New Orleans is having a moment. Taylor Swift concerts, the Super Bowl, Mardi Gras: since last year, it’s been epic events back-to-back-to-back. Traffic has never been worse, but business has never been better. Or so we were promised.
During the heady heights of Super Bowl week, downtown and the French Quarter were nearly impossible to access, and hotel rooms that ordinarily go for $120 per night were renting for upward of $4,000. So far, so good. But early on, I noticed posts on Instagram from owners of smaller, local restaurants and bars deeper in the French Quarter who were suffering slow sales weeks, which is the opposite of what you might anticipate with an extra 100,000 people in town.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that locals keep many of those places afloat, and locals aren’t wading into a tsunami of tourists.
The other reason is there are two cities of New Orleans. The lived local experience can try one’s soul. The infrastructure is crumbling, the city government is corrupt, and the housing market’s been obliterated by short term rentals owned by out-of-state investors. I love New Orleans and consider it the greatest city in the U.S., but it’s an abusive relationship.
The other New Orleans is clean and well-lit: a stunner of a city, all within walking distance. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, adjacent to the Mississippi River on the city’s east bank, is an extremely popular venue for major conferences and tourist events. If you are visiting town for some annual business gathering, you catch a Lyft from the airport to your conference hotel and never venture too far from there.
During the Super Bowl, my social media feed was filled with journalists marveling at how walkable the city is. That’s how I could pick out the people who never left the bubble. This is my favorite city in America, but it’s not walkable. What they experienced was EPCOT with a New Orleans theme. It’s the “upside down” from Stranger Things, with gas lamps on 300-year-old buildings and neon lights in club windows where jazz legends play every night.
The irony is that this slick and shiny New Orleans that so intoxicates tourists is the least-interesting, least-romantic part of the city.
With Mardi Gras season entering full swing, and over 1 million tourists beginning to converge on New Orleans to celebrate, I thought it might be helpful to offer a handy Where to Drink Wine guide, to get you out of the tourist bubble. My metric for choosing them is simple: Do locals respect the place, and would visitors feel enchanted?
The Delachaise, chaisdelachaise.com
If you have a lot of time, but not a lot of money, a great first wine stop might be The Delachaise, located on St. Charles Street in the Garden District. The first time I visited there almost a decade ago, I thought I’d slipped through a wormhole and landed in Paris. It has that same outdoor café ambiance: throngs of people leaning across metal bistro tables, talking about events of the day and hopes for the night. Its Thai moules frites aren’t to be missed, and its selection of wines is suspiciously affordable: on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from 12 noon-5 p.m., there’s a menu of $5 by-the-glass wines. It’s also a great bar to have one too many, because the streetcar runs directly in front of it. You can hop on and head clear across town, without paying surge fees or risking a DUI.
N7, n7nola.com
Hailed by Bon Appétit magazine as “the most romantic French restaurant in the world,” if you have a lot of time and a lot of money, N7 in the Bywater neighborhood is where you want to get a reservation. (And if you can’t get a reservation, I’ve been assured that if you just show up and ask for a table, they can probably find a way to make it happen.) Just walking into the restaurant is something like crawling through the wardrobe into Narnia. You wouldn’t likely stumble onto the place; on its block, you’ll see a few houses and a tall wooden fence. Only “N7” spraypainted on one of the boards gives away its location. On the other side of the gate is a French restaurant festooned in string lights and plucked straight from the Route des Vacances that once connected Paris to Italy. This is dining at its finest, with a deep, chaotic, and ever-evolving wine list on clipboards (primarily Old World with minimal intervention). Forget the usual suspects if you’re in town and want the best meal of your life (Brennan’s or Galatoire’s or the like). N7 is where you actually want to go.
Pluck Wines, pluckwines.com
Especially if you are staying in the Convention Center area, you would be remiss not to stop by Pluck Wines on Girod Street, downtown, to choose a bottle from an exquisite, masterfully manicured cellar. It’s a 10-minute walk from most conference hotels, with serious street cred across the wine world. (Last night at dinner, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a sommelier, and she mentioned that any time she travels to different wine regions, someone invariably says, “Oh you’re from New Orleans? Do you know Skye LaTorre? She owns Pluck.”) The wines skew Old World, made by small producers, and its sommeliers as a group are perhaps the friendliest and most knowledgeable in the city.
The Tell Me Bar, thetellmebar.com
Probably the hottest wine destination for locals right now is The Tell Me Bar, located in the Lower Garden District. The last couple minutes of the drive there will feel a little bit like you’re about to be ax-murdered (complete with a crude wooden sign with “WINE” spraypainted on it as if to lure you, and an arrow pointing the way). It’s a safe neighborhood, though: just in an interesting location, beneath a highway overpass. The Tell Me Bar specializes in natural wines, and its list never stops changing. The prices are astonishingly good given the cool, tropics-meets-Tuscany atmosphere, and the pop-ups and music are nonpareil. This is where I’m probably meeting my friends for a drink.
The Independent Caveau, theindependentnola.com
Probably the most influential wine destination in New Orleans, The Independent Caveau, on the periphery of Mid-City is three businesses in one: a wine shop, a wine bar, and a wine education center. (Joanne Close, its co-owner, taught half the sommeliers in New Orleans everything they know.) Without question, the wine shop’s selection, skewing Old World and natural, stands toe-to-toe with any wine shop in New York or Paris. Jim Yonkus, Close’s husband and the shop’s co-owner, is certainly the top fromager in the region, which means the wine and cheese plates are sublime. They also host regular wine education events, so if you’re in town (or even a local) and looking for a fun date night, join one of their specialty wine classes, where you’ll not only enjoy a flight, but also learn something about why the wines taste the way they do.
Bacchanal Wine, bacchanalwine.com
If live music is your thing, check out Bacchanal Wine in the Bywater neighborhood. I won’t go into too much detail on this one, because The Food Section has previously covered this famed music and wine destination. There’s a wine shop in the front, where you can grab a bottle of wine at any price point, and take it to the ethereal, dreamlike backyard, where string lights evoke a starry night, every night. Grab a seat at any of the dozens of mismatched patio tables, order some light bites, and drink your wine with no corkage fee as local musicians play on a charming, plywood stage.
David W. Brown, The Food Section‘s wine columnist, is a writer based in New Orleans. He is the author of The Mission, and contributes regularly to The New Yorker and The New York Times. You can find him at davidwbrown.com.
On the one hand, its always great to see wine getting some love in our village that loves cocktails. OTOH, I’ve still got to live through two more days of carnival before going back to work in the FQ. I had been planning to give up alcohol and wheat for Lent — both to atone and prolong my life. But now. I’ve discovered I live around the corner from The Tell Me Bar. I feel like it might be the first stop after mass on Ash Wednesday. Prayers for me and Pope Francis.
We got you, Heather.