"New Orleans is a city of mood,” chef Serigne Mbaye tells me one Wednesday morning in September. We've been discussing the merits of Parkway's po'boys and the old-school kitchen at Commander's Palace. While growing up in Senegal and New York City, Mbaye cooked with his mother, and his Uptown restaurant, Dakar NOLA, braids his memories of this time with his haute restaurant experiences and the deep-rooted African heritage of New Orleans.
outside Café Du Monde, a saxophonist plays
Pastel de nata and an espresso martini at 34 Restaurant & Bar
“New Orleans is a woman,” declares Biba Islah. We're talking in her studio, tucked away on the ground floor of an old bread factory in the Irish Channel neighborhood. An eighth-generation French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole New Orleanian, Islah does hair, makeup, and healing, and she reads tarot at Patron Saint, the wineshop and bar that my husband, Tony Biancosino, and I opened a year ago in the Lower Garden District. The night before we debuted our restaurant and tavern, St. Pizza, a couple of doors down from Patron Saint, she cleansed it with sage and rum. “New Orleans is empathetic. She feels everything,” offers Islah.
“New Orleans is a two-way embrace,” says Ben Jaffe, the director of historic French Quarter jazz-club institution Preservation Hall, when I ask him what it takes to endure here. “It comes with what I call the ‘New Orleans tax.’ ” This manifests not in the form of dollars, he explains, but in the responsibility to love and understand the city as it is.
One of the grand historic homes that line Canal Street
The city’s Garden District has some of the country’s best-preserved historic mansions in the Victorian, Italianate, and Greek Revival styles
It would be impossible to love and understand New Orleans without knowing its irrational, insouciant origins: a colony built on a swamp by three different countries; a yellow-fever-ridden, opera-obsessed port city central to the slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean; the fecund ground where jazz, America's most original art, sprang forth from the minds of Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong; a mecca of both seafood and oil. A beyond-American place of portals waiting to be opened by pirates, pioneers, and anyone curious to dig beneath the oyster-shell-strewn surface. It would also be impossible to love and understand this city today without recalling the blazing hot days of late August 2005 and all that has happened since.
The stage at storied French Quarter jazz club Preservation Hall
Lagniappe Bakehouse owner Kaitlin Guerin
New Orleans is a menagerie of culinary institutions, from Dooky Chase to Brigtsen's and Clancy's, but it also has room for newcomers likely to stand the test of time:
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If you're a JetBlue loyalist, you've probably noticed that you have not previously been able to redeem JetBlue TrueBlue points on the airline's least expensive fare option, Blue Basic (JetBlue's version of basic economy). Starting this week though, that has changed. JetBlue now has TrueBlue points redemptions available for every class of service — and we're seeing redemptions for as low as 700 points for Blue Basic.
Losing your luggage to the mysterious labyrinth of an airport baggage system is every flier's worst nightmare—especially when nobody at the airline can tell you where in the world it ended up. That's why many travelers have decided to take things into their own hands in recent years by attaching tracking devices like Apple AirTags to their checked luggage.
If Miami and Palm Beach had a love child, it would be Fort Lauderdale. Quickly shedding its image as just a spring break destination, the city is redefining itself as a place that lacks the formality of its neighbor to the north (Palm Beach), but has all the trappings of the vibrant metropolis to the south (Miami). And while Fort Lauderdale is quickly catching up on the five-star luxury-resort front, the real-estate (and therefore hotel) prices have not yet approached the levels of Palm Beach's on Worth Avenue. Fort Lauderdale lacks pomp and doesn’t take itself too seriously: It’s a place that still feels accessible thanks to an abundance of public beaches, a lack of gated communities, and a culinary scene that won’t break the bank.
For fliers who haven’t encountered it before, SSSS on a boarding pass stands for Secondary Security Screening Selection. It’s the Transportation Security Administration’s method of selecting passengers for additional security checks. If the acronym appears on your ticket, it means you’ll be subject to an extra-thorough screening—despite having pre-approval through a Trusted Traveler Program such as Clear, NEXUS, Global Entry, or TSA PreCheck. This can extend the boarding process by 15 to 45 minutes (or longer), which is always frustrating if you’re running on a tight schedule.
First came the coronavirus pandemic. Then came so-called "revenge travel." Now, it seems like the mad dash to Europe is an annual phenomenon that's here to stay.
As the host city for Super Bowl LIX, New Orleans expects to welcome more than 100,000 visitors for the Feb. 9 game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. At least a million more people will be celebrating Mardi Gras, the city’s biggest tourist draw annually, less than a month later.