Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 22-23, Mile 4076: Sweet Serendipity.

Nearly full moon over the Crescent City.

We're spending three days (four nights) in New Orleans. It's a nice break from the rigors of the road, and enough time to enjoy a bit of a city we love. 

Trigger warning: because this is N'awlins, y'all, there is quite a bit of food porn in this post. You can skip it if you're not into that sort of thing and no one will think the less of you.

I've been to New Orleans many times and O has been here three times, so we can avoid most of the tourist attractions. But there are several musts (for me)--gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice, oyster po-boy, fried chicken, muffuletta, bread pudding, and beignets. 

By our second full day, we'd checked off gumbo and po-boy, so we looked for a place where we could satisfy some of those other cravings.

When you're looking for authentic down-home NOLA eats, you don't go to an upscale restaurant. You find a little hole-in-the-wall where the cook has honed the grits by satisfying locals for years.

We found Coop's Place. It's pretty much a dive bar with great food, and while the crowds were waiting in long-ass lines to get into the Ruby Slipper, we slipped into a little table for two and ordered an array of NOLA favorites.

O ordered a cup of gumbo and a wedge salad. Both were excellent.

I started with a cup of tasty red beans and rice.

Then a sampler of rabbit and sausage jambalaya and fried chicken. The jambalaya was really good, but the fried chicken was perfect--crispy, but not greasy, with just enough spice to make it interesting.

I'm very picky about fried chicken. My grandmother made it so well, and I rarely find a restaurant that measures up. This did.

That evening, in the first of two sweet serendipities, we met our daughter-in-law, Emily's, father, Jeff, and his girlfriend, Pam, for dinner at Coterie in the Quarter. They just happened to be here the exact same days that we were.

We had a fun evening, with lots of laughter.

A different more upscale take on jambalaya substituting chicken for rabbit and adding crispy bits of delicious Tasso ham. Also excellent.

O had a very tasty blackened redfish.

And a stellar bread pudding with bourbon sauce for dessert.

When O and I first came here together in 1989, we had an incredible bread pudding at Tujague's restaurant. We raved about it for years. A few years ago, when we visited here with the Pereira's, we tried to take them to Tujague's for dessert, but the place closed at 9, and we got there too late.

This time, we were determined to make it happen. So we marched ourselves in, sat down at the bar (couldn't get a table), ordered a light dinner and bread pudding.

It turns out that the original Tujague's (pictured below) closed a couple years ago. The current location is just around the corner from the original, but has a new owner and a new chef.

And new bread pudding. Not the messy, bourbon-soaked fever dream of a pudding we remembered so fondly.

It was, however, utterly delicious, with caramelized bananas and a rich caramel sauce. We went away perfectly satisfied. Still it was good to have a bourbon-based version at Coterie.

The next day, we had our second serendipity--a couple we met in Cuenca, Ecuador happed to be in town on a road trip of their own.

Teresa and Paco are a delightful couple--intelligent and like-minded. They live in Cuenca and love it there. We met them at Cafe Du Monde for chicory coffee and beignets. It was great to get to know them both a little better. I hope our paths will cross again.

It was Good Friday, so we got to see Jesus and friend being whipped through the streets.

New Orleans is a city of museums, many of which we've visited before. We thought about visiting the National World War II museum, but it is huge and daunting, especially after our marathon visit to the Museum of the Pacific War in Fredricksburg.

But we were attracted to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

They had a retrospective exhibit of a Cuban-American artist I'd never heard of. Wonderful, weird stuff.

They also had a fair amount of naive art. One of my favorites.

I also love this painting of Jesus triumphing over the Great Beast 666.

Lots of great street art in NOLA as well. We saw this van downtown one night.

Then the next morning, I found this across town near our B&B by the same artist.

We also visited the Confederate Memorial Hall. These days the signage just says Memorial Hall, but inside everything bears the original name. 

It's a small museum, but they have some interesting artifacts, like Jefferson Davis' saddle and Robert E. Lee's silverware, lots of original uniforms, weapons, and flags.

Of course, everything is laid on with a side of Confederate sympathy, which is hard for me to take, especially when their biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest completely omits his role in founding the Ku Klux Klan.

NOLA is filled with decaying old houses. I really liked this one.

Our B&B is about a 35-minute walk from downtown, so we've driven very little the past couple days. It feels great to walk after so many days in the car. Yesterday we did almost nine miles.

Most big cities (and many smaller ones) offer venues on the outskirts of the main tourist areas that are ideal (read low rent enough) for chefs with a unique and decidedly not mainstream vision to push the envelope.

We stumbled upon one of these on our last night here: Marjie's Grill. It's a fairly small place in a kind of sketchy area of town, and the chef is putting out a wonderfully idiosyncratic fusion of southern and Asian food.

When I say fusion, I'm not talking about some half-assed amalgam of ingredients and flavors, but a really passionate marriage of the best of both cuisines.

We started with martinis. Mine was made with a dry gin from Vietnam, O's with Louisiana vodka. Then we shared fresh lake shrimp crusted with crisp salt-and-pepper corn flour and served with Thai chile vinegar. Crunchy and delicious.

I'd never tried Vietnamese gin before. It was very good.

We split this as an entree--heirloom pork jowl slow-roasted over oak logs, topped with a tangy combination of cilantro, pickled onions, and a mild habanero/lime/fish sauce dressing.

It was amazing. The dressing set off the smoky unctuousness of the pork perfectly, and crispy cornbread mini-croutons add a savory crunch.

A fitting end to our short, but sweet serendipitous stay in the Big Easy. We'll be back.

P.