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Creole Food, Classic Cocktails and Traditional Jazz

We came to New Orleans for work. The American Academy of Ophthalmology held its annual meeting at the Convention Center on the riverfront, and between talks, a poster and a reception there wasn’t much room left for the Garden District, the streetcar or the WWII Museum. Those will have to wait for a second trip.

So we made a choice: if we only had a few free hours, we’d spend them on the three things this city does better than almost anywhere else. Creole cooking, cocktails that were invented here, and jazz played the way it was played a hundred years ago.

This isn’t a day-by-day itinerary. It’s four places, each one worth planning a trip around.

Food: Dooky Chase's, Tremé

Dooky Chase’s sits on Orleans Avenue in Tremé, a short cab ride from the French Quarter, and from the outside you’d never guess its history. Emily and Edgar “Dooky” Chase Sr. opened it in 1941, after starting out with a sandwich shop that also sold lottery tickets. It became a real restaurant thanks to their son, a jazz musician, and above all to his wife Leah.

Leah Chase cooked here for more than seventy years and came to be known as the Queen of Creole Cuisine. She died in 2019 at 96, and the family still runs the place with her recipes.

In the years of segregation this was one of the very few places in the South where Black and white people could sit at the same table. Civil rights activists met upstairs to plan their campaigns, and the lawyers who fought desegregation in court, Thurgood Marshall and A.P. Tureaud among them, ate the same fried chicken you’ll be served today. Later came presidents (George W. Bush and Barack Obama both stopped here), writers and musicians. Look at the walls while you wait: the red dining rooms hold one of the most important private collections of African American art in the city, which Leah started collecting herself.

The room still feels formal, with white tablecloths and a dress code, but the food is home cooking at its best. What to order:

Creole gumbo. Get a cup rather than a bowl, you’ll need the space.
Fried chicken. The dish the place is famous for. The smart move is Red Beans & Rice, which comes with two pieces of chicken, so you get both classics on one plate.
Shrimp Clemenceau. Shrimp sautéed in garlic butter with peas, potatoes and mushrooms. It’s the most “Leah Chase” dish on the menu, and perfect for sharing.
Sides and dessert. Candied sweet potatoes or mustard greens, then praline bread pudding or peach cobbler.

Lunch runs Tuesday to Friday from 11 to 3, with dinner only on Fridays and Saturdays. Book ahead: without a reservation you may not get a table.

Drinks: the Sazerac Bar at the Roosevelt

New Orleans has a fair claim to being the city where the American cocktail grew up, and the best place to start is the Sazerac Bar inside the Roosevelt Hotel. It’s a long, dark room with a walnut bar, art deco murals and bartenders in white jackets. It feels like 1940, and that’s the point.

The drink that gives the bar its name goes back to the 1830s and to Antoine Peychaud, a Creole apothecary in the French Quarter who made his own bitters and mixed them with cognac for his customers. When phylloxera wiped out French vineyards later in the century, cognac became hard to find and bartenders switched to American rye. What you get today is rye, sugar and Peychaud’s bitters, stirred and served in a glass rinsed with absinthe (or Herbsaint, the local anise liqueur), with a lemon peel twisted over the top and then thrown away. Louisiana made it the official cocktail of New Orleans in 2008.

Order the second classic too. The Ramos Gin Fizz was invented in 1888 by Henry C. Ramos: gin, citrus, cream, egg white and orange flower water, shaken for so long that the bar used to employ a line of young men doing nothing but shaking. It comes out cloud-white and foamy, closer to a dessert than a cocktail. The story goes that Governor Huey Long loved it so much he flew a Roosevelt bartender to New York to teach the staff of his hotel there how to make it.

One more piece of history: until 1949 the bar was for men only. Women were allowed in just one day a year, Mardi Gras, until the day in September 1949 when a group of them simply walked in and sat down. New Orleans still calls it the storming of the Sazerac.

No reservations here. On a Friday evening the room fills up from about 6, so come at 5:30 if you want a seat at the bar.

Drinks: the French 75 Bar at Arnaud's

A few blocks away, on Bienville Street, the French 75 Bar is the front room of Arnaud’s, one of the grand old Creole restaurants of the Quarter. A Frenchman known as “Count” Arnaud Cazenave opened the restaurant in 1918, and the bar still looks the part: dark wood, a mosaic tile floor, small round tables and a lot of brass.

The drink is named after the French army’s 75 mm field gun of the First World War, supposedly because it hits you with about the same force. Most bars around the world make it with gin. Here it’s made with cognac, plus lemon, a little sugar and Champagne, and the result is rounder and warmer than the version you probably know. Order that first.

The bartenders are serious about the classics, so for a second round ask for a Brandy Crusta or a Vieux Carré, two more drinks born in New Orleans.

Don’t leave without the soufflé potatoes. They come from Arnaud’s kitchen: thin slices of potato fried twice until they puff up like little hollow pillows, served with béarnaise for dipping. It’s a dish you’ll find in very few places outside this city, and it goes perfectly with a glass of bubbles.

The bar opens at 5:30 in the afternoon. It’s small, which is part of the charm, so earlier is better.

Music: Preservation Hall

If Bourbon Street is what you picture when you think of New Orleans music, walk one block over to St. Peter Street and look for a weathered building with a wrought-iron gate and no sign worth mentioning. That’s Preservation Hall.

It opened in 1961, when traditional New Orleans jazz was disappearing. Rock and roll had taken over and the old musicians who had played in the brass bands and dance halls of the 1920s had nowhere left to play. Allan and Sandra Jaffe, a young couple who had come to town for the music, turned this room into a place where those musicians could perform every night. The name says it all: the point was to preserve something before it was gone. More than sixty years later the Hall is still run by the Jaffe family, and the musicians on stage today learned from the ones who played here before them.

The room is tiny and almost bare. A few rows of wooden benches, some cushions on the floor, people standing at the back, and the band a few feet from your knees. No bar, no air conditioning worth the name, no phones allowed during the set. A show lasts about 45 minutes and it goes by in what feels like ten.

There’s no amplification, so you hear the trumpet, the clarinet and the trombone exactly as they sound, and you can watch the players pass the melody between them. When the band gets going and the whole room starts clapping on the off-beat, you understand why this music was born to be heard live and up close.

There are several sets every evening (5:00, 6:15, 7:30 and 8:45 when we went). Buy tickets online in advance: the bench seats go first, and on busy nights the standing room sells out too.

Before you go

All four places are within a few minutes of each other, except Dooky Chase’s, which is about ten minutes by cab from the Quarter. Three things are worth booking before you land: a table at Dooky Chase’s, tickets for Preservation Hall, and, if you have a Sunday, a jazz brunch at one of the old Creole houses (Commander’s Palace sells out well in advance; Arnaud’s is a good fallback).

What we missed and want for next time: the St. Charles streetcar through the Garden District, a long lunch at Commander’s Palace, and an evening on Frenchmen Street hopping between the small jazz clubs.