A Week in New Orleans: My Honest Review as a Tourist Over 60

Josef and I spent seven nights in New Orleans, and I have been trying to write about it for two weeks because I cannot get the summary down to one sentence. Most cities I can. This one refuses.

So let me say the honest thing first and then defend it. New Orleans is the most interesting American city I have visited, and parts of it are genuinely unpleasant, and I would go back next year. All three of those are true at the same time and anyone who tells you only one of them is selling you something.

The food, which is the reason to go

I have eaten well in Rome, in Lyon, in San Sebastián. New Orleans belongs in that conversation and I did not expect to write that sentence.

We ate gumbo four times in seven days and no two were the same. Dark roux, light roux, one with okra that Josef declared his favorite and one at a small place off Magazine Street that I am still thinking about. The barbecue shrimp at Mr. B's is not barbecue and is not what you expect and required an embarrassing amount of bread. Cochon gave us a Sunday lunch that put both of us to sleep in the afternoon.

A few strong opinions, since you are here for them:

• Café du Monde is worth doing once, at seven in the morning, and never at any other hour. The queue at eleven is thirty minutes for beignets that are not thirty minutes better than the ones you will find elsewhere.
• The best meal we had cost twenty two dollars and came on a paper plate. The most expensive meal we had was fine. Draw your own conclusions.
• Do not eat on Bourbon Street. I will come back to Bourbon Street, but do not eat there.
• Get out of the French Quarter for at least half your dinners. The Bywater, the Marigny, and uptown along Magazine Street is where we ate best.

Clean or dirty, since everyone asks

I am going to be direct, because I dislike travel writing that goes soft here. The French Quarter is dirty. Not charmingly weathered. Dirty. On a warm morning parts of Bourbon Street smell exactly as bad as you have heard, and the smell has a specific character I will not describe over breakfast. Rubbish sits out. Some of the pavements are broken in ways that are a genuine hazard for anyone with an unsteady step, and I say that as someone who is fine on her feet and still turned an ankle on Royal Street.

But the moment you walk fifteen minutes in almost any direction, that changes completely. The Garden District is one of the loveliest residential neighborhoods in the country. The oaks on St. Charles, the ironwork, the houses, all of it is beautiful and well kept. Uptown is calm and green. The Bywater is scruffy in a way I liked.

So the fair answer is that eight blocks of the city are grubby and heavily trafficked by tourists, and those eight blocks are the ones that end up in everybody's photographs. Do not judge the city by them.

Getting around and the traffic

We did not rent a car and I would make that decision again. Parking is expensive, the one-way streets are maddening, and the road surface in places is worse than anywhere I have driven in Europe. There are potholes in that city with their own weather.

We walked, took the St. Charles streetcar, and used ride shares in the evening. The streetcar is slow and lovely and I recommend it as an activity rather than as transport. Ride shares were plentiful and cheap except at the moment every bar empties, when the surge pricing arrives and you either wait twenty minutes or pay for your impatience.

The airport transfer is longer than you think. Give yourself extra time in both directions.

Where we stayed, and what I would do differently

We booked a hotel on the quieter end of the French Quarter, near Esplanade, and it was the correct compromise. Walkable to everything, far enough from the noise that we slept. Old building, small lift, uneven floors, excellent courtyard. I liked it.

What I would do differently is split the week. Three nights in the Quarter for the atmosphere and the walking, then four nights in the Garden District or uptown for the quiet and the better restaurants. By day four in the Quarter I had had enough of hearing a live band through the window at one in the morning.

One firm warning: check exactly which block you are booking. Two streets makes an enormous difference to how much sleep you get. Read the reviews written by people over fifty, not the ones written by a bachelorette party.

The karaoke bar, which I did not plan

We did not go to the clubs. We are sixty two and sixty four and we are well past standing in a queue behind a velvet rope, and I have no regrets about that whatsoever.

What we did instead, on our fifth night, was wander into a live band karaoke bar on Frenchmen Street because we heard something through an open door. A real band on stage, and ordinary people getting up to sing with them. Not a machine and a screen. A drummer, a bass player, a keyboard, and a very patient guitarist who had clearly done this a thousand times.

We stayed three hours. Josef, who has never sung in public in forty two years of marriage and who once declined to sing at his own brother's wedding, got up and did Johnny Cash. Badly. The room loved him for it. A young woman at the next table hugged him when he came back down and told him he was adorable, and he was insufferable for the remainder of the trip.

I did not sing. I was asked twice. I stand by my decision and I would like it noted that I clapped very loudly.

That evening is the reason this post exists. Nobody cared how old we were. Nobody looked at us as though we had wandered into the wrong room. It was one of the best nights we have had on any trip, anywhere, and it cost us the price of three drinks.

What is worth your time

• The National WWII Museum. Genuinely world class. We gave it four hours and could have used six. If you visit one thing in the city, visit this.
• Frenchmen Street in the evening. Live music, locals, and a fraction of the nonsense of Bourbon Street. This is where the music actually is.
• A walk through the Garden District and Lafayette Cemetery. Do it in the morning before the heat.
• The streetcar up St. Charles and back. An hour, cheap, and lovely.
• A swamp tour. I expected a tourist trap and it was not. We saw alligators, and our guide was an actual local who talked about coastal erosion in a way that stayed with me.

What I would skip

Bourbon Street after dark, unless you want to see it once for the anthropology. It is loud, sticky, and largely populated by people having a worse evening than they intended. We walked it for twenty minutes and left.

The ghost tours. We did one. It was a young man reciting nonsense with great enthusiasm to a group of thirty people blocking a pavement. Two of the stories were about buildings I later learned were built after the events described. I have no patience for that.

And I would skip late June through August entirely. We went in early March and the weather was perfect. Friends who went in summer described it as walking through soup.

The verdict

Yes, go. Emphatically. But go with your eyes open and with a plan that is not the one the postcards suggest. Give the Quarter two or three days, then get out of it. Eat where the tables are plain. Spend your evenings on Frenchmen Street rather than Bourbon Street. Walk uptown in the morning.

New Orleans is not a comfortable, tidy city and it is not trying to be. It is a place with real character, which always comes with real edges, and I would rather that than another polished downtown that could be anywhere. Of every American city we have visited, it is the only one I would describe as having a soul.

If you would like a comparison, I wrote about our favorite European destination for couples and about the Caribbean island we keep returning to. New Orleans is not like either of them, and that is exactly the point.

Our favorite place in Europe for a coupleOur favorite Caribbean island