The Ghost of Ignatius

Clap your hands for Dixieland!

We slipped on down to the Big Easy for a long weekend full of jazz, obscenely giant oysters, Sazeracs, cemeteries, etouffee, and the swamp. Keeping with my admittedly contrived habit of trying to read on theme, I, of course, brought a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces with me on the plane. This happened to be the same copy I purchased for LSB several years ago--probably declaring it "one of the best books ever!"--which still had her bookmark in it on page one-hundred-and-something. For those of you who haven't read it, it's really good. Don't listen to LSB.

"When my brain begins to reel from my literary
labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."
- Ignatius J. Reilly
(John Kennedy Toole)

I'll get to the reptiles and dead people (and maybe a rocket, too), in a later post but for now, I'll touch upon my quest for the perfect Sazerac and a few other minor details, including the consumption of a massive amount of regional food. First, though, a confession. In spite of the fact that I developed a minor obsession with this drink over the past year or so, I don't think I had ever had a true Sazerac coctail prior to the trip. Upon arriving at the hotel, I headed to the rooftop bar and made up for lost time while waiting for LSB. My first authentic New Orleans Sazerac experience came in a small plastic cup that a gust of wind almost blew off the bar. My subsequent experiences here, here, and here, were better. How can you go wrong ordering a Sazerac at Sazerac Bar? You can't. I didn't.

The view after my Sazerac rooftop experience
nearly ended badly

And the food? Lawdy, what didn't we eat? We had alligator sausage (LSB had it fried, too), oysters on the half-shell, fried oysters, an oyster po-boy, gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice, crawfish etouffee, Crawfish O'Conner, a Ferdi Special, a muffaletta, and delicious powdery beignets.

A dozen and a half freshly-shucked oysters later...

Seems like we washed quite a bit of it down with Abita Turbodogs. Gosh, these people know how to eat. The one light, healthy thing we ordered--room-service oatmeal one morning--never made it our room for some reason. We blamed the loud, drunk people in the hotel room next to us.

Home of the Famous Ferdi Special

We heard some Dixieland at Fritzel's--down Bourbon Street a bit, past the strip clubs and loud 3-for-1 bars--and a mix of everything else wandering down Frenchmen Street in The Marigny, before settling in at the Spotted Cat to watch a band whose music was inspired by two of my favorite directions, the South and the East.