New Orleans has spent three centuries refining American pleasure — the food, the music, the drinking, the way evenings stretch — and is the only major American city where a serious traveler can do all four in the same six-block walk. The trick is staying on the right side of the city's two faces.
The thing nobody tells visitors clearly enough is that there are two New Orleanses, and they share streets. There is tourist New Orleans — the version that lives on Bourbon Street, drinks hand grenades from plastic to-go cups, and confuses volume for atmosphere. And there is actual New Orleans, which lives one block over on Royal and Decatur, two blocks down on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny, twenty minutes uptown in the Garden District, and quietly in dozens of small rooms where the music, the food, and the drinking culture have continued, unbroken, for more than a century.
This guide is for the second New Orleans. The first one will find you regardless; you don't need editorial help with Bourbon Street.
What follows is a guide to one weekend done correctly. Where to sleep (the choice is more meaningful than it looks), where to eat (the answer involves both white tablecloths and a corner po-boy counter), and how to spend the right kind of Saturday night in the Marigny — which, for the record, is the thing the rest of the trip should be planned around.
Where to stay
New Orleans has more historically interesting hotels per capita than any other American city — a function of having been continuously inhabited and continuously affluent for 300 years. The two picks below take genuine editorial positions on what a New Orleans hotel should do. The corporate towers near the convention center do not, and should be avoided.
The Roosevelt New Orleans
The most storied address in New Orleans hospitality since 1893 — a Waldorf Astoria property whose long lobby, "The Corridor," has served as the social living room of downtown New Orleans for more than a century. Huey Long held court here. Sinatra slept here. Generations of consequential visitors have walked through that lobby on the way to dinner. The Sazerac Bar is the spiritual home of the cocktail it's named for, and the Blue Room continues a big-band programming tradition stretching back to the 1930s. To stay at the Roosevelt is to be inside the city's history immediately and completely.
Check AvailabilityMaison de la Luz
The most thoughtfully designed boutique hotel to open in New Orleans in decades — an Atelier Ace property layering European salon aesthetics over Louisiana craft traditions. Handwoven fabrics, custom terrazzo, locally commissioned art throughout. Bar Marilou on the ground floor has quietly become one of the city's finest cocktail destinations, drawing locals as much as guests. For travelers who want serious design and a real connection to the city's creative culture without the scale and ceremony of a grand hotel, Maison de la Luz is the one.
Check AvailabilityWhere to eat
You eat well by accident in this city. The trick is making sure your three or four planned meals are good ones — because the unplanned ones (the second-line po-boy stop, the gumbo at a bar, the beignets at midnight) will already be extraordinary.
For the splurge dinner
Commander's Palace. The Victorian turquoise-and-white mansion in the Garden District against which all New Orleans fine dining is measured. Trained more James Beard winners than any other restaurant in America — Emeril, Prudhomme, a generation of others. The turtle soup spiked with sherry, the Gulf fish en papillote, the bread pudding soufflé that has been on the menu for decades because nothing has earned its replacement. The Saturday Jazz Brunch — live jazz, 25¢ martinis, and the full menu — is one of the great American dining experiences. Reservations open six weeks ahead and book up. Dress with care; the room expects it.
For the meal you'll actually remember
Domilise's Po-Boys. A white-frame Uptown house that has been making po-boys since 1918, and the recipe has not changed because there is no reason to change it: fresh-fried Gulf shrimp, dressed with creamy homemade remoulade, on Leidenheimer French bread that shatters when you bite it. The room is small. The line extends out the door. The service is brusque in the warmest possible way. Order the shrimp po-boy fully dressed. Eat it standing if you have to. Think about it for years.
For breakfast (which is also brunch, which is also lunch)
Café du Monde is the famous one and the line is not worth it. Morning Call at City Park is the same beignets without the queue, in a more atmospheric setting, with locals. Brennan's — for the celebrated Bananas Foster, originated here — is the once-in-a-trip ritual choice if breakfast is your main meal. Willa Jean in the CBD is the everyday excellent option for biscuits, sandwiches, and a serious coffee program.
For coffee
French Truck Coffee on Magazine Street is the local choice — a small-batch roaster the city's design and arts community treats as a third place. PJ's is the homegrown chain that has been quietly excellent for decades and is more reliable than any of the imported names downtown.
What to do
The Saturday-night-on-Frenchmen-Street experience is the thing this weekend is built around. Plan one daytime music ritual in the French Quarter and one Garden District walk to balance it.
The Saturday night that justifies the trip
Frenchmen Street. While Bourbon Street performs New Orleans for tourists, Frenchmen Street is where New Orleans performs New Orleans for itself. Two blocks in the Marigny, ten-plus live music venues operating simultaneously on any given night, each specializing in a different expression of the city's musical traditions: traditional jazz, funk, brass band, blues, zydeco. The Spotted Cat, The Apple Barrel, and Snug Harbor anchor the strip, but the strategy is to follow your ears and let the music guide the evening. Covers are minimal or nonexistent; tip the musicians generously. A Saturday night here is one of the great free pleasures of American city life.
The afternoon music ritual
Preservation Hall. A single small room in the French Quarter where the Preservation Hall Jazz Band has performed traditional New Orleans jazz nightly since 1961, to audiences seated inches from the musicians. No air conditioning. No drinks. No phones. Forty-five minutes that will stay with you for years. Doors open at 5 p.m. and the early shows are easier to get into; tickets sell out the week of the show. If you can swing it, the private experience ($600-ish for a small group) gets you the room before the doors open and a brief sit-down with the musicians — the most concentrated form of the experience.
The neighborhood walk
The Garden District is what New Orleans wishes it looked like in everyone's imagination — antebellum mansions, ironwork, live oaks, banana trees, deep porches. The 1.5-mile walk from Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 down Prytania, along Magazine Street's shopping corridor, and back through Coliseum Square is the city's most pleasant hour-and-a-half on foot. Anne Rice's house is on Prytania. Several others are too. This is also the right time to swing past Commander's Palace if you've booked dinner there.
If you have a third afternoon
The National WWII Museum is, surprisingly, one of the best museums in the country — five buildings, multiple campuses, several hours minimum. The Cabildo on Jackson Square handles New Orleans history with appropriate weight. The Steamboat Natchez jazz cruise is usually a tourist trap but on the right afternoon, with the right company, becomes the kind of ridiculous experience you'll be glad you said yes to.
Where to drink
New Orleans invented the cocktail (the Sazerac, 1838, around the corner from the hotel that bears its name). The drinking culture has stayed serious for almost two centuries. Two picks span the modern range.
Bar Tchoupitoulas at The Eliza Jane. Set inside The Eliza Jane hotel — a beautiful conversion of seven 19th-century Warehouse District buildings — Bar Tchoupitoulas serves cocktails built on Louisiana botanicals: Creole bitters, local honey, Satsuma citrus, Roulaison rum, Old New Orleans whiskey. The Tchoupitoulas Swizzle is the house signature. New Orleans cocktail culture at its most refined and most rooted.
Cure. Opened in 2009 in a converted Uptown fire station and single-handedly elevated New Orleans cocktail culture beyond the frozen daiquiri era. Still one of the finest craft cocktail bars in the South. The Obituary Cocktail — gin, Lillet, absinthe, a riff on the Corpse Reviver — is the house classic and has achieved legendary status. The whiskey and amaro selections are among the most considered in Louisiana.
What to skip
A few honest notes:
Bourbon Street after sundown. A working-class strip that performs an exhausted parody of itself for tourists. The drinks are expensive and bad. The atmosphere is genuinely unpleasant. Walk through it once during the day to take a photograph of the wrought iron, then pretend it doesn't exist. Frenchmen does the music job better in every way.
Plastic-cup hand grenades and hurricanes. The drinks served from to-go counters on Bourbon are objectively terrible and exist as tourist props. The hurricane was invented at Pat O'Brien's, and Pat O'Brien's still serves the genuine version (with a long line); even there, you're paying for the souvenir glass more than the drink. Order a Sazerac at the Sazerac Bar instead.
Café du Monde at peak hours. The beignets are fine. The line is not. Morning Call, Café Beignet on Royal, or even City Park's Morning Call do the same thing better, with locals.
The "swamp tour" closest to downtown. The high-volume operations from convention center docks are mostly extruded experiences — minimal wildlife, narration delivered to a headset of fifty people. If a swamp visit appeals, drive yourself to Maurepas Swamp or book a small-group naturalist tour from Slidell. A weekend visitor can probably skip it.
The practical details
New Orleans logistics
- Getting thereLouis Armstrong International (MSY) is well-served from every major American hub. The drive into downtown is 25 minutes outside rush hour; rideshare is the easiest option.
- Getting aroundThe French Quarter, CBD, Warehouse District, and Marigny are walkable to each other. The St. Charles streetcar is the right way to reach the Garden District. Avoid driving in the Quarter — parking is genuinely punishing.
- When to visitLate October through early December, and February through early April. Avoid July and August (humidity is medical). Avoid Mardi Gras week unless you specifically came for it (book a year ahead).
- ReservationsCommander's Palace requires six weeks. Frenchmen and Preservation Hall are walk-in friendly during the early evening; later sets sell out.
- CashUseful at Domilise's, French Quarter musicians' tip jars, and the inevitable street performers. Cards everywhere else.
- Hurricane seasonJune through November. Storms typically give days of warning; check forecasts before booking and consider trip insurance for late-summer trips.
The honest take
New Orleans is the most consistently rewarding small-area travel destination in America, provided you understand which version of the city you're actually visiting. The tourist Bourbon-Street version is exhausting, expensive, and disappointing. The actual New Orleans — the one with three centuries of food, music, and drinking culture continuously refined by people who never left — is staggeringly generous to travelers who arrive with attention.
Stay in the CBD or Warehouse District. Eat at Commander's once and Domilise's once. Walk the Garden District in the morning. Spend Saturday night on Frenchmen. Drink Sazeracs at the Sazerac. The rest of the trip will surprise you in the right ways.