Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans

I go to New Orleans for the food and the music, which might sound trite and obvious, like saying you go to Paris for the shopping and the croissants. But if these observations feel so worn it’s because they’re true. New Orleans is a city that can justifiably lay claim to the richest culinary tradition in America and music is such a part of daily life you start thinking it’s normal to see somebody on the street carrying a dented tuba, rushing to a late-night gig with a brass band.

There’s a close mirroring between the New Orleans packaged for tourists (listless jambalaya and booze-soaked clubs on Bourbon Street), and the New Orleans lived by locals (succulent jambalaya and rollicking dive bars on Rampart Street). I discovered when I lived here that sometimes the distinction is paper thin, like at Antoine’s Restaurant, which opened in 1840. The front room is grand enough but it’s a little bright and stiff – this is where the tourists sit.

But if you go with a long-time patron – and by that I mean at least a second-generation regular, somebody whose parents went there when they were young – you’ll be led to one of the semi-private dining rooms that unfold like a puzzle, one leading into another. A meal in the main dining room is fine but a dinner in the back is transcendent, a time capsule of 19th-century luxury and tastes. No matter where you’re seated, start dinner with oysters Rockefeller, an Antoine’s invention, ask for an order of pommes de terre soufflées and end with the baked Alaska.

Every year New Orleans throws two public parties, Mardi Gras and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, commonly called Jazz Fest. Mardi Gras is the better-known and better-trafficked, and it’s as horrible as you might think. At least it is if you go to Canal Street or the French Quarter, where hundreds of thousands of college-aged visitors shed their inhibitions by embracing the city’s lax liquor laws.

But most Mardi Gras parades start uptown, and to stand on St Charles Avenue in the Garden District is a very different experience. It’s still crowded but it’s less a drunken scrum than a tipsy celebration.

Jazz Fest doesn’t draw the same numbers as Mardi Gras but on a busy day 90,000 festival-goers will go to the Fair Grounds Race Course for the music. With 12 stages, the largest of which seats 30,000 people, a $40 general admission ticket gives you access to that day’s hundred-plus performances.

There’s only one Jazz Fest, with tourists and locals standing side by side. But if you’re from New Orleans you know the festival isn’t just an audible feast, it’s an edible one, and the food is as much a draw as anything on stage. For two semi-tropical spring weekends, the Fair Grounds is the most exciting place to eat in a food-obsessed city.

Much of the appeal is in the sheer variety. More than 200 dishes are available: crawfish beignets, alligator pie, pecan catfish meunière, soft shell crab po-boy, and pheasant, quail and andouille sausage gumbo. It’s a dizzying selection even by local standards.

If the diversity of food is exhilarating, the quality is even more impressive. This is real cooking, and the 50 stalls are run by small-town restaurants and church groups, local caterers and charities. Early in the year dishes are auditioned as if they were musical acts and the most deserving cooks are awarded stalls where each will offer three to five different selections. Some are specialists, such as Wally Taillon from Gonzales, who makes only his signature jambalaya.

What’s more remarkable, almost all the food is made fresh every day at the fairgrounds. Early each morning pork butts are loaded in smokers, bushels of oysters are delivered and thousands of pounds of live crawfish are kept cool until lowered by crane into boiling water seasoned with spices.

No matter how much you eat at Jazz Fest, it would be a shame to squander a dinner in New Orleans, especially since Cochon, Donald Link’s restaurant in the Warehouse District, is at the top of its game. Pork isn’t the only thing on the menu at Cochon but it sets the tone, and it seems to have liberated the already playful and talented Link, whose first restaurant, Herbsaint, is one of my favourite places anywhere to stop in for a cocktail and a bite .

There is more to New Orleans than food and music, of course, and I’ll always make time to poke through the antique-filled junk shops on Magazine Street, where sorting through tarnished silver is a literal treasure hunt. And I’ll have an unhurried coffee at Rue de la Course, which like all New Orleans cafés serves cold-drip iced coffee, a sweet and smooth local speciality.

Recently a friend sent me a grammar-free text asking what he should do with his one free afternoon in New Orleans. I told him to wander through the Garden District, where the homes are so gracious and elegant you can’t imagine mere mortals living there. Then I texted him again, and told him to get a fried oyster po-boy at Domilise’s, a legendary dive. It’s forgivable to pass through New Orleans without visiting the French Quarter, but skipping an opportunity to eat would have been a sin.

....................................

Details

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is on April 24-26, April 30 to May 3,
www.nojazzfest.com

Antoine’s, 713 Rue St Louis, tel: +1 504-581 4422;
www.antoines.com

Cochon, 930 Tchoupitoulas St, tel: +1 504-588 2123;
www.cochonrestaurant.com

Herbsaint, 701 St. Charles Ave, tel: +1 504-524 4114;
www.herbsaint.com

Rue de la Course, 3121 Magazine St, tel: +1 504-899 0242

Domilise’s, 5240 Annunciation St, tel: +1 504-899 9126