"NewOrleans" news and stories

A weekly look at the draft selections in beer-friendly bars across the country.

New Orleans is a city that is known for its parties and its drinking. But for a place that loves alcoholic beverages, craft beer has been conspicuously underrepresented in their landscape of libations.

Polly Watts, owner of New Orleans' The Avenue Pub, pointed to people's preference for other drinks. "Louisiana is a big liquor consumer," she explains. "Lots of vodka and rum." It makes sense: Bourbon Street is more than just a catchy name. And The Big Easy's penchant for fine dining plays a role as well. "We're a really big wine state too," she told us.

Not to say that beer didn't exist. It just wasn't always the drink of choice. And it was rarely ever craft. "For decades, the only beer you'd see was generic macrobrews," said Watts, before adding, "maybe an occasional Abita," referencing one of Louisiana's few well-known craft breweries.

Many people dream of living in a paradise of sand, sea, and sun, sipping cold cocktails. Our bar, Casa Cóctel, is in just such a paradise in Baja California Sur, Mexico, where we get about 360 days a year of sunshine. However, we are about to head into hurricane season so we're busy preparing the arsenal of emergency lights, big jugs of water, and the fixings for stormy-weather drinks.

It's hard to beat a classic Dark and Stormy, a highball in the "mule" family of drinks. A mule (also known as a buck) is a highball made with spirit, ginger beer or ale, and citrus, such as the Moscow Mule made famous by Smirnoff vodka. Often described as the national drink of Bermuda, the Dark and Stormy is a mule with a registered trademark by Gosling's rum. We love the Dark and Stormy made simply with 1.5 ounces of Gosling's Black Seal Rum over ice and topped with ginger beer and a squeeze of lime.

One of New Orleans' famous restaurants turned traumatic storms into one of the city's most well known cocktails, the Hurricane. Pat O'Brien survived as a speakeasy owner during Prohibition with his eponymous joint. During the Second World War, wholesalers forced bars to order many cases of rum in order to get other desired spirits that were in short supply. Pat O'Brien's served a crowd-pleasing cocktail with a hefty amount of rum in a glass shaped like a hurricane lamp, thus, the name. Sadly the original recipe seems to be lost. Pat O'Brien's now serves their drink made with a commercially bottled pre-mix. Their signature glasses are one of the most sought after souvenirs by visitors. (We hear that the glasses hold about $10 in pennies if you don't serve Hurricanes at home and are trying to figure out what to do with that souvenir.)

New Orleans is America's original foodie mecca. In the 1700s, there was already a 400 vendor farmers' market in the center of town (on the site of the current French Market). By the 1800s, cookbooks were being published here long before the rest of America, like the local newspaper's anthology recently reprinted as 'The Times-Picayune's Creole Cook-book'. "Our cuisine is 25% French, 25% Spanish and 50% African – the French and Spanish influenced the food, but it was the Africans who largely cooked it," explains Tom Fitzmorris, author of "Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans", "It's a creole cuisine in every sense of the word." (Creole is derived from the Spanish criollo or 'native')

Several different factors influenced the eclectic tastes of New Orleans. Firstly, it was a port city throbbing with newcomers from across the world. "People don't realize that in the 18th and 19th centuries, we had more immigrants coming through our port than they did in New York," food guru Poppy Tooker explains. Those new arrivals couldn't scatter into self-defined ethnic enclaves as they did in Chicago or San Francisco either. "Look at our geography, wedged between [Lake] Pontchartrain and the Mississippi river, there's not a lot of room to expand," notes Kelly Hamilton, who leads food tours around the city. Settlers clubbed together to cook and so produced hybrids of the foods they'd eaten back home.

Read our "only in New Orleans" list after the jump...

• Readers helped track down recipes for lunch tongue and Sarah Bernhardt cake in 2009, but outstanding fugitive recipes include velvet crab soup, lobster Roberto, wet spaghetti, mint roses and sweet potato pone.
• The Krewe of Argus has selected Rachael Ray as grand marshal of its Mardi Gras parade.
• The city's Mirliton Man, who set up to save heritage varieties of Louisiana's beloved alligator pear, reports he has identified eight traditional varieties and distributed seeds across the Southeast.
• Chicken is the starring player in three Creole dishes perfectly suited for cold weather.

The state of Louisiana, which produces one-third of the nation's oysters, has mustered the first quasi-official response to new FDA guidelines banning the sale of unprocessed Gulf oysters from April through October.

The strict new rules, designed to combat the deadly Vibrio vulnificus bacteria that swarms in warm water, require Texas, Florida and Louisiana oyster processors to freeze, heat, radiate or pressurize their oysters. But oyster connoisseurs worry their favored bivalves won't be the only casualty of post-harvest processing; Insiders suspect the law will also kill the Gulf coast's oyster industry.