Just to warn you, this is a long write-up. However, I wanted to go into some detail of the really great time we had (even though we were sick and ready to be home by the end, as happens on many vacations).
We left bright and early (6:05 AM flight) on Monday morning for a 5-day stay in New Orleans for our honeymoon. There were several contributions to our honeymoon fund, but a large part of it was from Terry and Tom. We were instructed to eat lots of good food and so that was one of our primary goals. The other goals were to relax and have a good time. We wildly succeeded in all of these goals!
We arrived in New Orleans around 10:30 and made our way to Le Pavillon, our hotel, and checked in by noon. We had a cozy, very comfortable room with a king sized bed in a splendid, luxurious historic hotel. There were several huge chandeliers in the lobby, which I noted had been outfitted with tiny compact fluorescent bulbs. Oil paintings, beautiful mirrors and brasswork, ironwork banisters, and period furniture gave the hotel a very posh feel.
The hotel staff was friendly, courteous, and incredibly helpful throughout our stay. They called cabs for us, assisted us with luggage, answered questions and gave us suggestions about our stay and plans for the week. A hotel tradition we really liked was PB&J sandwiches and hot chocolate/milk served between 10 and 11 PM every night. We came down for our nightly cup of hot chocolate, although we were mostly too full from dinner to indulge in PB&J.
After we checked in on Monday, we relaxed for a while and meandered around the hotel. I took quite a few photos. We pondered where to eat dinner and decided to make reservations at a newer restaurant called August. It had great recommendations from Fodor’s guide and was also recommended by personal connections. The majority of the restaurants we ate at during our stay were highly recommended by multiple people– it was really helpful to have so much information and I think we could have eaten at different, excellent restaurants for at least two or three weeks based on the recommendations we had from friends.
We decided to go all-out on our first night in town and had an eight course meal. We ordered August’s De Gustation, which is actually a seven course meal, but we also wanted to try the gnocchi appetizer, which had a rich truffle sauce. It was not part of the De Gustation, so we started with that and then had our seven course meal. The seven courses were:
1) a rich almond gazpacho
2) roasted tiny heirloom tomatoes and mozzarella balls filled with tomato juice (oh, the flavor was intense!)
3) flounder with shrimp and crab stuffing with a creole mustard dressing
4) A scallop topped with a medallion of pied de cochon (pig foot) and accompanied by clams and aged chorizo (sausage)
5) a beef filet with slow cooked oxtail (shredded and very yummy) and vegetables
6) pear terrine with candied walnuts and goat cheese
7) chocolate prepared three ways which were: a moist chocolate cake-like slab with chocolate liquor and a pastry filled with chocolate ganache
I guess we might have actually had a nine-course meal because they also brought out a couple of complementary items from the chef. One was a small glass of sparkling wine that beautifully complimented the meal and another was a seafood/truffle custard served (cold) in an eggshell and topped with caviar. This second item, a sabayon, was incredibly tasty.
We also ordered glasses of Merlot to accompany this incredible meal, which took about two and a half hours to complete.
On Tuesday, we set out to explore the French Quarter and ended up having a late breakfast of beignets and cafe au lait (Michael had milk instead) at Cafe Du Monde. It was very hot during most of our stay and I think we noticed it the most this day. Michael was coming down with a cold and we were a little stunned by the heat. We were pulled off the street by a lady advertising “free tickets” to area attractions and ended up spending an hour or two listening to a presentation about timeshares that we had no interest in buying. But we did leave with free tickets to the World War II Museum and for a two-hour haunted walking tour of the French Quarter.
Tuesday night we had dinner at Galatoire’s Restaurant on Bourbon Street. Michael had crab sardou and I had sauteed red fish with crab yvonne. We also tried their oysters brochette (fried oysters with bacon) and a bowl of gumbo as appetizers. Dessert was an incredible banana bread pudding, which we split, and coffee.
On Wednesday, we had reservation for brunch at Brennans, which so many people had recommended! We loved it! We started with mimosas and Michael had a cup of turtle soup while I had a delectable baked apple in cream. Michael had the Eggs Hussarde (eggs, Canadian bacon, Hollandaise sauce) and I had the Eggs Nouvelle Orleans (poached eggs with crab meat and a creamy sauce). Dessert was cheesecake for Michael and Bananas Foster for me. Bananas Foster originated at Brennans and a senior member of the waitstaff, Ron, made it at our table, taking care to make a great presentation with an incredible wall of fire when the bananas were flambeed.
We walked around (or wobbled, really) for a while afterwards, feeling very full. I think this was the day we ended up in Riverwalk looking for swimsuits (unsuccessfully) and felt tortured as we walked through the food court (and by chocolate and praline shops) because we had been eating so much food. We stayed in the cool air conditioning for while because it was so hot outside. Then we headed to the National World War II Museum for a few hours before going back to our hotel to change and get ready for dinner at K-Paul’s.
K-Paul’s is quite a good restaurant. They’ve been in business for about 30 years. The food is top-notch and the portions are big. However, our full bellies were working against us. I think in some ways it was our worst-timed meal of the trip. Also, our waiter was a little snotty at first and we had had such superb service up to this point everywhere that we were a little put off. However, the waiter improved and the food was excellent– we just couldn’t gobble as much of it down as we had at earlier meals. I started with a shrimp enchilada and Michael started with turtle soup. I ordered bread-crusted fried chicken with jambalaya (mostly for the jambalaya and this was one of my few deviations from seafood during the trip). Michael ordered a blackened flatiron steak. For dessert, I had bread pudding (and ate maybe three bites because I was so full) and Michael had chocolate cheesecake.
We didn’t end up trying any of Emeril’s restaurants, but I am guessing that they were much more like K-Paul’s (pretty modern style and menu) than, say, Galatoire’s or Antoine’s, which are more old-school New Orleans restaurants (Creole/French-style fine dining). I don’t think we missed too much since we had a good mix of older and newer outstanding restaurants on our must-hit list. However, there are plenty of reasons to go back to New Orleans and I would love to scope out more restaurants on future trips.
Thursday we slept pretty late and refrained from eating most of the day. We had some cereal bars we brought with us on the trip and stopped for an extended coffeehouse visit and internet break while we were out and about shopping and looking. We found a hat shop and picked up a few new hats there. For dinner, we had reservations at Antoine’s. It was not busy when we arrived and we were seated in the front room. However, this is a many-room establishment and at the end of the evening we had a sense that it was much busier and dinner parties were going on in other rooms. At the encouragement of the staff, we looked around at some of the different rooms, one of the larger of which was filled with photos of famous people who had eaten at Antoine’s (quite a few since it has been in business at that location for almost 170 years). General George S. Patton was one such famous customer we happened to note, as we were standing by his photo.
At Antoine’s, we shared an order of Souffle Potatoes, which are a specialty of the restaurant. The cooks fry and puff the potatoes so that they are hollow inside. It’s a lengthy process that involves chilling the potatoes for about 5 hours before frying them and the waiter said that not all of the potatoes do this, so there is some waste involved. The results, however, are splendid and even Michael raved about them (he does not usually care much for potatoes).
Michael ordered the Chicken Rochambeau (against his better judgment, considering the name) and I ordered Trout Meuniere. It was just about perfect. We each had a chocolate mousse for dessert (a little too sweet, but incredibly rich) and coffee.
After dinner, we changed into more comfortable clothes and went on our much-anticipated two hour ghost tour in the French Quarter. It was a lot of fun and we learned some of the (darker and more gruesome) history of the area. If you wonder how the city has managed to bounce back from Hurricane Katrina, imagine 20,000 corpses (deaths from yellow fever, cholera, and other diseases) stacked up and rotting on the streets during the summer of 1854 … New Orleans has had some pretty severe problems from time to time and the city just keeps rolling with the punches, recovering, and thriving.
Afterwards, we had planned to sample some of the more famous drinks from the area. We had tried a Hurricane during a bar stop on the tour, but we headed down to the Tropical Isle on Bourbon Street for something called a Hand Grenade around 10 PM. Then we wisely took a cab back to the hotel. I felt great. I only drank one. One was too much. Since the invention of Everclear, I think adults everywhere have had to redefine what they can “handle” as far as strong drinks are concerned. I’m fairly sure the 190 proof variety of Everclear was used in this particular drink. An Irishwoman in the hat shop who was “not a lightweight” warned us not to drink two, as her hardy Aunt Clara had walked into a post after merrily chugging two Hand Grenades. So we were not foolhardy and I was only really sorry for a few minutes back at the hotel. No lingering after-effects the next day.
On Friday, however, I was coming down with Michael’s cold and Michael was suffering from his cold, so we began the day trying to take a streetcar to the garden district. We rode the wrong streetcar around town for a while and finally got on the right one, but we didn’t stop in the garden district. We kept riding out past Loyola University and really had no idea where we were going. I finally decided we needed something to eat since it was past lunchtime and we hadn’t had anything to eat that day. I saw several restaurants clustered together and stopped the streetcar at the next stop. We ended up eating lunch on Friday at a little local Italian diner called Nino’s Restaurant. We had one of the specials of the day– chicken marsala and fettucine alfredo with red sauce and it was not on the same caliber with the other meals of the trip, but it wasn’t bad. The little knotted garlic breadsticks may have been the most enjoyable item there. I’m pretty sure they were homemade at the restaurant and I could have kept eating them.
We returned to the hotel, which took quite a while since we had ridden the streetcar so far. Michael was kind of out of it the whole time. I let him sleep a while at the hotel and went across the street for coffee. Later, we took a little walk in the French Quarter and attempted to go to dinner at Irene’s Restaurant (also Italian– there is a large Sicilian population in New Orleans), but discovered that the wait was going to be two hours. Friday night was the only time we really ran into issues with reservations and crowds.
I knew that a two-hour wait in a very loud, crowded lobby would do neither of us much good, so we took a cab back to the hotel and ate at the lovely, uncrowded Crystal Room restaurant in our hotel. It has a good reputation, but we had been so busy trying out the best of the best that we hadn’t given it much thought. I had a very good beef filet with vegetables and Michael had beef tips in burgundy sauce over noodles. I didn’t feel too bad about running down the hall to find a tissue for my nose a couple of times during the meal. Yes, we were feeling pretty sick and run-down by the end of our trip.
The next morning we again ate at the Crystal Room (they have a nice daily buffet with hot and cold selections, as well as order-to-your-specification omelet and waffle stations) before checking out and heading to the airport.
After way too much flying (including ear pressure/pain issues on both flights), we returned home Saturday afternoon and were greeted at the airport by Althea and the kids.