The New New Orleans

The best-dressed at MVB (aka, Most Valuable Burger)

Before my first visit to New Orleans, the sum of what I knew about the city was this: It had a harrowing amount of history. New Orleans is to cultural history what Yellowstone National Park is to natural history – a place that’s too colourful, too layered, too idiosyncratic. But I figured that the unruly past had been safely rounded up for visitors and penned in a few tidy history corrals, where tourists could gawk and take pictures.

You know, fun, but sort of faux.

Turns out, the city isn’t anything like that. That was made clear the moment I walked into a narrow nightclub a few kilometres upriver of the French Quarter and came upon a few hundred excitable people dancing – well, really pogo-ing up and down because the place was so tightly packed – to a boisterous tuba solo.

Andrew Carmon, the chef at the landmark restaurant

The Maple Leaf Bar is divided into two long, tin-ceilinged halves – one side occupied by a bar, the other by a low stage – but it’s all roadhouse. It was Tuesday, which meant the Rebirth Brass Band was playing its regular gig. The music is a complex amalgam of traditional New Orleans jazz riffs overlaid with a heavy funk beat, like aural artifacts of a past that’s shouldered its way into the present. The band played the audience like it was another instrument. This wasn’t history in grainy black and white. It was a spirited adaptation in full-out Technicolor.

A popular local bumper sticker reads, “New Orleans: So Far Behind We’re Ahead.” It’s funny in large part because it’s so accurate. After all, it’s a place where refinement is found not in a smooth edge but a rough one. Boston may be all about tidy brick Victorian-era townhouses, and Palm Springs clean mid-century modernist lines. But New Orleans is defined by uneven sidewalks heaved skyward by the muscular roots of live oaks, by fuzzy plants sprouting in overgrown gutters of bright century-old houses. New Orleans embraced shabby chic decades before it became a catchphrase.

The great outdoors at Café du Monde

That esthetic is sold by the piece at the Preservation Salvage Store, which sits a half block from an industrial railway yard in the sort of neighbourhood you might imagine a half a block from a rail yard. That is, there’s not much in the way of charm here, unless you find the thunderous coupling and decoupling of freight cars to be charming.

But inside the store – and within its chain-link yard – it’s like wandering through a big box building supply store transplanted from the mid-19th century. The place is filled with the flotsam and jetsam of historic New Orleans buildings: heavy Eastlake-style porch brackets, decorative spindles, ornate window frames and lots of tall doors.

The scene is poignant as well: Much of the salvage here is from homes that flooded following Hurricane Katrina. Capturing past moments of grace, preservationists lobbied the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pry out some of the architectural elements that make New Orleans so distinctive before the bulldozers moved in. Now antique stores, furniture makers, jewellers and artists, along with a few restaurants adorned with remnants of the city’s past, are also cropping up in and around this neighbourhood downriver of the French Quarter – so much so that the city issued a proclamation last November to make it the first official ReUse District in the United States, a kind of urban arts district but with more splinters.

“The area is really great,” says Beth Stelson, who’s with the Green Project, which runs another architectural salvage shop next door, and who spearheaded the creation of the ReUse District. “But it’s also an experiment.”

Left to right: The Joint, a BBQ restaurant in the Bywater neighbourhood; the 1920s interior of Arnaud’s French 75, one of the best bars in the city. 

Of course, for nearly three centuries, New Orleans has been an experiment – in how to live partially below sea level, how to cope with swelter and voracious termites. Residents have been working this out since 1718, when a pair of French Canadians decided to establish a permanent outpost on the damp and unsettled soil. If there’s been one conclusion from the citywide experiment so far, it’s this: The future isn’t worth thinking about if you can’t bring the past with you.

A good way to get a sense of that mingling is to explore by bike – the city is skillet flat – especially pedalling through neighbourhoods outside the French Quarter. On one afternoon’s ramble, I enjoyed lunch at Satsuma Cafe in the Bywater. Inside it has the feel of a spiffed-up yard sale but with the bonus of haute comfort food, like roasted pumpkin mirliton soup and a ham and cheddar melt with apples and onions. And just down the block is the Bargain Center, a sprawling used-stuff emporium with bright Mexican folk art, Mardi Gras castoffs and some mesmerizing pastoral scenes featuring little crawfish in discarded plastic bottles – Listerine, Lestoil, cranberry juice – crafted by a now-deceased self-taught artist.

Even paint cans get recycled at the Green Project, another local architectural salvage shop.

If New Orleans is looking for a post-Katrina metaphor – it’s been called a “cultural gumbo” well beyond the expiry date – the metaphor makers would do well to consider visiting the new district. Where everything old is New Orleans again.

Like the city’s architecture and music, the food scene here often provides subtle lessons about the past. The locavore movement may be all about eating meals from within 100 miles, but New Orleanians often seem more intent on eating meals that have proved themselves for at least 100 years. Call it the chronovore movement.

That respect for and intrigue with culinary heritage crops up everywhere, from the beignets served at never-closed Café Du Monde – a touristy spot beloved by locals – to the red beans and rice dished up on Mondays, as they have been for more than a century, in bars and restaurants citywide. Nothing’s static and caged here, though. In the same day, I enjoyed a classic bread pudding at soul food landmark Li’l Dizzy’s in Tremé and then its more posh cousin – a bread pudding soufflé enrobed in warm whiskey cream – at Uptown landmark Commander’s Palace.

Bacchanal Wine in the Bywater

On the far downriver edge of the Bywater is a restaurant called Bacchanal, a place I’ve been drawn to time and again. Well, it’s sort of a restaurant. It’s more accurately a wine shop, housed in a weary Creole-style building. Here’s what you do: Go in, select a bottle of wine and maybe a cheese or two, pay the $3 corkage fee at the counter, grab some glasses and head out back. The backyard is a large dishevelled space adorned with oleander trees, cheap plastic chairs, upended wire spools and other tables, along with some sputtering tiki torches. (“It’s hard to explain, just check us out,” advises Bacchanal’s website.)

I tucked into a delicious Bacchaletta sandwich from the deli, a slightly upscale version of the city’s venerable muffaletta, a Frisbee-size sandwich of meats enlivened with a tangy chopped olive spread. In one corner of the yard, a visiting chef was serving up pork cheeks ragout on homemade pasta with preserved lemon. (Let’s not get too fancy; it’s served on paper plates with plastic forks.) In another corner, the Courtyard Kings were playing acoustic swing on a modest stage. Somewhere into my first bottle of wine, I felt like I was hanging out in the yard of an old college friend, someone who made a little money after he figured out how to package and sell nonchalance.

Chris Rudge, who started Bacchanal nearly a decade ago, told me the Bywater has come into its own since he opened his doors. “Artists have really flocked around the ’hood, and they’re doing all kinds of cool stuff,” he says. “St. Claude Avenue has turned from ghetto to art gallery. Well, it’s still pretty ghetto, but now with art.”

Left: Lunch at Satsuma Cafe

A few blocks down Chartres Street is the scrapyard studio of Dr. Bob, a folk artist/sign painter who assembles found wood, bottle caps and whatever else into colourful rustic signs. Dr. Bob was well known before Katrina for his folk-artsy placards reading “Be Nice or Leave” hammered high on telephone poles. (Most have since been swiped.) Fair warning: Dr. Bob is not known for his social graces. The hand-painted sign outside reads, “This is a working art studio. You are welcome if you are here about my art, otherwise do not bother me.” He’s branched out and now sells signs reading “Rebuild or Leave,” “Be Gay or Leave” and “Buy Art or Leave” – remnants of the city you can fit into a suitcase.

New Orleanians have never grown weary of collecting, dusting off and then reassembling elements of their past. And it’s not a cheap pastiche – with the possible exception of the T-shirt shops that blare zydeco music onto the streets. (Zydeco? In the city? That’s the Louisiana version of country music.) To visit here is to see a rebirth built upon the past, apparently following some mysterious genetic instructions of how to do so. New Orleans has been recycling the best notions for decades and shows little inclination to stop any time soon.

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net

Don’t miss our video interview with the director of operations at a rebuilding organization in the Lower Ninth Ward.

enroute.aircanada.com/daniel-baylis-video