Quick quotes of the day: There’s flame coming out, it’s breathing and wheezing and whining, you realize the vehicle’s alive. It’s just hanging out there full of 3 1/2 million gallons of rocket fuel, ready to take flight. —STS-135 commander Chris Ferguson on arriving at the pad on launch morning. It starts out as...
While browsing Sunday’s Cocktail Bazaar at the Monteleone, Ann Tuennerman pointed out the table where the folks from the John E. Koerner Co. were displaying their goods. Koerner has been around over 100 years, with the third and fourth generations of the Koerner family now operating the business that was started in 1906. Ann...
Last word on bitters. I promise. I had talked in my previous posts on Tales of the Cocktail 2011 about Bitter Truth’s Creole Bitters, that they were touted as a modern (or retro-engineered, I’m not sure which) version of Peychaud’s Bitters, the long-standing New Orleans product without which the Sazerac cocktail cannot be made....
Note: I’m covering day one in another post. It’s just the way it worked out. It was over way to quickly. One thing I noticed the first time I went to see the ponies at the Fairgrounds was, when I turned the corner coming into the grandstand and saw the pack running on the...
As I excitedly posted earlier, I was selected (at random, it turns out) to attend the NASA Tweetup for the launch of space shuttle mission STS-135. It’s historic, the mission for the shuttle Atlantis is the last flight of the space shuttle. Launch is set for Friday, July 8 at about 11:30 a.m. Eastern...
I’m not a engineer, or scientist of any sort and certainly not a proverbial “rocket scientist,” which worked out fine, as most of the things I’ve accomplished in life fall into the category of “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.” Nonetheless, I’ve been selected to attend a NASA Tweetup and...
I’ve written a couple of posts through the years about absinthe, that old French spirit that remains shrouded in mystery and misinformation despite it being on the open market in the U.S. since 2007, after being legally unavailable here since 1916. (For a pretty thorough telling of how absinthe came to be banned and...
As post-Carnival depression sets in I like to go over all the pictures (blurry from cell phone) from the season and try to recapture some of the spirit. On Friday, as always, Hermes and Le Krewe D’etat rolled Uptown. The weather was sketchy but the showers held off most of the evening. We caught...
This past weekend (27 degrees at dawn) I was invited to ride along with some commercial crabbers. Freezing hijinks ensued.
I was lucky enough to be invited to preview Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835, the latest book from the Historic New Orleans Collection. It’s been in the works for over 30 years now, as furniture collectors (and scholars) Jack Holden and Pat Bacot, along with photographer Jim Zeitz, began documenting just about...
Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James were some of the most influential musicians the world has ever seen. Along with many other bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta country, their music formed the foundation for what became rock ‘n roll, the American music that took over the...
I was invited to spend Labor Day weekend with NOLAnotes and BSIComics at a friend’s camp in Intracoastal City, La. It’s pretty much directly south of Lafayette near ((but not on) the Gulf. The nearest towns are Abbeville, Erath and Delcambre, all pretty much Cajun fishing communities that have served to support the offshore...
So NOLAnotes issued a NOLA book challenge. Here are my favorites, an incomplete list limited to my top 5 non-fiction books, in no particular order. Old New Orleans by Stanley Clisby Arthur. A walking tour of the French Quarter written by the man who also wrote Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Make...
I try to go to the cemetery (St. Louis No. 1) every year on All Saints day. Save Our Cemeteries is there every year, too, with a list and the map from the Dead Space project to help families locate tombs. They’ve been doing a good job over the years working with various groups...
While I’m still working on some more detailed posts on things I learned at Tales of the Cocktail this year, I want to hand out some kudos to everyone involved. Ann and Paul Tuennerman, along with the Cocktail Angels Melissa Young, Christina Gaspari and Michelle Dunnick and the rest of Ann’s staff did a...
The Hotel Montleone, one of New Orleans’ historic hotels, and home to Tales of the Cocktail, is celebrating the 60th anniversary of its Carousel Bar. The Royal Street landmark is famous for its literary connections. Literary greats have haunted its halls for decades. Tennessee Williams was a frequent guest, Truman Capote often quipped that...
Tom Fitzmorris opined, back in 1977, that there were three restaurants he couldn’t live without: Antoine’s, Maylie’s and the Bud’s Broiler on City Park Avenue. Tom would have say whether all of that still stands today, since although Antoine’s is going strong, Maylie’s has been closed for years now (the also-defunct Smith & Wollensky...
New Orleans and cocktails, two things nearest and dearest to my heart. Each year Tales of the Cocktail presents all the best of these two things; cocktails, cocktail history, New Orleans’ cocktail history, and, for the finale, your chance to participate in New Orleans cocktail history in the making. I’ll have more details for...
I let loose my New Year’s resolution a couple of weeks ago: To eat better in 2009. Better steaks, better shrimp, better meals all around. One wag, Yat Pundit, echoed the theme with “less Subway, more Parkway!” Yeah, you rite! That reminded me of a glaring omission in my life. I’ve yet to have...
I’ll let the press release from Ann Tuennerman explain all the good news: TALES OF THE COCKTAIL OPENING RECEPTION TO BE HELD AT THE NEWLY RESTORED ROOSEVELT HOTEL TOAST OF THE EVENING TO OCCUR AT THE ORIGINAL SAZERAC BAR NEW ORLEANS, LA—December 1, 2008 – Tales of the Cocktail, a cocktail and culinary festival...