Six hours in N’awlins

When you work for an airline and three of your colleagues also have off on a random Tuesday, what do you do?  That’s right.  You take the 7am flight from New York to New Orleans, spend the day in the Big Easy, and take a 6pm flight home.  

So we get into New Orleans at around 10am, grab a cab, and head down to the Garden District.  Our “plan” (if you can call a 5-minute conversation about what we’ll do today, a plan), was to walk the Garden District, admire some architecture like the mansions on St. Charles Ave and the hard to find shotgun houses (typical of the less wealthy suburbs of the city) in this district.  

Prytania Street, Garden District

Next we took our cabbies advice and grabbed the trolley car to take us into the French Quarter.  It’s an interesting place yet unexpectedly empty, albeit noon on a tuesday, for the raucous crowd we expected to see on Bourbon Street.  So beads in hand, we took to the street stopping in bars for two-for-one drinks all day.  

Jackie & I 

Hunger strikes and it’s suddenly my favorite part of the trip - a table for four at Emeril’s Restaurant.  I wanted to try his NOLA restaurant, but word to the wise, they only do lunch on weekends!  Creole marinated calamari with olives, smoked tomato sauce, and parmesan - the tentacles were perfect, and though the rings were slightly rubbery it was still toward the top of the list for great calamari appetizers.  

Creole Calamari

My entree was perfect in every sense of the word - the Andouille crusted drum (a white fish with a mild flavor) was enhanced by grilled eggplant and shoestring potatoes accented with a delicious creole pecan meuniere sauce.  

Andouille crusted drum

Other dishes I tasted include the sweet barbecue glazed salmon with andouille potato hash (excellent!) and a chicken and waffle dish which was even better than the 'chicken and waffles so good they’ll make you want to slap yourself' I shared in Memphis.  

Sweet barbecue salmon

Chicken 'n Waffles

So while we were eating we found out from some of our awesome and attentive coworkers back home that our return flight direct to NY was cancelled due to eastern seaboard thunderstorms.. so we had to leave about an hour and a half ahead of schedule and re-routed through Atlanta - which was fine with me, seeing as I got a first class seat because of our connection ;) 

NOLA, I’ll be back. (On a day when it’s not 105 degrees).