Here are just some miscellaneous musing on New Orleans. This was our first trip to New Orleans since John went full vegetarian. The last time we came he was still eating seafood, but no land meat.

That did present some challenges because a lot of the cuisine here is meat based. Many restaurants only had a token black bean burger, which didn’t interest him. However, we did find some interesting places. And there is a growing number of vegetarian/vegan restaurants like the Ethiopian one we ate at the first night.

This was a vegetarian crepe at the French Market. It had spinach and tomato and I think cheese?

I had some crawfish mac and cheese:

Yum!

Breakfasts were easy with pastries and such. Plus the beignets!

We found a diner type of place called Daisy Dukes, which is a 24-hour restaurant. John got a cheese omelet there. Here I had shrimp and grits. They were really good, although I didn’t care too much for the biscuit.

There is a restaurant called Green Goddess, which does vegan and meat-based cuisine. Quite a mix. It’s a small place, but the food was good. John got a tofu dish. Leafy greens, lemongrass tofu, kimchi and “a bunch of other things” as John said.

My choice was a beef roulade on grits:

That was one of my favorite meals.

We also found plenty of coffee shops. The New Orleans coffee scene is really growing, which is nice to see. It’s not all bars!

Some of the downsides:

I will say that the homeless population in New Orleans seems to have gotten much worse or at least in the French Quarter. The homeless population in New Orleans as a whole has gone down over the last 10 years, but they seem to be coming more to the quarter. We saw a fair number of people sleeping in the streets and next to shops in the early morning. It’s disheartening.

We also saw the Hard Rock Hotel that collapsed in October, I think it was? It’s still standing and kind of shocking to be walking downtown and see it.

I guess they are still trying to figure out how to implode it, which is challenging because of how it has already partially collapsed. They still don’t know what caused the collapse.

Last bit:

We were early for Mardi Gras, so there weren’t any big parades scheduled, but there was one we bumped into at night.

It was a youth parade. Some members seemed quite young. The back of the parade was all adults walking and handing out beads. I’m not sure what this was, but it was fun seeing it.

This guy was mesmerizing to watch:

He seemed to kind of lead the parade, but wasn’t a drum major or anything. I wanted to keep following him. It was like a moth to flame LOL! You just never know what you will find in New Orleans.