destroyed most of the original French construction centuries ago. So the ironwork most people identify with the Quarter is really not French, but Spanish.)

Recomendations

[tovahs.livejournal.com]

Mother's on Poydras st: for any meal They always have long lines for lunch - Good food for not a lot of money

Kosher: Kosher Kagen in Metarie The best NYC style sandwiches there is also the best chicken soup

Patato: Spudly's In Metairie near Lakeside Hospial

Great Chinese Baffet: Okie Nagan in Metairie walking distance from the Landmark Hotel.

Re: Recomendations

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

You mean the Kosher Cajun Deli behind the Eckerd's in Fat City? Didn't that close after Katrina?

[tovahs.livejournal.com]

One has to go to Cafe du Mont near Jackson Square. Its a great place to people watch if nothing else. Other than that it all depends on what you are interested in.

City Park will have there light show on.

You can also go to www.NOLA.com (the local newspaper) for things to do.

Most of all, Have Fun!

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

One more thing...If you have the time and it's not too morbid for your taste, take one of the tours of the city's historic cemeteries for the history and the funerary architecture.
More info: http://www.experienceneworleans.com/deadcity.html

[gorgeousgary]

Hmm...will have to take a look. Unfortunately we can't join our friends from quartercon again this year (thanks to a badly-scheduled Bat Mitzvah), but at least maybe I can order some stuff.