New Orleans Mardi Gras, March 2019 (Part 2)
I woke up on the morning of “Fat Tuesday” with a terrible hangover. After having blacked out the night before, Audrey filled in the gaps in my memory as to what transpired the rest of Monday evening. It wasn’t pretty, but at least our friend Christine made it into town safely while I was passed out.
Around 10 AM, Christine, Lauren, Jacob, Audrey, and myself left our AirBNB to get something to eat before heading to the French Quarter. Much to our chagrin, pretty much every restaurant was closed for Mardi Gras so we agreed to just get an Uber to the French Quarter and try to get something to eat there.
By sheer happenstance, our Uber stopped at a red light right next to the legendary Cafe du Monde. “The People’s Cafe” when translated into English, is a tourist hot spot and landmark in New Orleans known for serving cafe au lait (coffee with milk) and beignets, a French style doughnut made from deep fried choux pastry covered in powdered sugar.
The tent-covered dining area is first-come-first-serve seating. Fortunately when we got there a large table was clearing out so we found seating relatively quickly.
Like most other locations in New Orleans, Cafe du Monde is cash only. We ordered some coffee and beignets for the table.
Be advised: this place does NOT skimp out on the powdered sugar.
All in all our coffee and beignets cost us $18 and came out very fast. After what was essentially our breakfast, we left Cafe du Monde and realized that we had arrived just at the right time as the line outside of the cafe was about 30 people long.
We eventually made it into French Quarter where the party could finally get going. The place was an absolute zoo. People dressing up, people dressing down, beads being flung all around, it was like the Feast of Fools from the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Audrey and Christine were the first of our group feeling up to the task of drinking while the rest of us were still nursing our hangovers.
We were kind of surprised there weren’t more people, but that quickly changed around 2 PM as the streets in the French Quarter became packed with hoards of people joining in on the festivities.
Before long, people were packed into all the major streets like sardines. Around this same time, my hangover finally began to subside and I was able to start drinking again.
There really is not much else to say about the next few hours. We moved from bar to bar getting drinks whenever we ran out of booze and did a lot of people watching. Everywhere you look you can find half-naked men and women, drag queens, and people dressed up in elaborate costumes ranging from blind NFL refs (don’t ask), to mermaids, to movie accurate Imperial Stormtroopers.
After several hours of collecting beads and giving our livers a workout, we started getting really hungry.
As we do with all of our travels, we wanted to commit to eating as much local cuisine as possible. We stumbled upon the Royal House Oyster Bar on Royal Street. With great reviews on Google we were convinced to give it a try and we were not disappointed.
With no reservations being taken, we put our name down at the host stand and were seated within 20 minutes. Audrey and I both ordered the red beans and rice with andouille sausage and fried chicken. Although the dish itself wasn’t very visually pleasing, the flavors were all phenomenal.
Creole food has many influences including French, Spanish, West African, and Haitian. All of those cultures combine to create wonderful flavor profiles with a variety of different herbs and spices to give food complexity and just the right amount of heat.
The sun had gone down while we ate dinner and when we left the restaurant the atmosphere in the city had completely changed. The hoards of people dressed up and looking to have fun were replaced by a rager that filled the streets.
After another round or two of drinks, we decided to call it a day. We hailed and Uber and went back uptown to our AirBNB. We spent the next several hours playing Cards Against Humanity until we ran through all the cards in the set.
The next morning, Lauren and Jacob had to leave early in order to make it back to Orlando at a reasonable hour. Christine was headed back to Austin which, considerably closer, allowed her to stay a little bit longer. We walked about two minutes from our AirBNB to Surrey’s Uptown, a cute little diner located on Magazine Street.
Seating at Surrey’s is first come first serve. We put our name on the list and were seated in about 25 minutes. It was about 45 degrees that morning so the wait outside was a little uncomfortable but we didn’t have a lot of other options nearby so we sucked it up.
