Couple o' Cafe Reviews (and a bookstore to Boot)

Introduction: I'm not sure if I'm going to do this kind of thing a lot. I can't say I'm an aficionado of "travel writing" as a genre, but I know that the stuff published in most newspapers, namely stories about where the writer ate, stayed, and visited specifically, with recommendations for travelers who want to follow their footsteps exactly, is not very good, to put it lightly. Nor do I desire to be a restaurant reviewer, though I always have a soft spot for a good review. 

After eating at the two places to be covered yesterday, I got the idea of writing about them. I think I've rationalized it in this way: I would like to share experiences at specific places that I found to be positive. I thought it would be fun to write about this. But mostly, in figuring out why people are in New Orleans and what they do, and why I'm in New Orleans and what I do, and also what and how I write, I thought this might be part of that exploration, in a helpful way. And so, on come the reviews of New Orleans establishments, maybe for the only time, maybe as a series.

Of course, I'm not sure why I bothered to write this self-justifying introduction. Between the fact that this is my blog and I do what I want, and the fact that I have about, if I flatter myself, 4 readers, all of whom will be supportive, I don't think it really matters what I write about. A writer is a writer is a navel-gazing solipsist is a writer, I guess.

 Eco Cafe - 


On Monday morning I went for a walk eastward. I sought not the morning sun but a bicycle shop I deemed to be closest to my hotel; I needed a lock for my newly purchased used bike. I wanted to find a place to have breakfast, or at least to have tea and a pastry. I strolled through Mid-City thinking I would probably have to go past the bicycle shop and over towards Esplanade Avenue, which held, I had read, a few eating establishments. I crossed Canal Street, began walking past this main road, and then noticed the Eco Cafe.

If we continue the theme of first impressions that I so ponderously introduced in the previous post, we can explore why this cafe interested me, impressed me enough for me to stop in my tracks, retrace my steps, and tread curiously on the stone steps leading into the cafe. People, two men of a distinguished age if I recall, ate inside, which caught my attention - the place wasn't deserted. The place advertised that it served coffee, breakfast, and lunch. In the end, I helped myself to none of those things, but this still seemed significant. The pleasant red vinyled-building and the confusing existence of three sets of stairs that could serve as entrances to the cafe (I believe only two actually did) also attracted my attention. Ultimately, the fact that the place was on my way also played a major role.

In any case I entered. I met with a kindly New Orleans dame, also of distinguished age (both servers fit into this description, actually). I asked for tea, and then if they had any pastries: they didn't, only bagels. But there in front of my face, protected by a plastic cover, stood a most tantalizing piece of chocolate cake, the type of chocolate cake that is so luscious there's no place for asking about the price. I said I'd take that and she warned that if I didn't, she would, and we laughed as she offered to bring the tea and cake to my table. "I'm going to put the tea bag in the water first," she said, "I had an Englishman come in who showed me how to do it right." Reassured, I sat down by the window.

That's most of what there is to say about the Eco Cafe. Coffeehouse or cafe tea, 95% of the time, is straight from a bag and no better than what I can make at home when I don't have any infusers or tea pots, and worse than what I can make when I do have the tools. I fully acknowledge that when I order a tea in a cafe, I am spending $2 or whatever to enjoy the atmosphere and feel ok about it, like I'm not gypping anybody because I sit at their otherwise unoccupied table and read or write or judge others or what have you. The atmosphere at Eco Cafe was nice on a sunny MLK day morning, with sunlight streaming in through the windows, a sparse crowd, the kind servers, and unobtrusive music on the speakers (if any at all - I can't remember, proof of how unobtrusive it was). Eco Cafe filled the bill, in other words, despite being in a quiet area.

But what has to be covered is the chocolate cake.

How can one not cover this cake (with saliva, forks, hands, teeth, etc.)?

I didn't expect the actual cake part to crumble in my mouth as it did; I thought I was going to get moist, almost juicy cake. Instead it crumbled, broke apart in neat cubist fashion but hardly stale - if I counted up all the great-looking cakes I've eaten that have broken my heart due to staleness, unexpected nuts or fruits embedded inside, or the horrible realization that it was a German chocolate cake, it would easily outnumber the number of fair maidens' once innocent hearts that I've broken. Easily. Karma I guess. This cake did not break mine heart.

It wasn't a perfect cake, though it was better than the purported best chocolate cake in the world I sampled in NYC. As you might guess, if the cake didn't disappoint but wasn't perfect, that probably means it was a little too much of a good thing. The frosting and the inner chocolate (the chocolate that splits the cake, you know what I mean) was stickily rich, just a little too much so. I'm not complaining; I loved the cake and would return. When a piece leaves me weary and not sure if I want to finish or throw in the fork, it's not a comment on the cake's lack of quality. The quality was there, and then some.

Oh, and despite being too luscious-looking for me to ask about the price, it weighed in at a dainty $2.50. In these modern times, one cannot complain about that.

Corner Muse - 

Later on Monday, equipped with my new used bike and already moved into my room for the month, I cut through the Big Easy streets as if New Orleans was my oyster. A muddled metaphor, but in any case indicative of the surge in joy and freedom I feel when I'm on my own in a new city and blitzing through the streets on a bike, able to see the architecture and the people at a reasonable pace while still getting where I need to go when I need to (admittedly, I didn't really need to be anywhere at anytime), flouting the traffic rules with relentless abandon (something that used to drive me crazy as a car driver; in Israel I would justify it by saying I had little alternative, and everybody drives like that anyway, car bike or motorcycle; now, I just accept my role as rule-flouting traffic pest), able to get to all the parts of a bikable flat city like this one. Somebody told me Uptown was a good place to check out for young folks, which makes sense as it's near Tulane and a couple other universities besides. Magazine Street is the major shopping street in New Orleans from what I've read (though my investigation has found it to be more eclectic and bohemian than I thought, far closer to Durham's 9th street or Toronto's Kensington Market than LA's Rodeo Drive or Chicago's Michigan Avenue, and yes I'm showing off in ass-like fashion) and leads through the Garden District, home to many cool mansions, and Uptown, so I thought I'd take it. I didn't make it to Uptown until Tuesday, though, and finding the Corner Muse was a large reason for it.

Again, circumstance played a big part; the sun had already begun its westwards drift, I ready to eat had been on the lookout for a likely spot. While a part of me feels that it is better to explore as many options as possible in moments like this, another part of me senses that when a good option appears, one should take it. Corner Muse, with its purple and gold sign and its humble outdoor tables, appeared as that good option and I, a hungry young man of means as it were, took it.

The owner/server greeted me kindly and enthusiastically, breezing about the room as she waited on me and said hello to everybody in and near the coffee shop (I mentioned her in the previous post). I noticed at one point that a piano sat in the corner and that the cafe advertised live music; I naively thought to ask with my own amateur performance career in mind (I dance on my head while playing a bike horn in each foot, you gotta check it out) about the music. She gave me a genuine response, maybe knowingly, that served as the best possible response that didn't involve, "You play? We were just looking for someone for tomorrow night..." She told me that the music is geared towards kids who attend the school next door; Celtic music is on the bill in February, for example. I thought this was great. Unfortunately, I didn't think to ask, "So, do any of those kids like songs about minivans?"

The cafe was also sparsely populated and played pretty standard coffeehouse for the modern young person music; yes, that's right, they played Fleet Foxes, which I've definitely heard in cafes in at least two other cities, one in another country. The food they served was cheap and of high-quality: I ate a chicken salad sandwich that was actually a chicken curry salad sandwich, i.e. the chicken was curry sauced, which I found interesting and tasty if not extraordinary. Also, grapes on the sandwich, a nice touch. I also ordered an apple, a tea, and a very tasty cupcake that was essentially a Hostess chocolate cupcake, cream filling and all, if someone actually baked it. All this for just a shade over $11. Again, conceding that I paid a little bit for atmosphere and the right to sit somewhere besides in my room at my computer while I read and wrote, and that it's not quite nice enough to go lay in the park where it's free, it was a good deal. The Corner Muse is a new place, I think, but they're doing the job right.

Blue Cypress Books

My bike ride today took me to Uptown through the back way, the Northwest. It was again a high as a kite bike-riding day, at least until my bike chain snapped off (a story not for here, possibly for there). On my planned route, I stumbled on an interesting little street whose artisan signs drew my attention, drawing me away from my plan. The street was Oak street, a street home to a few cafes, the Maple Leaf Bar, and a bunch of other shops, apparently all local (i.e. not founded by carpetbagging Yankees, or at least newly carpetbagging Yankees, I infer). A nice community feel hung in the air over the street, even though it was mostly empty as it might well be on a January Tuesday about noon.

I detoured down the street, going until the signs stopped popping up, and then returning down the other side. Oak street is a little one, better compared to Durham's 9th Street in size and scope than Magazine Street, for example, so this detour didn't take me long. Didn't take me long, that is, until I decided that I just had to check out Blue Cypress Books.

It was just a used book store, not very big and not necessarily boasting anything unique except a few New Orleans themed shelves and a gray calico cat who, once she sniffed out my dropped backpack, was very upfront in getting to know me as well. Additionally, I am in a position where the last thing I need is more books; I brought 7-8 books with me, more than enough to make it through the month, and there are books at the house I'm staying in that I'll want to read if I get the chance. Buying books, no matter how cheap or interesting they are, is not what I need to be doing.

So consider it a mark of the quality of BCB's selection that I walked away with four books to stuff into my backpack, including one hardcover. My back and spine can justly complain to upper management about the wisdom of making them carry more weight for the rest of the day on my ride. I'm just afraid that upper management, while dutifully listening to their pleas, will do nothing about it, as they are the ones after all who benefit from the books.

Ok, that's enough for today. In case it hasn't come through yet, I am enjoying my time here. We'll see what's out there tomorrow.

New to N'awlins: Or a collection of Three Days

Let's face it: first impressions matter. You are familiar with this tired refrain, yes? Well, it's true; there is no doubt that a given first opinion about a given person, place, food, et al. is significant. Lasting even.

Prejudices also matter, for that matter. We'd all like to believe we live unprejudiced, open-minded lives (well, not all of us, but you know what I mean), but we definitely have pre-first impressions about certain things, ideas that form our perceptions, which make up for half of the fateful first impression.

We should not linger on first impressions overlong, of course. First impressions, like prejudices, usually fail to ascertain the essence of a given object, as do in many cases second, third, and nth impressions. Allowing a first impression to define a view about someone or something is lazy and lame. This is one of the more frustrating things, for example, about applying for jobs or schools or anything else, the sense that all the applicant has is a fleeting window to make a positive, though superficial first impression, an impression that is his/her only chance to win the position or at least earn a longer window for making a deeper impression. There's no way around this in situations like open application processes, of course, but in our personal experience we should make sure to consider the pernicious effects of lazily allowing our first thought to stand unedited.

And with that, I dismount from my high horse and present to you the prejudices and first impressions that have guided me in my first three days visiting/living in New Orleans. I'm here for a month (at least), which reminds me of my two month visit to Madrid and allows me to test my new hypothesis that the 1-2 month stay is the best way to visit and get to know a city if you are not prepared to move there or anything crazy like that. Cheap room off craigslist, cheap used bike (also off craigslist), and a heavy dosage of Google Maps and online investigation to set up my activities for the month: this is how we get along in 2011, it seems.

Anyway, I present first the prejudices I have compiled about the Big Easy derived from popular culture and friends' reports, and then my initial impressions, sure to be laughable to me by the end of my month here, from the long weekend. Onwards with shallow thinking, yah!

Prejudices:

Live and Let Die, my favorite James Bond movie, was largely set in a decaying, brass band at a funeral New Orleans, good ol' N'awlins and all that thing. The movie pit, as my high school friend aptly and bluntly put it, Bond against just about every African-American (as well as African-Caribbeans from Haiti and/or Cuba if I recall correctly) in the world, excepting the one or two characters on his side. Hmm. At least this may prepare me for considering the actual racial tensions that I suspect are present in the Crescent City.

There are some cultural touchstones that among well-read people spanning from my age to maybe 15 years older have gained so much currency as to be cliche. Neutral Milk Hotel, great as they are/were, are a good example of this (also not completely irrelevant - Jeff Mangum is from Ruston, Louisiana if I'm not mistaken - sure that's all the way across the state and no doubt a completely different setting, but still). If A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole isn't, it should be. And I think it is a book that stands as something of a badge of pride for New Orleans; I found a statue dedicated to his famous character Ignatius J. Reilly on Canal Street, one of the main boulevards in the city.

For all the significance of the book, I can't remember a ton from it that influenced my view of New Orleans; the Reilly character overshadows much of the rest of the book, and my copy of the novel is currently indisposed, preventing me from brushing up. I remember the crazy feeling of the novel, the crowds and the pushing and what not, I remember (or remembered after hearing my shuttle driver say his accent was either New Orleans or South jersey) the preponderance of Jersey emigres in New Orleans, and I remember, well, again, Ignatius J. Reilly. Humph. I read another book last year, Tom Robbins's Jitterbug Perfume, that took place partly in NO and is quite a good book, but didn't tell much about New Orleans beyond the obvious.

Then there is of course that obvious: New Orleans as a birthplace of jazz, home to Satchmo Louis Armstrong, for example. The Creole and Cajun and French and Spanish roots of the place. Katrina and the flooding and the canals and the gulf spill and everything. Who Dat and Dem Saints winning last year's Super Bowl (I'm sure it would have been a crazy arrival if I entered New Orleans with the Saints still in the playoffs; I'm not sure whether their losing was a good thing or a bad one for my purposes). Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, and the French Quarter. Those are the pieces of information (represented here in trivial sentence fragment form) that helped me form my initial picture of New Orleans. A crazy, high energy, low prosperity, possibly disharmonious city that knows how to get down, more or less is the picture I formed.

First Impressions
Southern Hospitality - Most people I have come across have been pleasant. In every eating establishment except the most touristy (Cafe Du Monde on Decatur), the service has been kind and timely; at one place, one of the overseeing waitresses (managers?) kept making sure I was taken care of and calling me baby (she couldn't be much over 30); at another, the older staff joked and smiled with perfect kindness; at a third, the cafe owner occupied the energy center of her corner cafe, engaging with her few guests, waving and talking to any and all passers-by - all acquaintances of hers, and providing a good and cheap menu to boot. At one eatery, the hospitality was of the faux-hostile form, i.e. when I asked to get the order for here, the owner good-naturedly scolded me about how I was getting it to go because it was closing time and time for them to go home if not for me.

I also had an exchange with a bus driver that made me smile. The bus driver greeted me by saying something like "What's chirping with you, champ?" (I really didn't hear what he said, but I remember "ch" sounds). A woman stood next to him, so I thought maybe he was talking to her. Then I thought maybe he said it to me because she didn't respond. So I said, "What?"
"Hello, sir, how are you doing tonight?" he responded with exaggerated diction. I found this all charming.

Colors - I haven't wrapped my head around New Orleans's layout, housing design, or overall set up, but the architecture has general themes to them: there are columns and balconies or roof space on many of the buildings, which along with the frequent vacant lots lends an air of decadent decline (an impression definitely emerging from my prejudices, I should say). There are neighborhoods I'm not comfortable walking in after dark that look mildly dilapidated but also joyous and grinning in the daylight. And New Orleans seems like a place full of residents who exude pride in spite of it all.

Mostly, I would attribute that to the colors of the houses. Purple and gold are common colors (possibly official ones) down here, but houses also come in greens, pinks, yellows, blues, and reds. It makes me think that, if color is your thing, why would you ever to paint your house anything less than an exciting, bold color? Why miss the opportunity? Looking at some of these houses, I felt a sudden yen, I of all people who is the last in the world truly concerned about this sort of thing, I felt the desire to own a house, if just so I could paint it cool colors (I'd accept a brick house too, I guess, but cool colors are, well cool).

Why people come to New Orleans - I sense that, should I decide to do some serious exploring in New Orleans, and further to use this blog space as a platform to catalog said exploration, I will have to discuss the societal tensions that to me seem to be obvious in New Orleans. Again, first impressions are shit, so I'm sure I'll revise or deepen that observation if I choose to pursue it, but there are at least three different major populations that I've come across that could cause tension for one another, or that I've heard cause tensions for one another, or so on. 

There are people who live in New Orleans because that's where they're from and they have little choice or consideration for leaving. I will not get ahead of myself any further than to say that I suspect that this is largely a poorer community, and that the ethnic makeup is significantly more African-American than the other groups.

Then there are the people who have arrived in New Orleans in the past five+ years to help revitalize the city in Katrina's aftermath, among other things. This would be a more affluent, white, young community consisting of today's relatively hip and open-minded 20 and 30-somethings, or tomorrow's yuppies. We'd like to think this group is wholly noble and selfless, and will blend effortlessly into the community and buoy all its members. Of course, while most people in this group are good people doing good things, that doesn't mean that the previous statement isn't rubbish. Even if well-meaning, these types can easily create some dissonance when contrasted with the first group. It reminds me of classes last year where we talked about how UN Peacekeeping forces, even when meaning well and following the rules, completely disrupted the economic system in the areas they worked, because the money and needs they brought with them distorted typical market calculations. I wonder if similar things happen here.

Lastly, there are the tourists. Tourists are usually easily ignored, laughed at and brushed aside. Here, where it seems to be a big part of the city's identity, and where the reason tourists visit is so in-your-face - my brother described to me how some people call San Francisco "Neverland" due to the prevalence of 30 and 40-somethings who refuse to settle down and continue to live in the city and party and live the wild life (I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, really, if that's what they want to do, but I digress); New Orleans seems to be, along with Vegas and probably a couple other places, the tourist's Neverland, a place where they can come to forget all morals and values and just have a fun time, because that's what people do here - it is probably harder to deal with that. Add in the large numbers of the young people in group two who do everything they can to show they "fit in" and are true locals, and it makes sense that group two might despise group three.

Before I mock group three too much, however, I should pass on what a native (though someone who doesn't fit into my neat categorization: drat!) told me when apprised of my plan to leave New Orleans in mid-February: that it was strange I was leaving before Mardi Gras, and that whether one parties or not, Mardi Gras is a good time to see the city put on its best face. There's no need, then, to say that partying is inauthentic or as make believe as Peter Pan or something.

Anyway, I'm going to watch out for the tension, among other things. You know, when I'm not face down drunk at the feet of a lady of the night just off of Bourbon Street  So about once a week, in other words. That's the beauty of the 1-month stay, however; it's long enough to get over the first impressions but not so long as to make it feel too much like home or stale to me (not that it feeling like home would be bad, but I might not have the time).

I'll end this with a line from my friend JS, who told me much about New Orleans. Aware of my international leanings, he tried to convince me to move to New Orleans by saying it is like a completely different country. I plan to watch out for this too. As there are no Bank of America ATMs within 40 miles of the city, I am inclined to give this view a thorough consideration, at least.