Category Archives: French Quarter

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Gumbo

A classic version found on the corner of St. Ann and Chartres (aka Jackson Square). Stanley’s gumbo has loads of meat and seafood amid a nice dark roux that’s not too thick. That they offer the added potato salad is nice: I have turned some heads in parts of the city that don’t believe in potato salad in the gumbo, but once in a while I like it. I learned about it at a demonstration at the old Wednesday Crescent City Farmers Market by Wayne Baquet, the Creole restauranteur of Lil Dizzy’s and Zachary’s fame even though he says in this interview with Sara Roahen that he doesn’t use it.

Southern Gumbo Trail oral interview

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Curfew for the few?

One of the city’s most original writers, CW Cannon takes on the curfew in this piece from non-profit journalism site The Lens and I think, nails it.
Here is the piece I’ll quote to those who argue for keeping kids out:
“This law isn’t about protecting them, it’s about protecting tourists from seeing them. If the price for getting people to come to New Orleans is hiding my actual New Orleanian family (or moving to a family-approved residential zone), whatever is left of New Orleanian “authenticity” will finally be dead.”
For anyone who wants to maintain the Quarter as the vibrant middle of the city, rather than as a genteel police state for visiting consumers, this curfew is a warning shot. I’d also add that the assault from the NOPD on informal gathering and cultural camps throughout the Quarter and the larger city has done little to nothing to reduce the heavy crime in the Quarter and beyond.
As someone who grew up in the Quarter and would walk to see my hard-working mom while she was still at her office at 8 or 9 pm, or walk to the schoolyard and play basketball at Royal and St. Phillip after dark (since we didn’t have a TV or even a yard), I would hope that those few kids being raised in the area could feel that the city center is as theirs as their own residential block when needed. To limit the Quarter to less hours for youth is to limit future residents and workers from becoming acquainted with their own town square, which could be its demise.
The Lens