Into the Wild…or something completely different

Posted on January 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

Snowy Homochitto State Park from 2009

He Said:

See ya later, civilization.

Today we make our annual pilgrimage to Clear Springs Recreation Area at Homochitto State Park in Mississippi for some ‘camping.’

For me, roughing it means no room service, so it was tough for She Said to convince me to give this a shot a few years back. True story: I was ‘asked to leave’ the cub scouts as a child because I didn’t want to learn to tie the stupid knots. I live in the city; what the hell was I ever going to tie other than shoes?

Daniel Boone I am not.

So tune in next week for word of our adventures on safari in Mississippi. But if you are in town, you should consider Sunday night’s Mixing Up Some Magic at Commander’s Palace, a four course benefit for Liberty’s Kitchen, a very worthy cause. The event is from 6:30 to 9:00, and tickets are $95, inclusive.

Enjoy the weekend!

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Posted in He Said, Travel, Better Weekends, Food, Benefits

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Putting Down Roots? Dominique’s Tamarind

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 1 Comment

He Said:

New fine dining is in short supply in the Big Easy these days, but the well-travelled Dominique Macquet, formerly of the Bistro at Maison DeVille and eponymous restaurants in the French Quarter and (more recently) Uptown, has lately sprung up at the French-Vietnamese Tamarind, in the Hotel Modern.

The Modern is a new renovation in the former Hotel le Cirque at Lee Circle, a presumably enviable location which has in recent years never produced any lasting success. The new hotel appears to be going all-in to change that, pairing Macquet’s new restaurant with Bellocq, an uber high-end cocktail bar designed by the owners of Cure, the high church of craft cocktails on Freret. We stopped in Monday for a first look. Continue reading →

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Posted in Food, He Said, Restaurant, Reviews

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Pour Some Sugar on Me: 2012 King Cake Death Match, February 2nd

Posted on January 23, 2012 | 2 Comments

CC image courtesy Angie Garrett at Flickr

He and She Said:

According to a carefully chosen panel of experts, what’s the best King Cake in town?

Who the hell cares?

Experts? We don’t need no stinkin’ experts. We need you.

For the second year in a row, we are crowdsourcing the vote for the best King Cake in NOLA. If you’re a native, you’ve been eating them all your life, right? And if you’re a transplant, we know you remember the first time you were smacked upside the head with Carnival pastry goodness.

You know what good is, so come out and prove it.

Here’s the deal:

Place: Thursday, February 2nd, 7pm sharp at the fabulous Patrick’s Bar Vin in the French Quarter. Haven’t been there yet? Here’s your chance to check out the Quarter’s newest wine bar and meet bon vivant extraordinaire Patrick van Hoorebeek. Click on this link for more info about Bar Vin.

Price of admission: Your opinion.

Bill of fare: A murderer’s row of confectionery bliss including cakes from the defending champion Cake Cafe and Bakery, Sucre, La Divina Gelateria, Rouses, Maple Street Patisserie, La Dolce NOLA, and a few more as we work this week to complete the list of contenders. By the time you stumble out in a sugar-induced coma, you’ll have sampled the best the city has to offer and passed judgement upon them all.

Bar Vin will be complementing the cakes with everything they have to offer, including drink specials on bubbly by the glass and king cake flavored vodka.

That’s not a misprint: king. cake. vodka.

So mark your calendar and make plans to come out, meet your humble correspondents, and let your voice be heard next Thursday!

*Disclaimer: While no one has actually, like, died during the death match (so far) He Said/She Said NOLA and Patrick’s Bar Vin take no responsibility for the effects of ridiculous sugar intake upon your system. The gloves are off for this pastry cage match, so eat at your own risk.

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Posted in Contests, Food, He and she said

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Do You Second Line?

Posted on January 20, 2012 | 2 Comments

The perfect view from our picnic spot

She Said:

Sundays when the weather is nice are just perfect in the French Quarter and last Saturday when I checked the forecast I knew we were destined for a treat. Ideas streamed through my head and I soon began the daunting process of elimination to figure out exactly what would be on the agenda. Every item added means something else misses the cut. Music is a must and Steve mentioned Cristina Perez would be playing a 7pm set at The Maison on Frenchman. That was perfect because we could go and still feel like responsible employees when Monday morning rolled around. Working backwards then: Because it is a Sunday, we should cook. And because we have a plethora of beef (my husband bought part of a cow..more to come on this), we considered stuffed peppers. Sold!

What’s next? Well this past Tuesday our new friends mentioned second lines on Sundays, and I have been to far too few in my day. So be it. What about lunch? With weather this gorgeous I have an itch to be outside as much as possible so we decided on a picnic. There was some stale bread lying around, so we needed to source a few ducks to dispose of it. Continue reading →

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Posted in Better Weekends, Food, Music, She said

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Breaking Bread New Orleans Style

Posted on January 18, 2012 | 3 Comments

CC image courtesy of Dinner Series on Flickr

She Said:

We love to eat!

Yes, Steve and I do, but I am not talking about us specifically, but rather New Orleans as a whole. It is the only place I know where people sit around a dinner table and the topic of conversation is inevitably what they will be eating at their next meal. Definitely one of my favorite aspects of being NOLA-Bred. Indulgent- Absolutely! 

Last Tuesday evening we were dining at Dan Esses’ Three Muses Supper Club and enjoying conversation with new friends of ours who we met at that same venue three months prior. Within minutes of our first meeting, the conversation turned to food. Over our once-monthly courtship, we have managed to cover a lot of ground:  best dishes, best restaurants, great breakfast, best dive places, best neighborhood restaurants, under radar, new in 2011 , etc.  The list goes on and on.  Our dining companions and ourselves don’t always agree. Hell, He Said and I often don’t agree, and I think that makes conversation all the more interesting. If there is one thing New Orleanians are passionate about it is food. If you don’t believe me, ask any local who makes the best red beans and rice. I always welcome the opportunity for someone to open my eyes to a different approach and more importantly something I have yet to experience. Continue reading →

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Posted in Food, She said

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One Oven to Rule Them All: Ancora Pizzeria and Salumeria

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 2 Comments

He Said:

Last month I visited Jacksonville.

It gets worse.

While there, I was dragged against my will to a Cheesecake Factory, where I encountered a menu only a little bit slimmer than a Manhattan phonebook. You remember phonebooks, don’t you? Strange artifacts, now extinct, of time when all of your contacts weren’t in your pocket 24/7.

But I couldn’t accuse the cheesecake guys of lying. ‘Factory,’ after all was part of their name, and a factory is exactly what this was. A suburban dining assembly line, resolutely stamping, riveting, pressing, and deploying every item on a Brobdingnagian bill of fare. I immediately made myself less popular among my co-workers by pointing out the rather obvious fact that no establishment can turn out credible representations of twenty different cuisines made-to-order out of one dining room.

It was not a good night.

Such was not the case, however, at the restaurant wrapped around an oven that is Ancora Pizzeria and Salumeria, where we made a long overdue visit last weekend. Continue reading →

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Posted in Dinner, Food, He Said, Restaurant, Reviews

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Save the Date! 2nd Annual King Cake Death Match, February 2, 2012

Posted on January 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

CC Image courtesy of Infrogmation on Flickr

He and She Said:

Thrills, festivities, and edge of your seat excitement. Fire breathers, dancing-girls, clowns in Volkswagens: anything can happen. Back by popular demand, we present the second annual He Said/She Said King Cake Death Match, where fan voting rules the day.

That’s right, no fancy-pants, nose-in-the-air celebrity voting here. Bring your appetite and your opinion and let your voice be heard.

This year’s event will be held Thursday, February 2nd, at 7:00pm at the fabulous Patrick’s Bar Vin in the French Quarter on Bienville Street. Admission is of course free and will include the opportunity to sample the best king cakes in town and take part in anointing the winner for 2012.

Cake Cafe took home the prize last year, and we expect them to make every effort to defend their title against a host of worthy challengers. More details coming soon on the pastry gauntlet, drink specials, and general merriment.

So, put it on your calendar and give the Super Bowl weekend an early kickoff with us at Bar Vin!

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Posted in Contests, Food, He and she said

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Beat the Crowds: Visitor Alternatives for New Orleans

Posted on January 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

He and She Said:

Welcome to the center of the universe.

The New Orleans Saints score like Lindsey Lohan on Meth, and it’s playoff time. That’s enough alone to make this a huge weekend, but add to it our invited victims guests the Detroit Lions, a franchise representing a city with more than a few parallels to the Big Easy, and it gets even better.

The silver and blue last made the playoffs in 1999, before you could even post smack about it on facebook, and they last won a playoff game in 1957, so expect to see a healthy contingent of Lions faithful in NOLA as well.

And there’s a pretty big college game on Monday you may have heard about. The Dome seems to be LSU’s made to order National Championship stomping grounds, as they closed the deal here in both 2003 and 2007. Facing the Tigers and the sea of purple and gold they’ll bring to downtown over the weekend are the Alabama Crimson Tide, who claim somewhere between 14 and 85 national championships (including a 1911-13 threepeat in the final polls at Cat Fancy, I think). The Tide’s overtime loss to the Tigers in Tuscaloosa this November still stings a little, and New Orleans is an easy drive from any point in Alabama, so expect the Houndstooth Nation to represent with a vengeance as well. Continue reading →

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Posted in Better Weekends, Food, He and she said, Lists

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This Post Goes to Eleven: The Best New Orleans Music of 2011

Posted on December 29, 2011 | 4 Comments

He and She Said:

The only thing better than the food in New Orleans is the music. If you’ve travelled a bit you know that the list of cities where you can drop in on incredible musicians on a random Monday or Tuesday is a pretty short one (NYC, L.A., Austin…are we missing any?) Given that, we’re sure we could produce a list of the great sets we didn’t see a mile long. But, in no particular order, here’s a list of what we did see that rocked our world. With apologies to Spinal Tap, here are the eleven most memorable sets in a year filled, as always, with great sounds. Consider checking some of these musicians out in 2012:

Gal Holiday at Balcony Music Club: BMC at the corner of Decatur and Esplanade is one of our favorites. Live music every night of the week with no cover. Before she relocated to L.A. to chase bigger things, Vanessa Niemann and her band held down a Sunday night set here which became one of our favorite ways to wind down the weekend. Three guitars, including pedal-steel, Vanessa’s terrific vocals, and arrangements of very old-school country unlike what anyone else in town is doing. Continue reading →

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Posted in He and she said, Lists, Music

New Orleans Top 10 Restaurants of 2011 (Via Mock Draft)

Posted on December 26, 2011 | 3 Comments

He and She Said:

 Back by popular demand, here is 2011’s Top 10 Restaurants via Mock Draft. Somehow Mars convinced Venus last year that this might be a good way to rank our restaurants. Each December, His stream of consciousness is pretty much ‘blah, blah, football, football, blah, football, blah, lather, rinse repeat,’ and Hers is pretty much ‘dear God, when will the football end?’ So this represents a compromise of sorts, one that appears to have been well-received by our dozens of faithful readers.

 The rules: Only restaurants on the active roster need apply. Translation: We must have visited you in the past 12 months. We make every effort to get to the full spectrum of what we perceive to be the best of the best each year, but we sometimes fall a bit short. Better luck next year to those places we missed. Ladies first, as always:

  Continue reading →

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Posted in Dinner, Food, He and she said, Restaurant

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