New Orleans Without the Mistakes

New Orleans forgives almost everything, which is its charm and the visitor's trap, since the city will cheerfully absorb your mistakes and hand back a lesser trip without ever mentioning it. The standing errors here concern geography, calendar, and Bourbon Street, and the difference between the tourist's weekend and the regular's is nothing but information. Here is the information.

October through early December and then the window between carnival and the summer heat, roughly March through early May, are the city's best weather and best moods. The festival weekends, carnival's final stretch and the jazz festival's two weekends, are magnificent and must be chosen a year ahead at festival rates, never stumbled into. The mistake is July and August, when the heat is a physical circumstance, and the counter-play is that the fine hotels drop their rates accordingly for visitors who plan around air conditioning and late nights.

The French Quarter is smaller than its reputation and splits into two cities, the raucous blocks nearest Canal and Bourbon and the residential calm below St. Ann toward Esplanade, and the correct Quarter stay is the lower, quieter end. The alternative school books the Garden District or the Marigny, trading tourist density for porches and locals. The genuine mistake is the chain corridor of Canal Street, which delivers the city's traffic without its texture. Wherever you sleep, the streetcar and your feet beat a rental car, which spends the trip hunting parking.

Book the old-line rooms, the ones running on their second century, for one lunch, not dinner, since the long Friday lunch is the native format, hours deep, jackets optional but appreciated, prices gentler than the evening. Book the modern serious rooms for one or two dinners before the flight. Then trust the neighborhoods for everything else, the po-boy counters, the oyster bars covered elsewhere in these pages, the red beans on Monday, which the city still observes. The mistake is eating every meal in the Quarter, where the tourist tax is real and the city's actual table is a streetcar ride away.

Skip Bourbon Street after one educational walk, taken early evening, drink in hand, anthropologically. The music the city is famous for lives on Frenchmen Street and in the neighborhood rooms and traditional halls, where the cover charges are modest and the players are the point. Skip the daiquiri chains, the voodoo-themed retail, and any tour promising ghosts by megaphone, and take instead one small-group history walk and one afternoon in the sculpture garden or the cemeteries, booked properly.

Book festival dates a year out or dodge them deliberately, reserve the serious tables three or four weeks ahead, and adopt the local clock, late breakfast, long lunch, music after ten. Carry small bills for the buskers and the second lines, drink water in a ratio the city will not suggest, and budget one unplanned afternoon, since the city's best hours arrive unscheduled.

On the last night, skip the last bar and take beignets after midnight instead, powdered sugar drifting under the cafe lights, the mule carts clopping past empty. The city has been staying up late for three centuries and knows exactly how to end an evening. Let it show you.