Tag: Metairie LA

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Spending A Day with the TBC Brass Band in New Orleans

    There are no second-lines during the summer, at least not the large, official ones sponsored by social aid and pleasure clubs, but that doesn’t mean that brass band activity dies down during the summer. If anything, the bands are busier than ever, due to weddings, birthdays and family reunions, as well as club dates and outdoor music festivals, so I usually try to make it to New Orleans at least once during the summer to hang out with my friends in To Be Continued Brass Band, and this year was no exception, as I made my way down on July 20th, stopping in Covington, Louisiana for a dinner at The Chimes, an excellent seafood restaurant along the scenic Tchefuncte River. But it was after midnight when I arrived in New Orleans, and my TBC Brass Band friends were gathered outside of a place called Jokers Wyld and Mickey’s Playhouse (the former Ooh Pooh Pa Dooh) where they were supposed to be playing for some sort of party. After I parked and pulled around the corner, I found them engaged in a friendly but vigorous band argument of some sort, which is often the case in New Orleans, as band is a competitive sport in that musical city. Unfortunately, the man who had engaged the band “went off to get the money” and never returned, so they didn’t play, and I instead grabbed a cafe-au-lait and some beignets and made my way to the West Bank and to bed. 

    The next morning, my homeboy Darren Towns, the bass drummer for TBC, his two young daughters and I headed into the Bywater neighborhood to have breakfast at a bright and cheerful new spot on St. Claude Avenue called Polly’s Bywater Cafe, which had not been there when I was last in the city at Mardi Gras. In one sense, Polly’s takes a page from other typical New Orleans breakfast spots, with local artwork on the walls, and a bright color scheme, and cheerful, sun-catching windows and decor. But we greatly appreciated the private parking lot (a rarity in New Orleans), the pleasant, efficient service, and the extremely high-quality food. Thoroughly satisfied, we were soon on our way to a recording studio in Mid-City, where TBC was to record a commercial with the legendary Kermit Ruffins. 

    After the studio session, it was largely gigs all day, with the first one being a wedding reception at an event venue in Jefferson Parish. From there I ran Darren by Guitar Center so he could buy a new cymbal for his bass drum, and then we headed to Legacy Kitchen, a new local chain of restaurants that I had been eager to try. We found the food excellent (I had the chicken and waffles), and we liked the upbeat vibe of the place, although prices were fairly steep. From there we had to head to the arena on the Xavier University campus, where a family reunion was taking place. Like the earlier wedding reception, the organizers had hired both the TBC Brass Band and some of the Zulus to be there in costume, and the attendees seemed to enjoy it. 

    The next stop was another wedding reception, this one at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Algiers, right at the border with Gretna, and at that particular location, the crowd had gotten rather rowdy, and some men were trying to calm down a man who was obviously intoxicated. But the performance went well, and the crowd seemed to enjoy TBC greatly, and again, there were members of the Zulus in costume there as well, which apparently is the current trend in New Orleans events.

    Our final destination was a birthday party in the Seventeenth Ward at a place called the Broadway Bar, where a large crowd was gathered out in the street, at tables and chairs in front of the club, and inside. The place was so crowded that it was hard for TBC to get into the club, but the Broadway is the type of hood club where the band and the crowd feed off of each other, and their performance was the hypest of the whole day. After TBC came back out of the truly tiny club, the band and members of the crowd began a sort of second-line around the neighborhood, and were not ready to break up when we made it back around to the club entrance. So TBC played for another twenty minutes or so while the man whose birthday it was, and his father danced in the street, along with some other people from the crowd. Finally, about 1 in the morning or so, we finally left the area. After one of these serendipitous New Orleans moments, the mood is usually exhaustion but exhilaration too, and this night was no different. 

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    Strange Winter Rituals on a Busy Lundi Gras


    Lundi Gras, the Monday before Mardi Gras Day, is basically a holiday in New Orleans, and thus ordinary things like getting breakfast can become a little complicated. My friend Darren Towns, his wife Jarday, and their children and I had planned to grab a breakfast at a new spot called Cloud 9 Bistro uptown at Magazine and 9th, a place that was supposed to specialize in liege waffles. Unfortunately, because of Lundi Gras, the restaurant had both cooks and servers not show up for work, and the owner stated it would be 45 minutes before he could even take our order. As a result, we walked around the corner to the Red Dog Diner, but they stated that the wait for a table would be at least two hours. Desperate, not to mention starving, I suggested that we try further uptown at Riccobono’s Panola Street Cafe, and although we did have to wait, it was a reasonable length of time, and we got seated. The breakfasts there are always great, and this day was no exception. However, the delays in finding a place and in getting seated meant that when we were through with breakfast, Darren only had about an hour before he was supposed to play at his afternoon gig.
    I had traveled to many gigs with Darren and other members of the TBC Brass Band, and almost all of them had been fun, but this one on this particular day was not much fun at all. For one thing, it wasn’t a TBC gig, but rather a pickup band that had been hired for this particular event, and for another, the event had been put together by a certain celebrity performance artist who is often in New Orleans. Her desire to protect her privacy and not disclose her whereabouts meant that I was not to use my phone to film or photograph the goings-on, and that in fact I was to keep my distance from the whole thing. The organizers had given several different addresses to the musicians, perhaps another step in trying to keep paparazzi and other unwelcome guests at bay, and we had gone first to a location in the French Quarter before ending up on a rather desolate street in the 9th Ward neighborhood known as Holy Cross.
    The organizers had hired both some Mardi Gras Indians, and musicians, for some sort of outdoor event. They wanted everyone other than the Indians to wear white, and one of the women explained to Darren that they were going to “build an altar” for their ritual, and that they would then walk to the river with the Indians and musicians to “make their offerings.” None of us were quite sure what exactly was going on there, whether voodoo, or New Age, or neo-paganism, but it was all quite strange, to say the least. The weather was bitterly cold as well, and eventually I retreated to the car, where I turned on the heat and sat there for the hour and a half or so that the procession and ceremony continued.
    When it was finally all over, Darren and I decided to go and get dinner. Perhaps because of the cold, it never even occurred to me to suggest that we go to the parades. Instead we headed to the new Saltgrass Steakhouse in Metairie, where we enjoyed a steak dinner, and then we stopped by the Cafe du Monde on Veterans Boulevard for after-dinner beignets and coffee. Thoroughly exhausted, we decided not to go out for live music, but to head to the house and get rested up for the big day on the morrow.

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    A Badly-Needed Brunch at Metairie’s Tic Toc Cafe on Mardi Gras Day

    081 Now That's A Moray082 Tic Toc Cafe on Mardi Gras Day
    The only thing worse than being cold and starving is being cold and starving after parading for about 7 miles from Audubon Park to Canal Street, so when I finally made it back to my car, the only thing on my mind was getting food and coffee. I had seen the day before that Who Dat Coffee Cafe had been bragging that they would be open all day on Mardi Gras Day, so I decided to try to get from Uptown to the Marigny neighborhood, not an easy task on the holiday, what with all the parades. But I managed to get up to I-610, and from there to Franklin, and once I was on Franklin it wasn’t hard to get to Who Dat. But when I arrived, although they were open and crowded, they told me that they had shut their kitchen down. So I headed back out west to Jefferson Parish, but almost nothing out there was open at all, not even Dot’s Diner. Finally, in desperation, I stopped at the little Tic Toc Diner at I-10 and the Causeway, which was open and crowded. I felt sorry for the people that had to work, but they were fairly cheerful about it all the same, and the bacon and cheese omelette, hash browns and biscuit seemed like the best I had ever had. As I enjoyed my late afternoon brunch, floats were roaring past outside on the Causeway, on their way back to storage from one of the Metairie parades. Warmed and filled, I set out to meet back up with my friends in the TBC Brass Band under the bridge on Claiborne Avenue downtown.

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    Treme On The Morning Of A Parade


      Each year on a Sunday, usually in August, the Satchmo SummerFest sponsors a second-line that runs from the St. Augustine’s Church in the Treme neighborhood to the Old U.S. Mint in the French Quarter, featuring Indian tribes, brass bands, the Baby Dolls and various social aid & pleasure clubs. This year’s second-line was scheduled to start at 12:30, and I thought it would start on time, so I felt I didn’t have time for a leisurely breakfast down in the city, and I grabbed a quick breakfast near my hotel at the Tic Toc Cafe in Metairie. With the parking situation so expensive and limited in and around the French Quarter, I decided to park my car up in Treme, close to the start of the parade route, and, fortunately, I had no problem finding a place to park near the Treme Coffeehouse. It was already extremely hot outside, so I grabbed an ice coffee from the coffeehouse, and then started walking down towards the church where the second-line would be starting. Like many other mornings when I had been in the neighborhood before a parade, the Treme was calm and quiet, but with a sort of eager anticipation in the air as well.

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      From Disappointment to Delight in an Hour: Crazy Johnnie's Steak House in Metairie, LA


      As I came into New Orleans for the Memorial Day weekend, my plan was to head to a new burger joint called Fire House Burgers in Metairie, a new concept from the folks at Drago’s Seafood Restaurant which had opened in January. Drago’s is great, and I had imagined that their burger offshoot would be too, so one can imagine my surprise at finding the place closed and evidently out of business after less than sixth months. With it already being 9 PM, my choices were somewhat limited. Drago’s has great seafood, but I had set my heart on beef, so I decided to try the place across the street, Crazy Johnnie’s Steak House, which had gotten reasonable reviews on Yelp and which I knew had been around since the 1970’s.
      Crazy Johnnie’s is unlike any steakhouse I have ever been in before. It is basically a bar, and a dive bar at that. Its steak menu grew out of a “Steak Night” bar promotion, and has always featured steaks at far below standard pricing, such as the $17.95 filet mignon that I decided to try (you’ll likely pay that much for a burger these days at some of the more trendy New American bistros). Frankly, the filet mignon was well-seasoned, cooked to perfection, thick and juicy, better than its more-expensive equivalents at Longhorn or Outback, and it actually came with a side dish as well. When my waitress told me that Crazy Johnnie’s had no french fries or baked potatoes, only mashed potatoes called Crazy Potatoes, I was briefly disappointed, at least until my food arrived. I don’t particularly like mashed potatoes as a rule, but these were amazing and tremendous, cheesy and buttery, with garlic and herbs and bacon, and a bit of a hot kick that was hard to identify. And I have to add that as I was enjoying all of these culinary delights, great Louisiana R & B was playing from the speakers overhead. The place I had settled for as a backup proved to be a stellar food experience.
      If you’re hoping to experience Crazy Johnnie’s, now is the time to act. The restaurant’s owners threatened to close down in 2013,due both to age and the rising price of beef, but public response took the form of a massive increase in business, so they decided to stay open for the foreseeable future, but they should not be taken for granted. The next time you’re in the New Orleans area, make it a point to eat there.

      Crazy Johnnie’s Steak House
      3520 18th Street
      Metairie, LA 70002
      (504) 887-6641
      http://www.crazyjohnnies.net

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      Yes, CHOCOLATE Beignets at New Orleans Coffee & Beignet Company


      After my dinner at Acme Oyster Bar in Metairie, I headed across the street to something called the New Orleans Coffee & Beignet Company, which was just about to close but hadn’t closed yet. Having tried Morning Call and Cafe du Monde many times, I was eager to see what was different about this newer place, and I soon found it, in the form of a sign on the wall: “Home of the original Chocolate beignet.” Well, perhaps the only thing I like better than beignets is chocolate, so I had to try it. How was it? Decent. What was it? Basically some beignet dough to which had been added Hershey’s cocoa powder. Nothing all that fancy, but good nonetheless. So all in all I was pleased. The beignets are good, the cafe au lait was good, the parking is free. What didn’t I like? They close at 10 PM. If only they were open 24 hours a day!

      New Orleans Coffee and Beignet Company
      3005 Veterans Memorial Boulevard
      Metairie, LA 70005
      (504) 644-4130

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      Dinner at Don’s Seafood Hut in Metairie @Donsseafood


      After the second-line, I was both hungry and exhausted, but food was harder to find than you might think. New Orleans is still a bit of a strange place on Sundays, and more restaurants are closed on the Sabbath than you would expect in a city known as a party town and convention place. After running by several places which proved to be closed, I found myself out on Veterans Memorial Boulevard in the suburb of Metairie, and came to Don’s Seafood Hut, the New Orleans branch of a Louisiana chain based in Lafayette. One of the surprising things about New Orleans is that while seafood is ubiquitous and plentiful, most of it is fried, and Don’s is no exception. I had a catfish and fried shrimp combo, and was very impressed with what I got. Next door is the legendary Gambino’s Bakery, which is famous for, besides po-boy bread, king cakes, which are a big deal at this time of year. Yet I resisted the temptation to stop there, and headed back into the city.

      Don’s Seafood Hut
      4801 Veterans Memorial Blvd
      Metairie, LA 70006
      (504) 889-1550
      http://donsseafoodonline.com/

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      8/26/09: Lean Times In Fat City


      Breakfast was at Panera Bread, and then I headed out to New Orleans for the Cutting Edge Music Business Conference, but I stopped in Jackson to have lunch with Charlie Braxton at Majestic Burger, and to pick up the new Ned Sublette book about New Orleans at Lemuria Books.
      All the time I had spent in Jackson had me running behind schedule, but I got so sleepy south of Jackson that I had to stop in Brookhaven for a cappuccino.
      The New Orleans rap artist Ms. Tee had wanted to meet with me, so when I got across the swamps and past Manchac and LaPlace, I called her from the outskirts of Kenner, and she suggested that we meet at Copeland’s Social City in Metairie. I had no trouble finding it, but, unfortunately, the menu had changed since the last time she had been there, and it was not only expensive, but just weird. mostly small plates, the tapas menu that’s so trendy nowadays in places like Los Angeles or New York. This was New Orleans, however, so we decided to drive further down Veterans to the Copeland’s Cheesecake Bistro, which was a much better and more diverse menu. We talked, some things about the city’s rap scene, and some about her career, and then went our separate ways, me out to the part of Metairie that had once been called Fat City in search of beignets.
      Tucked behind the Lakeview Mall, it was hard to see how the nondescript strip malls facing each other had ever been intended to rival the French Quarter, but that’s what the developer who built them had bragged back in the early 1970’s when school integration had started in earnest, and whites began pouring out of Orleans Parish into Metairie like water flowing through the broken levees. Businesses flowed over the line as well, one of them the venerable old Morning Call coffee stand that had proudly stood in the French Market for 103 years, a block northeast of its more-famous competitor, the Cafe Du Monde. When it left the Quarter for Metairie in 1974, people began to realize that something was truly going wrong in New Orleans. Officially the move had been due to “street construction”, but the truth was, most of the place’s long-time customers had probably moved already. Nowadays, Fat City was a garish warren of outdated strip malls with old-fashioned neon signs, and the only thing that seemed “fat” about it might be the beignets at Morning Call. But the coffee stand still proudly advertised that they were open”24 hours”, and they were crowded (with locals, not tourists). The prices were slightly cheaper than the Cafe Du Monde, and I noticed that they didn’t dust the beignets with powdered sugar, but had canisters of powdered sugar on every table for you to do it yourself. From there, I took a spin through West End Park, where I had eaten on an enjoyable promotional trip back in the summer of 2005 before Hurricane Katrina. Although the Joe’s Crab Shack had been rebuilt and opened as a Landry’s Seafood House, the rest of the area was still strangely desolate. Peculiarly, the sand volleyball courts were still there and apparently had been rebuilt by the city, but there was not a trace of the four or so restaurants that sat in a circle at the western end of West End Park the last time I had been there. I felt rather depressed as I headed down Pontchartrain Boulevard and into the city, whose broad expanse of downtown towers suggested a place of infinite wealth and possibility. Any illusions were soon shattered when I exited onto Canal Street, passing an abandoned hotel, three abandoned movie theatres and a vacant office tower with shattered windows, although the street had been planted with rows of beautiful royal palms, and the street’s condition seemed to improve with each block as I drove nearer to the river. The hotel where my conference was being held was the Westin Canal Place at the very end of the street, and after I had checked in, I decided to call it a night. My room featured a window with a broad expanse of the city, looking eastward toward the Faubourg Marigny and across the river toward Algiers. Off in the distance to the east, I could see the flash of radio towers, maybe out at Michoud, and nearer, I could see a big boat negotiating the Mississippi, perhaps an oil tanker. I left the window open on the city and fell asleep on the plush bed.