New Orleans Belongs to the Cool Months

New Orleans has a season, and it is not the one the summer tourists suffer through. From October to April the humidity lifts, the light softens, and the city settles into the stretch it was built for, when walking the Quarter all afternoon is a pleasure rather than a negotiation and a table on a courtyard needs no defending. The regulars plan around these months. So should you.

Book one grand meal and let the rest happen to you. Commander's Palace in the Garden District has been the city's occasion since 1893, with its jazz brunch on the weekends, its twenty-five-cent martinis at weekday lunch, and a dress code it means, and Galatoire's has held down Bourbon Street since 1905 with much the same conviction. Those are the ceremonies. The rest of the trip runs on po-boys eaten standing up, gumbo in the cool evening, oysters by the dozen now that the months have an R in them, and beignets at Café du Monde at whatever hour the mood strikes, since it hardly closes. Winter is oyster season and the city knows it.

The French Quarter asks for a slow morning, before the afternoon crowds, when the balconies drip with ferns and the streets still smell of last night and coffee in roughly equal measure. The Garden District asks for a slow afternoon, and the St. Charles streetcar is the correct way to get there, rattling up the avenue under the oaks as it has for longer than anyone alive. Ride it to Washington Avenue, walk the blocks of mansions, and let the return trip take as long as it takes. The streetcar is transportation the way the city is a place to eat, which is to say technically.

The cool months are the city's whole calendar compressed. October brings festival weather without festival crowds, December dresses the hotels and the oaks in lights with the bonfires on the levee at Christmas, and January opens Carnival season, with king cake in every bakery and the parades building week by week toward Mardi Gras. If you want the city at its most itself, come for the early parades, two weekends before Fat Tuesday, when the crowds are local and the neighborhoods run the show. If you want it quietest, the weeks right after Mardi Gras are the town exhaling, and the tables are yours.

Stay in or near the Quarter for a first trip, or in the Garden District if you have made the trip before and want the porches. Pack for sixty-degree swings, since a January day can open at forty and close at seventy-five, and bring shoes that forgive brick sidewalks. Take the streetcar over the rideshare, take the long lunch over the packed itinerary, and accept that the city will reorganize your plans by the second day, which is not a failure of the trip but the beginning of it.

The city has been feeding and entertaining its visitors for three hundred years, and it has learned exactly what it is doing. Come when the air is cool and the oysters are cold, give it more time than seems reasonable, and let it work.