It would be hard to prove that New Orleanians are naturally any friendlier than people elsewhere, but I do know for sure they are among the easiest people with whom to strike up a conversation. One big reason for this is the almost failsafe fodder for chat we have here in the local food and its attendant culture.

At a restaurant or backyard crawfish boil, in a hotel lobby or on a bench at a streetcar stop, with loved ones or perfect strangers, broaching this topic will nearly always ignite interest and response. Taken together, then, the food booths of Jazz Fest present one big gab session keeping the mouths of festival goers over-employed. This veritable outdoor food court is for many people as much as part of the Jazz Fest experience as the music. And, as usual in Louisiana, there is a story behind many of the dishes served here that give some context to the singular culture of the region and give all of us something to talk about.

Crawfish is as good a place as any to start. Jazz Fest time comes at the shank of crawfish season in south Louisiana and by all early indications this year should yield a bumper crop, farmed in the rice fields or caught in the great meandering swamps of Acadiana that produce 90% of the nation’s mudbug take. The harvest at Jazz Fest is pretty impressive in its own right, with some 22 dishes served around the Fair Grounds this year involving crawfish. These range from the straightforward, traditional boiled crawfish, served with spicy boiled potatoes at Food Area I (see maps) by Ledet & Louque of Gramercy, to the unusual and surprisingly refreshing bisque of crawfish, spinach and zucchini served in Food Area II by the Uptown Tunisian restaurant Jamila’s Café.

Crawfish may be the most abundant food export from Cajun country to New Orleans, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for that stuffed stocking of the Cajun boucherie: boudin. This sausage of rice, liver, pork and abundant seasonings has a spreadable texture, but is more often eaten with one hand, squeezed from its euphemistically-titled “natural casing”—which is also a testament to the widely held Cajun belief that the only inedible part of a pig is its oink. This is breakfast food, snack food and road food in southwest Louisiana, available hot and cheap at every butcher shop in the rural towns, which usually double as gas stations. If you are unable to make it out to Cajun country, there is no easier way to summon the flavor of that region than by biting into a link of boudin. At Jazz Fest’s Food Area I, it is sold in several varieties, including molded into balls and fried, by Papa Ninety Catering.

TWO FAMILES, MANY RESTAURANTS

Family and food are intricately entwined as in Louisiana, and two preeminent family names in New Orleans cuisine are represented at Jazz Fest: Brennan and Baquet.

Different branches of the Brennan family today operate independently one or more of 13 restaurants, most of which are in New Orleans. Though internecine lawsuits have erupted over use of the family name for these various businesses, they all trace their roots to Brennan’s Restaurant, originally opened on Bourbon Street by Irish barkeep Owen Edward Brennan and later moved to its present Royal Street address. Today, a stroll of only a few blocks in the French Quarter will take a pedestrian past seven high-profile restaurants owned by four different scions of the extended Brennan family. At Jazz Fest, Ralph Brennan’s Red Fish Grill sets up shop in Food Area I serving its salad of fried oysters, blue cheese and spinach and a fried oyster po-boy covered in a spicy-sweetish sauce similar to that usually found over Buffalo wings.

The Baquet name comes up a different route of New Orleans culinary fame. This family’s restaurant legacy also began in the 1940s, with the opening of a fried chicken joint just off Canal Street called Paul Gross Chicken Coop. By 1966, co-proprietor Eddie Baquet opened his own place, called Eddie’s, on Law Street, which grew into a Creole soul food legend before closing in the 1990s. The family operated many other casual Creole restaurants in the city until what seemed to be the last, Zachary’s on Oak Street, closed in 2004. But within a matter of months, proprietor Wayne Baquet was back at it in a new restaurant called Lil’ Dizzy’s which opened this year on Esplanade Avenue in Tremé, very close to the French Quarter. Visitors to Jazz Fest can taste the Baquet legend in Food Area I, where Lil’ Dizzy’s serves Wayne’s famous and seriously good fried chicken, crawfish bisque and crawfish pies.

“OLD SOBER”

Crawfish, liver and rice sausage and other Louisiana staples may seem exotic to newcomers weaned on Shoney’s and Cisco food service products, but at least one dish served at Jazz Fest retains a bit of mystery even for New Orleanians. Called ya ka mein, this multi-ethnic soup is prepared primarily at Asian-American owned corner stores in African American neighborhoods, with familiar American groceries standing in for traditional Asian ingredients. There are many different spellings for the dish (ya ka mein, ya kamain, yat ca mein, yada mein, etc.) with none being authoritative, and the same can be said for its many various recipes. A typical serving could include spaghetti noodles, shrimp, chicken or sometimes bits of roast beef, almost always a hard boiled egg, whole or chopped up, green onions and other common greens and a strange, salty broth with soy sauce standing up as a prominent main ingredient. It’s generally eaten with a plastic
fork on the street. At Jazz Fest, ya ka mein is cooked up by Linda Green, a well-known presence at the city’s many Sunday afternoon second line parades where she serves foam cups of her soup outside the barrooms where the parades pause for breaks. The dish also has the endearing nickname of “old sober” for its purported qualities as a hangover cure. Preliminary research by thiswriter has proved inconclusive, but the field trials are still ongoing.