New Orleans (Pt 4)

I woke up this morning, and the sky is blue! This makes me and my camera very happy! We strolled over to a highly pink-ified restaurant called Petunia's. The wait was fairly long, although we learned later, when we got a table, that someone had tipped over a couple trays of food earlier and had to start over. One of the servers also wasn't at work because he had apparently hit a truck with his bike on the way to work. Needless to say, service, however great, was spread a bit thin. Anyway, once we finally sat down, we ordered some pain perdu, a New Orleans style French toast, and a Cajun breakfast, which consisted of Andouille sausage, boudin (a pork and rice sausage), grits, eggs, and rye toast. The grits... were really well-done, not too salty, and overall very well-prepared. The pain perdu was amazingly good - the toast, made from slices of sweet French bread, was perfectly crusted and slightly spiced... They also put the right amount of sugar on it, which is to say not too much.

After that, we headed to Pat O'Brien's for their original Hurricane, which was actually much sweeter than the one we got from Lafitte's. This was most likely because the one from Pat O'Brien's didn't quite have enough alcohol in it to cancel out a bit of that sweetness. Just to confirm, we walked over to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop to get a Hurricane from there - for comparison's sake... We then headed back to the hotel and then tried to figure out what we'd do for the late afternoon and evening. I think while there, I managed to pass out for an hour; I think it was just from being so tired from all the walking I had done in the past few days.

Once it hit early evening though, we headed out to hunt for dinner because we wanted to avoid the hunger/lack-of-food fiasco/dilemna of the night before. We wandered around the French Quarter for a while and found that most places were already hopping with New Year's Eve revelers. Ending up on Decatur (as usual, by now), we stepped into Coop's, which had gotten really good reviews online. Coop's was primarily a bar, but it also served some good grub. We ordered the house specials, the seafood gumbo and supreme jambalaya. The gumbo was delicious, despite the fact that I normally do not like okra. It had tons of seafood in it, including crab claws, shrimp, and crawfish. The jambalaya, deliciously spicy, was filled with sausage, rabbit meat, shrimp, crab meat and crawfish. We also bumped into a local couple there at the bar, and we chatted for a while about the places to go and to eat in New Orleans and what things there are to do for NYE. They highly recommended a Creole-Italian restaurant called Adolfo's, which was on Frenchmen St, so after dinner, we headed over there to check out the place and see if it would be open New Year's Day.

While in the area, we picked up a couple of Abita ales and cups from a liquor store and drank those while wandering around, looking for the perfect masque. I ended up trying to many on, mostly for fun really, that my face was quite glittered by the end of the masque-hunt, when we decided to walk along Bourbon to see what was going on for NYE. Bourbon was very, very crowded - think Castro Halloween party but less costumes and much more drunk people. We wandered around, watching raucous drunken folk flashing their parts and vying for beads thrown by equally drunk people on the balconies. The countdown was rather sudden though, since we were on the street, and we only managed to hear the seconds before the new year in central time. After the slightly anticlimactic countdown, we ambled our way back to the hotel, where we just went to bed because we were both really exhausted.