Aerosmith, YUNGBLUD - My Only Angel (Official Visualizer)

New Orleans. Home of jazz, ghosts, Mardi Gras beads, and most importantly, my favorite food in the whole world. You might even say this city is a gumbo of cultures, traditions, and flavors all simmered together over centuries into something uniquely American. Here, French, African, Spanish, and Caribbean influences collide in a way that somehow makes perfect, delicious sense. The food is soulful, messy, comforting, and alive. So buckle up your ass, because today, we're eating the best of it on the Ultimate New Orleans Food Crawl. First up, Domelisse's, an essential po'boy joint that's been open since 1923. So if we want to get a prototypical po'boy, this here's the place to do it. A neighborhood institution over a hundred years old, and I love that the only two people working in the kitchen are these two wonderful septuagenarian ladies just soloing the lunch rush. Just, just like, I mean, it doesn't get much more New Orleans than that. That's so cool. All right, so the most popular po'boy is the fried shrimp po'boy fully dressed, which looks like it's mayo, hot sauce, maybe ketchup, pickles, lettuce, all the good things in life. The bread really does make a difference. Like, you think it's not going to be very good. If you try po'boy bread on its own, it's like, eh. But then in the sandwich form, it's like, wow, this makes sense. And the shrimp is nice and crispy. It's well cooked, so it's not, like, bouncy or slippery or anything. It's, like, just right. There's a reason this place has been open for over a hundred years. All right, we wanted to do the most popular menu item and the wildest menu item. That's what we have here. This is a cheeseburger po'boy. And then they also put this mystery sauce on it, which I'm going to lick to try first, just to see what the sauce is all about. Kind of tastes like chili, you know? Just kind of tastes like a basic spiced chili. I don't like it as much as the shrimp po'boy, but, like, as far as burger goes, from, you know, from a lunch cafe like this, it's great, you know? It's like a diner burger, but it's on po'boy bread, which I think adds to the conversation. But even an eight. Like, I really enjoy it. I'd house this whole thing. But if I had a choice, I'd pick the shrimp. It's still very good, though. All right, folks, next up is Coop's Place, a New Orleans institution since 1983. They make it taste homemade every time. At least, that's what the website says. This is actually one of my favorite places to get red beans and rice, because it's pretty much a dive bar and a restaurant. So, let's go eat there. Here we are. This is the Jambalaya Supreme. We got shrimp, shredded rabbit, pork sausage, and it looks like they put some crawfish in there. Let's get a little bit of everything. Even though they're making these in huge batches and it's hanging out for a little bit, the shrimp is perfectly cooked. Like, it's not slippery or rubbery. Coop's Place is also cool because it's not often you go in a bar that divey and get shrimp. Get a bunch of seafood. But the only problem I have with this is that the rice is, like, crazy overcooked because it's probably been hanging out for a long time. But I wouldn't care. I'm gonna nine. Beautiful. Next up, red beans and rice. We got some fried chicken in there. That's unexpected. One of my favorites is super simple, beautiful food stuff. It's so perfect. It's like three things. It's just so f***ing perfect. The chicken is really soggy on the bottom from all the gravy, but that's good. It's soaking up the gravy. God, that's good. I mean, this is the highest compliment because I feel like this is what you want to eat. You want the best Cajun food to be? It's dirty. No, no, it's 10. It's perfect. Perfect. Way to go, Coop's. Next up, leaves is by the track, or so we thought. I'm not gonna lie. That one's closed. It do. And it was. We'd have to pivot and pivot fast. Thankfully, in the muggy heat of the moment, I had a wonderfully terrible idea. You know what we could do? What? I say we go get sh**-hams. Okay. Where one door closes, another one swings wide open. And we stumbled through it onto the infamous, booziest boulevard in the country with the name to match, Bourbon Street. Our first stop is Tropical Isle, the bar credited with inventing a New Orleans staple, the hand grenade. We got hand grenades, okay? I don't even know what's in them, if I'm being honest. There's a lot of stuff. Hands. Grenades. Tastes like you melted down some strawberry and watermelon chapstick and mixed it with grain alcohol. This is a hangover, and it's so sweet. It's a hangover in a hand grenade. These are smaller than I remember them to be. I thought these were like three feet tall. I don't like it very much at all. I'm gonna drink the entire thing. Five. With a hand grenade thrown down the hatch, it was time to order the drink it was invented to compete with, the Hurricane. This concoction came to be during World War II to take advantage of a rum surplus when other liquors like bourbon were in short supply. And now you can find frozen versions of the drink in all different flavors scattered about the French Quarter. But I went with the original, passion first. Tastes like cherry. It only tastes like cherry to me. Pretty good, though. Especially on a, you know, soupy hot night like tonight. This is what, you know, they have all the, I don't know what they call those slushie machines where they're just constantly going. You get these tiny, tiny, tiny little ice particles. You get these incredibly creamy kind of drinks as a result. And, you know, I gotta have that Babish fam. You know Hurricane? You know Hurricane? I gotta have that Babish fam. But keep it 100 right now. Does that Hurricane blow? How do you know that Hurricane blows me off my seat, out my box? I'm God. I'm God. I'm God. I'm God. This Hurricane's got me feeling a little windy, a little breezy. It's tearing down my infrastructure and destroying millions of lives. Destroying millions of lives. You know I gotta destroy millions of lives, Babish fam. I'm gonna give this a two. I, no, no, no, it's so refreshing. I'm gonna give it a four. I don't like how it tastes, so that's a four. See, I can still do this. I can still do this. You know, if I couldn't do this, I'd be running into things. Bourbon Street has an incredible way of making the most depraved behavior feel almost quaint. One minute you're on the street crushing an 800-calorie alcoholic slushie, the next you're performing for strangers to earn plastic jewelry. I flashed my tits. But now, after, let's call it, burying my soul, it was time for something a little more refined. So we headed to Jean Lafitte's old absinthe house to enjoy some absinthe the old way, in a house. The process starts by pouring the bright green, high-proof herbal spirit into a glass over a sugar cube resting on a slotted spade. Then they light the sugar cube on fire. Once it's caramelized, they gently drizzle in cold water, melting the sugar into the cocktail and causing it to turn cloudy and slightly sweet. It's delightfully dramatic and tastes like an apothecary-grade black licorice. I love absinthe. Uh, I am not a huge licorice guy, but it just works for me. Especially once you add the ice water and it turns cloudy. It's a mixture of sweet and almost like a Szechuan peppercorn kind of tingly numbness. And I just love it. So I'm a huge absinthe freak. So every time I come to New Orleans, every single time, I come here. And I've been to New Orleans probably a dozen plus times now. So, cheers. We're still out here, baby. Cheers. I feel like we've been through something. I love you, dude. So look, absinthe. Look, I'm completely sober, all right? I can, you know, I can pretend to be completely sober. You want to see? You want to see how I do it? You want to see how I do it? You want to see how I do it? So you give it a 10, right? Yes, I'm giving it a 10 because absinthe. I bet that sounds crazy. Next up in our New Orleans drinks review is a very popular cocktail of saline solution, vitamin B, vitamin C, Zofran, mild anti-inflammatories, antioxidants, and hope. It's been about five minutes and I taste vitamins. I think it worked. I think it worked, dude. I feel perkier. I don't know. That might be one of my favorite cocktails. So the base price for Housecall IV therapy, which one might call luxury, it's like $250 a person. And then each add-on, you get two free add-ons and we did three. So that's one add-on. I think it was $50. So looking about $275 each, just shy of $600 all told. So taking that cost into consideration and the fact that my mouth tastes like vitamins, I'm going to give it an 8 because it was a very positive experience. But holy God was it expensive. We didn't spend that much at the casino, at all the bars, and at all the restaurants last night combined. Now that we felt like a million bucks or just shy of $600 to be precise, it was time to start the day. This time with no closed locations, calling ahead to make sure that our desired stops were open, and definitely no drinking. Well folks, in a cruel twist of fate, after calling ahead to make sure they were going to be open on Memorial Day and checking the hours on Google, they're closed because they're without power, which not something you want at an oyster place. But not all hope is lost. Our Uber driver told us there's an amazing oyster bar right down the street. So we're going to follow our intuition and the advice from locals and see if we can get something tasty inside of our mouths. Superior Seafood, right around the corner. Wasn't hard to find. It looks like exactly the kind of place where I want to get some oysters right now. I'd say this is where you get oysters based off the sign alone. It's very clear. I appreciate that. It's very pro-consumer. Looks like we walked into a real mainstay of New Orleans oysters. This place was open in the late 90s. And since then, it's just become one of the most favorite places to sit down and have an oyster in a kind of like old-world brasserie environment. You got the tin, the ceilings. You got the bare bulbs. You got the Art Deco decor. Really cool. And we only found it because we listened to somebody who lives here who was like, you got to try this. And that, if you ask me, is the only way to travel. Two Blancs, two Blancs. Blancs, two Blancs. Would you like a bottle or just two glasses? Just two glasses. Thank you. Well, I said no drinking today. And as quickly as I said that, it went out the window. You do cats? What was that? Can you do cats? Oh, God. All right, I'll try. In my mouth? Oh, this is a huge mistake, man. Here we go. This is how I'm going to die. My clothes! Let's stop wasting life forms. It's fine. Nobody even noticed. It just looks like I got in a fight with an oyster. Thank you. Thank you, sir. All right. This is my first oyster on a cracker. I think my whole world's about to change. I've only ever been able to handle oysters about this big because I don't like having to swallow it more than once. You know what I mean? But on a cracker, that's awesome. That's a great oyster. And seriously, that unlocks so much for me. And so it's a whole new world. I'm excited to eat these now. It's going to be like, okay, but I can have the rest of these because I'm... But they're killer. So we're putting the oyster on a lance saltine. We're topping it up with cocktail sauce, horseradish, and a little squeeze of lemon juice. Just to make it taste less like an oyster. Super clean tasting. Not a hint of grit in there. Really sweet. They're very neutral, but they taste like the ocean. They're exactly what an oyster is supposed to be, or so I have read in the encyclopedia. And then to wash it down with a nice dry glass of champagne. I mean, there's few things finer, you know? Best oyster experience my life, both texturally and flavor-ly. Ten. Ten's all the way down. All right, folks. Next up, we're going to the epicenter of the original muffuletta, central grocery. One of my favorite things in the world is a muffuletta. Oh, man, these look way better than last time. Whoa. I'm going to be honest. This looks and feels different. I don't know if they changed the bread recipe or something. It feels lighter, almost more like focaccia. I remember it feeling like stiff and almost stale in the past. Every time I've come here and I'm with somebody new and they need to try a muffuletta, I'm like, all right, we got it over there, you know? And it's never that good. This is way better. They improved the bread like crazy. It's seriously focaccia-like now. I wouldn't give them the original a six, a seven on a good day. I was going to give this an eight. This is a market improvement. This is something worth seeking out now, not just because it's a tourist trap. All right, so next up is Klessy's. This is a family-owned business that started as a street seafood boil. They opened a permanent location in 2018. Since then, it's become a favorite place to get crawfish. I love crawfish. This makes perfect sense. I think we should go in. Thank you so much. Beautiful. Cameraman Brad, creative director Brad, is going to show us how to properly eat a crawfish. Okay, so I learned this from my good friend John Ollier taught me this, who is from Louisiana. Full twist, but then you take this before you bite it and you peel back one of these top layers to get that off. And you grab the meat and you push down right here at the back and work the meat out. And, well, it's supposed to, if you do it the right way, it de-veins it for you, too, when you pull it out, when you put your thumb there. But I did not de-vein. I didn't realize you're supposed to de-vein these. I've only ever just eaten. And now I need to see how you eat the head. I need you to slurp with some head for me. I'm going to do it. It's too corporeal for me. Okay. So twist and pull. There we go. Oh, look at that tamale. All right, so now you pinch down here at the bottom. We'll get there. Come on. Oh, almost, almost. Yep. Just got to yank that. And that, kids, is where etouffee comes from. We'll be right back. Mm, that was really good. Very bay forward. And then the next thing you got to do, slurp some brains with tamale. That is fantastic. It's definitely the best crawfish I've ever had. They're huge and they're delicious, like really, really good. The meat is soft and sweet, really heavy with the bay. Nice and spicy, too. Great flavor profile. Really competently cooked. No surprises across the board. And, of course, we got some gulf shrimp. This I'm going to try. And some of their, they got, I don't know what's going on here. This is definitely drawn butter or crawfish butter or something. So sweet. That's dessert. God, that's good. I mean, like, I've had good crawfish boils, but this takes the crawfish kick. I struggle to find anything wrong with it. That's a 10. 11. So sweet. And that sweetness got me thinking about another place no trip to New Orleans would be complete without. Cafe Du Long, the most famous spot for beignets and chicory coffee. Can we get an order of beignets and a chicory coffee, please? Thank you very much. Yes, please. Thank you so much. Have a good one. You, too. We're going to do a walk and eat on this one. So let's see how these guys are. Can't get powdered sugar on a white shirt. You can't do it. Oh, man. This is good at fresh, hot batch and fluffy. You can see the inside. It's thick and dense. You can see that it's, like, really, you know, open and airy, but it's also dense and chewy and in just the right way. And then, of course, they just mound it up with powdered sugar. No better way to start the day. Or in our case, end the day. I feel like New Orleans has the highest ratio of tourist traps that are good. Like, the tourist traps in New York, I wouldn't go to if you had a gun up my butt. But, like, a bunch of the tourist traps in New Orleans are worth going to. Cafe Du Monde's one of them. But the look of it, the history of it, the aesthetic of it, and the fact that it's a damn good beignet. I'm going to give the beignet 9 out of 10. It's fantastic. Now the chicory coffee. I always drink my coffee black because I'm really cool. So I usually order my chicory coffee black, and she put cream in it, and it's really way better than usual. Chicory coffee is a pretty intense flavor, edging and unbitter. And throwing some cream in there, it's just, ooh, that's nice. No sugar, though. Oh, I like that. I'm going to give it a 7. It's just good. And it goes real damn nice with a fried donut at night. And as much as I wanted to let the delicious French Creole donuts carry me into a sugar coma, I couldn't do that. Not yet. Because it was time for our grand finale. Alright, it's golden hour. I'm wearing the only collared shirt that I packed, so we must be going somewhere nice. And it's about as nice a place as you can go to in New Orleans. This is where Emeril Lagasse and Paul Perdome got their start. It is one of the oldest restaurants in town, and it's every bit as delicious and exquisite and luxuriant as it was when it was opened in 1893. We are going to the one and only Commander's Palace. We use the word iconic a lot, but very seldomly is it so literal. I mean, you see it from a mile away. Alright, there we go. A trip to Commander's Palace is as much a part of New Orleans as the humidity. As we are escorted to our table, we took in the chandeliers, white tablecloths, and a smattering of balloons they put on display for birthday celebrations. We kick things off with a Sazerac, New Orleans' official cocktail, and basically an old-fashioned that lured in Cajun French. Sazerac. Cheers, man. Sazerac gets a 10. I love a Sazerac. It combines everything I love about an old-fashioned with a little bit of absent character, because they wash the glass with absent. It's one of my very favorite cocktails, and to have one here in New Orleans in the perfect context, it's just 10s. Next, an Amuse-Bouche, consisting of a single Hokkaido scallop cured in local field peppers for an hour before landing on our plates. Wow, that's the best scallop I've ever had in my life, and it's just a tiny little slice of it that I want more of. It's been cured, but it's not super firm. It almost tasted like scallop nigiri, in that it tasted raw and soft and oceanic, but it was cured just enough that it had a nice firmness to it so that your teeth cut through it rather than, you know, kind of chew on it. Wow. 10. With our palate sufficiently amused, our waiter, David, arrived with their extensive menu. He walked us through every section, pointing out the standouts and house signatures, and we said yes to everything. And we're starting with a classic of theirs whose recipe has been unchanged for more than 60 years, turtle soup au sherry. So you guys poured a little bit of sherry on top. A touch of Amontillado sherry to finish it off. Very cool. Yeah, it is cooked with the sherry, but the little hit of it right before you get it kind of relivens all those flavors. Very exciting. Thank you, David. Oh, God. Probably made with a chocolate brown roux, stewed and simmered very slowly, very gently for very long periods of time. There's definitely trinity in there. The most classic New Orleans flavors are present and accounted for. And then that sherry, like he said, it just wakes everything up. It just brings this freshness to it. Christ, it's good. And the turtle, it's like the most tender dark meat chicken I've ever tasted, basically. It's not like my favorite thing I've eaten tonight, but it's up there. I'll give it a nine. It's lovely. And as if we weren't already appetized enough, we moved on to proper appetizers. We have our shrimp and tasso henneken. This is wild white shrimp. These are flash-fried. They've been stuffed with house-made tasso, and they are tossed in a crystal hot sauce for blanc. That's over a five pepper jelly with pickled okra and sweet onion. Oh, no. It's so good. Oh, no. Like, God, the tasso ham is the hammiest ham that ever hammed on Ham Street in Ham Town. It's so hammy. It's shrimp and ham dancing, just like in nature. The shrimp is perfectly cooked. It's got a little crisp on the outside from the flash-frying. And this pepper, that's where the hot sauce flavor's coming from. Oh, and it's hot. Oh, on its own? Huh. Forget about it. Whoa. Oh, yeah, it's hot. S***. Okay. Those are some nice pickled red onions. We have some okra here. Let's see what that's all about. I'm not supposed to be eating this with my fingers. Wonderful. Really exquisite layers of flavors from briny to spicy to rich to fresh to hammy and smoky and light and dark. Happiness and sadness. Coins. Two sides of them. It's exquisite. I'll give it a 10. I love it. There's no part of this dish that I don't want to eat with my fingers like I just did and am not supposed to do. And then our Cervic David's favorite starter and a dish that happens to be 100% vegan and gluten-free. This is our hickory smoked cauliflower. It's been brined in the style of a tasso ham. Then we have cold smoked it and charred it. Wow. That's served over Louisiana-fueled pea hummus with green tomato chow chow, chimichurri, roasted oyster mushrooms. I don't know if they're getting the return on their investment. Like they said that they cure the cauliflower the same way that they do ham tasso. It just tastes like roasted cauliflower to me. Very, very well competently smoked and roasted cauliflower. It's not blowing my face off like some of the other stuff has up to this point. So I'm going to give it an 8. Like it's a great side dish. I would highly recommend it. The fact that we're sitting here now eating one of the finest meals in New Orleans, considering how we roared this morning, speaks to the efficacy of that fourth cocktail that we tried out. The IV one. But it was time to swap cocktails for wine to enjoy with our mains. So I wanted to get like a dusty old bottle, something that felt atmospherically correct. But we got pork and fish coming, so I can't really go red, can I? You could. David knows it all. He knows how to pair red wine from Loire Valley with fish and pork. That is basically like rubbing your belly and patting your head while coming out to your family. Wait, I can do that. Hold on. Yeah, see, motherf**kers? I'm gay. So here we have our pecan-crusted gullfish, one of the oldest, definitely classic preparations and a signature dish here at Commander's Palace. That is a sauté of roasted corn, melted leeks, charred kale and shaved asparagus. Now you have a dish that we just put on for summer and I'm very excited about. So here you have our Tasso brine, 48-hour brine pork chop, dusted with a house-made barbecue spice. So we get nice char on that, cook it to your temperature. This is a mid-rare this evening for you. We add to that whiskey as well as apple cider vinegar for a nice pop. You guys are doing so much. Do you take care of yourselves? Do you make time for you? When we're not here, we're not here. Thank you so much. It looks unbelievable. Much as I might. Cheers. This should be cooked to a stately medium-rare. Oh, beautiful. Beautifully cooked. I want to try the pork on its own first just to see what kind of sh** I've gotten myself into. It's cockfight. Oh, I die, Horatio, is a line from King Lear. Anyway, I'm dead. That's what I'm trying to say about this fam. I'm dead. I'm dead. So the pork is stupendous. I really want to try this bacon, fat, confit, sweet potato. Beautiful. I think it was J. Kenji Lopez-Alt that, like, he popularized sous-viding sweet potatoes because when cooked at low temperatures, there's some kind of f***ing enzyme that's activated and it makes them more naturally sweet without adding any sugar. I doubt they've added any sugar to the sweet potato, but it tastes decidedly sweet because they've cooked it gently by confit-ing it. So it's dum-dum good, Babish fam. Wonderful. It's a wonderful pairing. This is a wonderful dish. I'm going to give it a nine. It's exquisite. This is one of their oldest and most signature dishes. They're saying it's made the same way as they did since the 1960s. Prosecco-poached jumbo-lump crab over spiced New Roads pecan-crusted fish with roasted corn, asparagus-grilled kale, melted leeks, and whiskey-spiked crushed corn cream. In other words, f*** you. Very salty. Interesting. Very, very salty. Okay, but the melted leeks and the corn and all this other stuff going on down here is very sweet. Perfectly cooked fish. Like, you can tell just from looking at it. Enough of trying things one at a time. That's not how you eat in New Orleans. You eat the food that's in front of you on the plate. You're going to stop analyzing it like it's your childhood issues. Look, Babish fam, on God, that's straight fire. Let this man cook. Say less. Oh, how does it pair with the wine? That's an interesting question I just asked myself. It's funky, but it's light and fruity. In none of the heavily tannic or abrasive ways that red wine just doesn't work with fish. It works so fabulously. Thanks, David. He's right behind you. Can you hear what I'm saying? David! No, he can't hear me. It's a fabulously cooked piece of fish. The crust is really nicely salty and crunchy. And then it's got this perfectly sweet, umami-forward kind of corn slob stuff going on below. It's a 10. There's a reason that this has been on the menu for the longest amount of time. This is a classic, and it will continue to be, hopefully, for the foreseeable future. This wine paired beautifully with this meal. I'm going to give it a pairing of 10 and his attention to detail and knowledge of 10. But as a wine itself, I like funky old wines. This airs a little too funky for me. It's fantastic. It's not my personal favorite, but it's still so good. And I'm going to give it an 8. Oh my goodness. This is what we call the queen of Creole desserts. This is our bread pudding souffle finished with a warm whiskey cream table side. The very end of the season now, you're lucky to enjoy the ponchatoula strawberry shortcake. This is absolutely one of our iconic dishes. This is a warm, fluffy biscuit. This is topped with macerated ponchatoula strawberries. And the biggest thing on this is this wonderful balance of how you have very crispy top biscuit and then the nice and macerated, soaked bottom biscuit. And this is from our tasting menu. I really wanted to share this with you guys. So this is a liqueur 43 butter cake that we have topped with a vanilla Bavarian cream. This is, again, with ponchatoula strawberries as well as a chambord syrup. And it's finished with pretzel brittle. I love souffle. It's super gooey and eggy. See how it's jiggling, like it's bouncing? Oh, soft and bouncy, bready. There's also crunchy and chewy flavors from the parts that are caramelized on the outside of the ramekin. Look at this. When you go down in here deep, you'll see you get this bready, almost cake-like part of the souffle. Then up on top of that, you have the light, fluffy, eggy part of the souffle. An intoxicating dichotomy of flavors and textures happening in this spoonful. It's as simple as it is complex. And yes, that sounds like bullsh** because it is. That's the way everything is. This isn't bullsh**. That's a 10. Alright, so this is the special. It's a butter cake with pretzel honeycomb and some other stuff that I didn't absorb because I'm not smart or observant. I don't know what textures to expect right now. They both cut like they were barely there. Everything cut like this whole thing was made of whipped cream. We have the cake base, which is so soaked with some kind of vanilla syrup or something that it almost comes off like a custard. It's soaked to its socks. It's cake. It is cake that they have soaked within an inch of its life and compressed so that it becomes this almost like fudgy, sweet, syrupy, custardy kind of thing. And all of it just tastes like butter and vanilla. That's it. Just butter and vanilla. It's delightful. It is not my personal cup of tea. I'm going to give it an 8. If you like butter and vanilla, you're going to give this a 10. Last up, the thing I am undoubtedly most excited about. Strawberry shortcake is one of my favorite things. It's kind of like pizza in that if you buy the pre-made shortcakes and just put some f***ing drissible strawberries on there and spray some whipped cream on top, it's still a 7 out of 10. And what we have here is one of those dishes that you cannot make very bad. You could make it the worst I've ever had and I'm still going to eat all of it. Grab a good piece of shortbread, good strawberry, good bit of cream. There she is, folks, the big free. Ugh. I'm f***ing with you. It's amazing. 10. No question. No jokes. No commentary. And I'm not going to talk for the rest of the night. 10. New Orleans is, without a doubt, my favorite city in the world. I spent my first summer there after Hurricane Katrina, gutting houses, making a documentary, and slowly falling in love with all the little pieces that we helped put back together. In fact, my first ever tattoo commemorated that experience. Now I can't go more than a year without feeling the warm hug of its thick summer air, heavy with Arabian jasmine and tinged with the bittersweet warble of a beat-up saxophone. We hit the most well-known spots on this trip, but no matter what jagged cobblestone street you wander down, you're bound to find a memory worth making. Packed in ice, swimming in liqueur, sizzling with spice, or boiling in oil. It's one of the few cities to live up to its moniker, the Big Easy, a sultry, lush arboretum that slows you to a crawl with icy cocktails, lavish luncheons, and sticky swelters. My only advice for visiting New Orleans is, if you've never been there, go. And if you've been there before, go back. I'll see you there. And bring beads, because I'm gonna earn them the old-fashioned way.