United States
New Orleans
Jazz spilling from doorways at 2 a.m. while beignet sugar dusts your collar.
The air hits you before the music does, warm and thick with praline sugar from a Decatur Street shop and the river's metallic tang two blocks south. Trumpet notes curl around wrought-iron balconies while strangers clink glasses on a Tuesday as if the whole city has forgotten what a weeknight is.
New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718, rebuilt in brick and stucco under Spanish rule after the fire of 1788, and shaped ever since by West African, Caribbean and Creole hands. Frenchmen Street, a short walk downriver of the French Quarter, has taken over from Bourbon Street as the corridor where locals go for live sets that run deep into the night. The city treats its music as heritage in the most literal way: New Orleans jazz has its own national historical park, and rangers stage performances in a concert space at the Old US Mint. Restaurants that have served Creole food for more than a century, Commander's Palace and Galatoire's among them, still sit at the top of the city's culinary order.
Solo
Few cities reward a lone traveller so quickly. Take a bar stool and conversation finds you; walk Frenchmen Street after dark and the music decides your evening for you.
Couple
Courtyard tables lit by candles, jazz drifting through open hotel windows and mornings spent splitting a plate of beignets give the city an easy, unforced romance.
Friends
Second-line parades materialise out of nowhere, po'boy crawls stretch across the Bywater and nights on Frenchmen Street ask for no plan beyond the first doorway.
- Frenchmen Street's clubs run live jazz seven nights a week, and many sets cost nothing more than the price of a drink.
- New Orleans jazz has its own national historical park in the French Quarter, with ranger-hosted live performances at the Old US Mint.
- The Sazerac and the Ramos Gin Fizz were both invented in New Orleans bars, and both are still poured at the source.
- Behind the Quarter's cast-iron galleries hide courtyards invisible from the street, pockets of quiet inside the noise.
Beignets buried in icing sugar, eaten hot with chicory coffee at Café du Monde as the Quarter wakes.
Gumbo thickened over a slow roux, its French and West African roots ladled over rice in every neighbourhood.
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