New Orleans was the big eat-y for us

A big part of our anniversary trip to New Orleans was enjoying the local cuisine.

Who am I kidding — a big part of any trip my wife and I take is enjoying the local cuisine. Even when there isn’t any.

But in New Orleans, the food is certainly one of the major attractions, and it certainly was for us.

That was one area where the train trip to New Orleans helped get us prepared for what was ahead. Amtrak’s City of New Orleans features a few N’awlins-flavored items on the menu, which is way above what passes for airline food these days or the interchangeable fast food fare that you find at most highway interchanges.

We made one of the many Bourbon Street restaurants one of our first stops our first evening in the French Quarter. That was after sampling our first Hurricane — the drink, not the weather phenomenon.

From the gallery on the second floor, we both enjoyed some fine local cuisine. I had a shrimp and pasta in a cream and wine sauce dish with a French name that I couldn’t even pronounce, let alone remember, while Terry had a Louisiana sampler with gumbo, jambalaya and red beans and rice.

Saturday morning Terry had booked us for a session at the New Orleans School of Cooking. She has an associate degree in cooking, while I have an honorary degree in eating — probably an honorary doctorate by now — so it was perfect for both of us.

It was a two-hour session to learn how to make gumbo, jambalaya and pralines, but it turned out to be much more of an education.

Our chef/instructor Anne was a native woman who had served for a number of years as a tour guide in the city before coming to the school.

In addition to showing us how to make the city’s signature dishes, she entertained us with a history of the city, an explanation of how the local cuisine came to embody the best of the many cultural influences that made New Orleans what it is over the last several centuries, gave us tips on where to go for the best local eating, and even shared a few good Cajun jokes. All in all, it was a better show than a lot of what you can see on several cable networks.

The cost of the class for both of us was less than what lunch at just about any restaurant in the French Quarter would have cost us, and the entertainment alone would have been worth the price.

But the best part was that we all got to enjoy all of the dishes Anne prepared — and could even go back for seconds. There was also all the beer or root beer — both from Abita, a local Louisiana brewery, whose product we both sampled frequently and enjoyed greatly all weekend — you could drink, along with sweet tea, of course, and biscuits.

With a start like that, the rest of our culinary adventure had a lot to live up to — but we figured the French Quarter would be up to it, and it was.

After all, where else but in New Orleans could you find a world-class restaurant inside a museum?

That’s what we found Sunday, when we went to the National World War II Museum. The museum itself was a magnificent tribute to and education on the Greatest Generation and their accomplishments — and sacrifices — in winning World War II. But it also boasts an excellent restaurant run by another native New Orleans chef, John Besh.

In keeping with the theme of the museum, the wait staff is dressed in World War II-era outfits, the French fries come wrapped in paper inside C-ration style tin cans, and the kid’s meals even come in souvenir World War II-era metal lunchboxes.

We planned to spend just a few hours at the museum but wound up there most of the day. But we did manage to get back to the French Quarter in time to look for someplace to have our anniversary dinner — Sunday being our 35th anniversary, the reason for our celebratory trip to the Big Easy.

We were walking through the French Quarter when we happened to walk past the Acme Oyster House.

The Acme is rated one of the best, if not the best, place for oysters in New Orleans. It hosts the annual World Oyster Eating Championship and the 15 Dozen Club, an oyster-eating Hall of Fame, and has been featured on the Travel Channel, among others.

It also takes no reservations and usually has a waiting line of an hour or more, but when we walked by Sunday evening, there were only a few people waiting outside the door.

That made up our minds quickly about where we were going for our anniversary dinner.

We didn’t try the 15 Dozen Club challenge — maybe about 30 anniversaries or so ago we might have been up to it, but not now.

We did, however, manage to polish off two-dozen oysters, a pound of crayfish, gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice, and Andouille sausage, all washed down with a few of our new favorite beer — maybe not a world record repast, but certainly as good a way as we could think of to celebrate.

Terry ordered the oysters and the crayfish while I ordered the rest of the dishes on a sampler platter — and they were mighty generous samples. She actually ordered a dozen oysters to start with, but when I started grabbing a few, she quickly ordered another dozen to make sure she got as many as she wanted.

As I mentioned in an earlier column, we did a lot of walking around the French Quarter which, given as much as we were eating, was probably a good thing.

NEXT WEEK: More culinary — and other — adventures in NOLA.