New Orleans Is Ready to Tell a Different Story

It is late morning, the sun already bright and hot, and I’ve just arrived at Tchoupitoulas Street, a mostly nondescript corridor of New Orleans. As I stand on the sidewalk, cars whiz past, and I look in front of me at an expansive mural. It is colorful and vibrant, rich and impressive in its scale. But it is still evolving, much like the city itself.

New Orleans-born artist and educator Jamar Pierre first conceived of the Tchoupitoulas Flood Wall Mural in 2018, after the NOLA Foundation selected him to create a painting for the city’s tricentennial. That painting, Resilience, inspired Pierre to embark on something more ambitious, and after years of red tape, he was able to begin working.

When completed, the mural will depict more than 300 years of New Orleans history, beginning with the Houma Indigenous peoples and including the Louisiana Purchase and the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. The Ursuline nuns, herbalist and voodoo practitioner Marie Laveau, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson are already featured in the completed portion of the mural. Currently, it is less than 25 percent done, covering 1,200 of its anticipated 4,994 linear feet. But when it’s finished, Pierre hopes it will become one of the city’s top sites.

Photo by Sinna Nasseri

“It’s a long process,” Pierre says as we walk the mural’s nearly mile-long stretch, past images of the trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong and the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition, past mermaids and alligators depicted emerging from cerulean waters. “If you want something monumental, if you want something historical, you can’t rush it. This is going to be our Eiffel Tower. This is going to be our Statue of Liberty.”

New Orleans architecture is distinctive: shotgun houses, 19th-century cottages, wrought-iron balconies. More than 200 of the city’s buildings and districts are on the National Register of Historic Places. But situated in the Mississippi River Delta, between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans is also especially vulnerable to climate change; more than half of its 350-square mile official city area is water.

Nearly two decades after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which hit in August 2005, New Orleanians speak about it as if it happened last month. One afternoon, an Uber driver points out residual flood damage on the side of his church. Another day, a bartender downtown still sounds heartbroken as she tells me how her mother relocated to Texas after Hurricane Katrina and never felt safe enough to return. That’s the thing about history: It’s not confined to the past.

Vue Orleans opened in March of 2022 inside one of the tallest buildings in the city. The second floor hosts an interactive museum and movie theater exploring New Orleans history and culture, and the main attraction is the indoor and outdoor observatory deck on the 33rd and 34th floors offering a 360-degree view of the skyline. From the lobby, I ride the elevator and step onto the terrace, 407 feet aboveground. This is my third visit to New Orleans, and as I look out at the sprawl of streets, homes, churches, and bridges damaged not long ago, I consider how the city always feels so full of joy and life to me. Only a place that has been knocked down, given up for lost, and rebuilt time and time again knows how to mark every day like it’s a gift.

Photos by Sinna Nasseri

After taking in New Orleans from great heights, I’m ready to return to Earth. I descend and walk up Gravier Street, arriving 20 minutes later at Chapter IV, opened in January 2023 by chef Edgar “Dook” Chase IV and his wife, Gretchen. It is the latest installment of the Chase family’s celebrated culinary history in New Orleans dining, which began nearly 80 years ago with Dook’s grandmother, the late Leah Chase. Known as “the Queen of Creole Cuisine,” Leah fed everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to the writer and activist James Baldwin. In 2008, she slapped Barack Obama’s hand before he could put hot sauce in her gumbo, as she wanted him to taste it without seasoning first. (“I had to reprimand him,” she later said.)

Informally trained by his grandmother and formally trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Chase tells me that, after watching his grandparents’ livelihood destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, he committed himself to restoring the family business and “continuing that legacy that build my family up.” Inside, Chapter IV is shiny and white, with blue benches, fresh flowers, and original artwork by emerging Black artists. The diners are a mix of families, older couples on dates, and businesspeople on breaks. Chase circles the room to say hello to nearly everyone, sometimes even sitting down at a table. “Growing up, [my grandparents] always taught us that true hospitality meant service to our community,” Chase says. With my first spoonful of gumbo—thick with shrimp, chicken, and coins of smoked and spicy sausage—I close my eyes in delight. For the next spoonful I surreptitiously shake a few drops of hot sauce into my bowl, with silent apologies to Leah Chase.

Photo by Sinna Nasseri

From Chapter IV, I head a mile north to the New Orleans African American Museum (NOAAM) in historic Tremé, considered the oldest Black neighborhood in the country. Founded in 1996, NOAAM suffered numerous financial hardships in its early days and extensive damage from Hurricane Katrina; it reopened in 2019. Located on a former plantation site and brickyard, the museum is housed in a 19th-century Creole cottage and includes African masks and beadwork as well as fine art and photography by local artists. It’s a small space that makes use of every available inch. “Our goal is to help bring to light individual stories of Black New Orleanians in order to humanize the Black experience,” says Gia M. Hamilton, a New Orleans native and anthropologist who has been NOAAM’s executive director and chief curator since it reopened.

The museum, which is located on a two-acre campus, highlights the artistic and cultural contributions of peoples in the African diaspora and educates visitors about the earliest history of New Orleans—what was referred to as Bulbancha, or “the land of many tongues,” by its Indigenous Choctaw inhabitants.

Photos by Sinna Nasseri

“We’ve designed our programming for the family that hasn’t felt comfortable coming to a museum,” Hamilton tells me as we sit beside bright, elaborately decorated Black Masking Indian women’s dresses and crown, on loan to the museum from artist Cherice Harrison-Nelson, cofounder of the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame. “We focus on education, on accessibility, and complicating the narratives that have traditionally been told by the tourist industry.”

That evening, I head to dinner at LUFU (Let Us Feed U), which chefs and founders Sarthak Samantray, Aman Kota, and Sachin Darade opened in July 2023 after building a pop-up. They moved to New Orleans from India after culinary school and saw an opportunity to educate diners on India’s culinary range and add to the city’s diverse food culture. It is one of more than 40 new restaurants to launch here in 2023.

The LUFU menu changes every six months. After finishing my Darjeeling old-fashioned (bourbon with tea and bitters), I order bhatura, an impressively puffy, fried bread popular in the northern Indian state of Punjab, and manso kosha, a Bengali dish of goat in a dark brown curry. Nearly done with the manso, I use the last bits of bhatura to mop up what’s left of the sauce, eager to make the experience last a little longer. The sun sets, and I walk two blocks to the Rubenstein Hotel to fall into bed.

In 2021, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience opened with a mission: to tell the 350-year history of Jews in the South. One morning, I arrive soon after the doors open and linger long in front of the exhibits, the only guest at this hour. Photographs, historical documents, and artifacts are arranged chronologically, beginning with the arrival of immigrants in the 18th century, to the role Jewish people played as abolitionists and slaveholders, all the way forward to their participation in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Modern Jewish communities across 13 Southern states are represented as well—and the museum’s decision to include contemporary voices is meaningful, executive director Kenneth Hoffman tells me.

“We’re not the museum of Southern Jewish history. We’re the museum of the Southern Jewish experience,” Hoffman says. “Because it’s continuing, and it continues to evolve. It’s not all about 19th-century peddlers. We’re a living museum.”

An interactive exhibit invites visitors to contribute to an expanding digital quilt by creating a square representing their identity. Inspired by the multicolored “crazy quilt” at the museum that was assembled in 1885 by the Ladies Sewing Circle of Temple B’nai Israel in Canton, Mississippi, this invitation connects visitors to their own individual and communal identities. But my eyes are drawn behind the front desk, where a wall displays a collection of mezuzot, the small containers that traditionally hold a parchment scroll written with a Hebrew blessing, affixed to doorposts in observant Jewish homes. These have been donated by Jewish supporters across the South, and as I admire them, an older couple stops to do so, too, remarking that one day they might have one to add.

Photos by Sinna Nasseri

“We’re expanding people’s understanding of what it means to be a Southerner, what it means to be a Jew,” Hoffman says. “Ultimately, what is means to be an American.”

What does it mean to be American? Days into my time in New Orleans—founded in 1718, one of the oldest cities in the country, older than the nation itself—I reflect on that question as I leave the museum. I review my first few experiences, eating Creole and Indian food and learning about the contributions of Black and Jewish diasporas. I think about how New Orleans is a unique and peculiar American city, so shaped by its geography. And I think of the way this geography has contributed in part to its tragedies, and that it’s this awareness of tragedies, both past and potential, that gives the city a feeling unlike anywhere else.

Collaboration and innovation are on display at Ayu Bakehouse on Frenchmen Street, across from Washington Square Park. Opened in 2022 by Samantha Weiss and Kelly Jacques, who met while attending New York’s International Culinary Center, Ayu (which rhymes with “bayou”) offers pastries made in small batches. Inside the light-filled space, muffuletta breadsticks share a shelf with kaya buns, made of a sweet coconut spread wrapped in laminated dough—the latter inspired by Jacque’s Indonesian grandmother. (Jacques and Weiss call the food at Ayu “Southeast Asia meets the South.”) I’m tempted to try one of everything, and nearly do, packing my bag with babka knots, breadsticks, and boudin boys: pockets of flaky croissant dough stuffed with crumbled Cajun sausage and soft-boiled egg. I take the riches back to my hotel, where I share the wealth with two very excited front desk clerks.

Photo by Sinna Nasseri

After breakfast, I wander through several of New Orleans’s distinct neighborhoods. I consider all the different people I’ve met over my four days here: Hoffman and Hamilton, Jacques and Weiss among them—locals and transplants alike who are finding new ways to contribute to the city. I’m struck by the almost implacable resolve of New Orleanians to build and rebuild. It is a shared sentiment: To appreciate the city’s beauty is to acknowledge everything that New Orleans and its residents have endured, DJ Johnson, founder and owner of Baldwin & Co. bookstore and coffee-shop, tells me later. “When you go through a difficult time, you really learn to appreciate things on a different level,” he says. “I think that’s part of our resilience and I think it’s helped manifest this culture, which is so beautifully genuine and compassionate.”

Opened in February 2021 to great excitement—Johnson remembers lines of people stretching down the street during its first week—Baldwin & Co., named after author and cultural critic James Baldwin, is focused on elevating the local community: not only the Marigny neighborhood where it’s located, but greater New Orleans. Offering books predominantly by BIPOC writers, Baldwin & Co. also promotes the arts through its foundation, which hosts author events, story times, and book drives.

“In creating this space, I was intentional,” says Johnson, who grew up in New Orleans. “I didn’t want it to just be a place of consumption. I wanted it to give back and enrich and cultivate the community.”

Photos by Sinna Nasseri

Later that day I make my way to Central City to see a business that is as much a part of the community’s future as of its past. First opened by civil rights advocate and businessman Frank Painia in 1939, the Dew Drop Inn few from a restaurant and barbershop into a hotel and nightclub—James Brown, Ray Charles, and Tina Turner all performed here. It also served as a welcoming space for the city’s Black LGBTQ community, and hosted the New Orleans Gay Ball in the 1950s and ‘60s, emceed by celebrated drag performer Patsy Vidalia.

Over time, the Dew Drop Inn fell into major disrepair. It flooded during Hurricane Katrina, then sat abandoned until its purchase and $11 million renovation by local developer Curtis Doucette Jr. In March 2024, the Dew Drop Inn reopened. Now including an outdoor pool and two suites with views of the performance stage, the hotel is hoping to help bring entertainment and visitors back to Central City, a neighborhood above the Garden District known mostly for its parades. “This is a community that is undergoing revitalization,” Lauren Usher, Dew Drop’s director of communications, tells me as we tour the hotel. “And I think the Dew Drop can be a catalyst to push that along.”

Photo by Sinna Nasseri

That evening, I walked into a converted home in the trendy Uptown neighborhood to experience the work of another catalyst for change: chef Serigne Mbaye, whose Dakar NOLA took home the 2024 James Beard Award in the Best New Restaurant category. Senegalese American Mbaye had previously cooked at restaurants in New York and San Francisco. But after he visited his childhood home in Dakar, he returned to New Orleans and opened Dakar NOLA, first as a pop-up in the Bywater neighborhood in 2020, then as a brick-and-mortar restaurant in November 2022. Seating is communal and all dinners are prix fixe, with each of the seven pescatarian courses introduced by either Mbaye or his managing partner and wife, Effie Richardson. “In West African culture, we dine communally with our family, and sometimes your family is your neighbor,” she says.

The meal begings with ataya tea, followed by a salad of greens from the farmer’s market, and locally sourced seafood in a spicy Senegalese yassa sauce. Though the dishes change frequently, all emphasize the oft-overlooked influence of West Africa on New Orleans’s fare. One constant is the “Last Meal”: black-eyed pea soup with crispy rice, palm oil, and chunks of Louisiana blue crab, inspired by the food served to enslaved West Africans before they were loaded onto ships bound for the Americas.

As I eat, I fall into conversation with my tablemates: two Black women who are longtime friends, and three white women who travel together once a year. Though we are all visiting from other parts of the country and come from different backgrounds, we agree that we are fortunate to find ourselves here. By the third hour of our meal, I consider the ways this is like no other dining experience I’ve had in New Orleans, and yet it feels perfectly at home here, in this city where community takes precedence, where residents are effecting change from the inside, where the present always seems to tangle with the past. “This is our story and this is who we are,” Mbaye says.

Photo by Sinna Nasseri

Where to go now in NOLA

Eat & Drink

The restaurants, food halls, and hotels to consider for your next trip to the Crescent City.

MaMou

Chef Tom Branighan and sommelier Molly Wismeier launched MaMou in fall 2022 on the edge of the French Quarter, and it delivers an art nouveau aesthetic and inspired cuisine: From the braised celery hearts appetizer to the must-try poisson à la Florentine, it all comes together to evoke “Parisian brasserie meets the Big Easy.”

Hungry Eyes

Uptown is arguably New Orleans’s buzziest destination. Hungry Eyes, which the Turkey and the Wolf sandwich shop team debuted in April 2023, adds to that reputation. Step inside the space (neon lights, new wave playlist) and feel transported; the dishes (artichoke hearts on the half shelld, pastrami with barbecue marinade) are equally irreverent.

Fives

In the French Quarter, Fives stands out for its selection of raw oysters from the Gulf and East coasts, and original cocktails alongside the classics. Thanks to its horseshoe bar made of green marble and small wooden tables scattered throughout the space, Fives feels intimate and—despite opening in the summer of 2023—lived-in. “We wanted it to feel like it’s always been here,” says bar manager James O’Donnell. “Like it’s timeless.”

St. Roch Market

Historic St. Roch Market reopened on the edge of the Marigny neighborhood in 2015 after a revamp of the building, which dates to 1875. A myriad of local food purveyors means visitors can choose their own adventure—Cuban, Sicilian, Vietnamese, and more.

Stay

ONE11 Hotel

The 83-room ONE11 Hotel sits near the French Quarter, steps from the Central Business District and Mississippi River. Close to the Sazerac House museum and Woldenberg Park, it has enviable river and city views from its rooftop terrace, and its ground-level outdoor pool is perfect for winding down at the end of the day.

Rubenstein Hotel

Occupying the same building as its century-old namesake (the Rubensteins men’s clothing store), the 40-room Rubenstein Hotel opened its doors at the beginning of 2024. Situated at the corner of Canal Street and St. Charles Avenue, it has a wraparound second-floor balcony that offers guests a veritable front-row seat to the inevitable Mardi Gras bacchanalia.

The Ritz-Carlton New Orleans

Located in a Beaux-Arts building that was once a department store, the 528-room Ritz-Carlton New Orleans takes up nearly a whole block. It completed a $40 million renovation in 2023. Don’t miss the jazz bar and the 25,000-square-foot spa—it’s the largest in the city.

Four Seasons Hotel New Orleans

Housed in a tower that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Four Seasons New Orleans outpost debuted in 2021 with 341 elegant rooms and a rooftop pool. Miss River, one of the hotel’s two restaurants (by James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya) and the lobby Chandelier Bar (a nod to its 15,000-piece chandelier) are destinations unto themselves.

What to Do

StudioBE

Local artist and advocate Brandan “BMike” Odums established StudioBE in 2016 in the Bywater neighborhood. Large, colorful paintings and mixed-media installations are on view throughout the 36,000-square-foot art gallery and workshop, including affecting portraits of Black New Orleanians and other prominent Black Americans.

Crescent Park
Looking for a spot to picnic? Try this 20-acre, 1.4-mile linear park, which opened in 2015 with ample lawn space, pavilions, and bike paths. Bordering the Marigny and Bywater neighborhoods, it offers multiple views of the city skyline and Mississippi River.