Text 34480, 102 rader
Skriven 2015-12-23 08:44:30 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: garden district & marigny 706
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Free Tours By Foot Garden District/Lafayette Cemetery.
Having had an enjoyable experience with the other cemetery
tour, we decided to give the same outfit another try. 
After riding the streetcar (named Canal, not the one
named Desire, which was replaced by a bus many decades
ago and served the wrong part of town anyway). We met
mid-morning at Prytania and Washington, at the edge of
the good neighborhood, though the less good neighborhood
still is more attractive and likely safer than most of the
rest of the city; so as public transport actually worked
and we were a little early, we decided to wander around a 
little on our own before returning to the meeting point at
the appointed time.

Our guide, a self-consciously humorous young fellow in
his forties, was a fount of information, but his delivery
left a bit to be desired - he seemed to be like the teacher
who tries to become popular by grading leniently and 
telling lots of jokes in a forced way, laughing rather too
conspicuously at his own humor. My disdain might be partially 
explained by that I'd had enough of cemeteries for this trip
and don't much care for eclectic architecture of the later
19th century.

We started off with an hour at the Lafayette Cemetery, in
which no famous dead people are interred. That of course 
means that one hears the whole yellow fever lecture all over 
again and the same peeks into the history and hydrography of 
the region, this time followed by pitches for various local 
historical societies and restoration funds.

I was glad enough to get out of there, but the reward was
a peek at a few rather too ornate Victorian and Greek Revival 
and neo-Gothic (well, only one of these) residences, and now
I know where Peyton and Eli Manning's daddy Archie lives and
where Nicholas Cage used to live and where John Goodman and
some other famous actor hide behind the bushes (looked it up
- Sandra Bullock).

The tour was twice as long as the other but not twice as 
interesting; so  we gave the guy the same $20 between us as 
the other guide had earned.

Lilli wanted to experience a jazz brunch; okay, fine with me.
I gave her some suggestions, and we ended up heading for
Buffa's in the Marigny just past the French Quarter. This
involved going back into town on the rickety old streetcar
and then either transferring to the bus or - taking no more
time - walking a mile across the Quarter and up a bit.

Buffa's is a neighborhoody place with live music in the back,
today a local group of actual competency called Some Like It 
Hot; today we had the luck of being present at their live CD
recording, may their dollars increase. Not my kind of music
exactly, but old-style Dixieland is a lot better than the
Christmas tunes heard at every corner elsewhere in the city.

Sadly, for jazz brunch, they were selling the brunch menu 
only; Lilli didn't see anything she liked and was working up 
to getting bent out of shape because they wouldn't sell her 
the stuff she had read about online but finally was convinced 
to eat a BLT, which she pronounced good, with thick cut bacon
that for a change wasn't done to the texture of roof tiles.

They sold her the house red at $9 a glass (not divulging the
price - a dirty trick); it was A by Acacia, actually a fairly
respectable product. She had two glasses.

I got a small order of the supposedly award-winning bratwurst 
jambalaya, which was okay but shall we say a very poor man's 
version, with some very dry white chicken and not so much 
sausage; no seafood at all of course.

There's a wall of hot sauces in back by the restrooms.
I chose The Ghost, which was one of the few sauces I've
ever had that was really hot and decently tasty at the
same time, not overwhelming the palate with acid. This
is along the Melinda/Marie Sharp line but using naga
jolokia instead of the normal Habanero/Scotch bonnet
peppers, along with the mango and carrot and so on. It was 
the first hot sauce I've had in a while that I wanted
to use drop-by-drop in the way sauces were designed for.
The chilehead Websites give wild estimates for the heat
of pepper sauces; one credible suggestion for this one
was 400K units. At any rate, the stuff really tastified
this otherwise merely okay food.

Nothing on draft, mostly mass-market stuff in bottle and 
a small selection of Abitas - no Turbo Dog, so I got a
couple ambers and called it good.

I guess they charge extra for the music - prices were
not charity driven. It was my turn, and I dropped $50 
for not so much sustenance and not so much flavor.

A moderate disappointment; nothing was bad, per se, not
even the music; but the best things were the wine and
the beer in that order, and Lilli didn't see that selling
us a bowl of red beans would have subverted the order of 
the universe all that much.
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