36 Hours in New Orleans

In the French Quarter, the city’s colonial heart, gimmicky ghost tours are as common as cockroaches. A better way to commune with the spirits is to visit the Historic New Orleans Collection’s museum on Royal Street (free), which opened in April 2019 after a $38 million restoration and expansion of an 1816 mansion. Artifacts like an advertisement for the 1859 opening of the French Opera House, with text in French and English, evoke ghost worlds (the Opera House burned down in 1919). An 18-minute film on French Quarter history, projected across four walls, covers 300-plus years of immigration, epidemics, nation-to-nation handoffs and the neighborhood’s libertine streak. The gift shop is one of the best in town: find handmade wooden spoons for stirring a roux ($21), and prints of New Orleans musicians by the local photographer Michael P. Smith (from $35 unframed).

In the Bywater, a formerly working-class neighborhood hugging the Mississippi River that has been altered of late by an influx of the hip and the bourgeois, the bar scene is charmingly scruffy and low-key. Have dinner at N7, named for the old auto route from Paris to the French Riviera. The restaurant opened in 2015, but exudes the offhand wabi-sabi of a local institution decades older. Savor a natural wine in a bar adorned with vintage Parisian flotsam (an old Cahiers du Cinema cover; a photo of Jane Birkin as Melody Nelson) and order the reliably comforting coq au Riesling ($25). For the budget-minded, there are hard-boiled eggs ($1) at the bar, set in a wire carousel. For live music nearby, try Saturn Bar, a Kennedy-era dive with an eclectic gamut spanning cumbia to spiky dance-punk.

The six-mile commercial corridor of Magazine Street is a glorious mish-mash of retail shops, art galleries and good places to eat, with surprises on nearly every block. For breakfast Uptown, stop in for a flaky cheddar-and-chive biscuit ($4.75) at La Boulangerie, a New Orleans take on a classic French bakery with a happy thrum on Saturday mornings. Take it to go and stroll along Magazine Street, taking notes on places you might want to hit up when they open later in the day: Magpie, is a standout vintage clothing and jewelry store, and Sisters in Christ, which sells records and books, is well attuned to the city’s D.I.Y. arts underground. Shawarma On The Go, inside a Jetgo gas station, is notable for its Lebanese iced tea with pine nuts. Crunchy, cold, aromatic and savory-sweet, the drink is a local spin on a traditional Lebanese drink called jallab.

Explore New Orleans food at its casual best in the Mid-City area, an eclectic mix of residential neighborhoods. The eggplant parmesan ($17) with a side of gumbo ($8) at Liuzza’s shows how Sicilian immigrants have contributed to the Creole culinary conversation, while Parkway Bakery and Tavern turns out some of the city’s best po’ boys, which it began serving nearly a century ago to feed striking streetcar operators. The tiny and affordable 1000 Figs, a falafel and hummus place with a short, smart wine list, gives a taste of New Orleans’s recent love affair with Middle Eastern cooking, and Katie’s is a classic haunt notable for its side-street charm and a menu full of gut-busting local specialties, including a signature crawfish beignet ($16).

New Orleans takes its traditions seriously. But the city is also open to fresh ideas and outside influences, particularly those with a common culinary denominator. (Vietnamese refugees began settling here in the 1970s, and their impact on the dining scene continues, with the line between banh mi and po’ boy growing fuzzier by the year.) In the Uptown neighborhood, the chef Jacqueline Blanchard, who grew up in bayou country and has worked at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, gives the Japanese izakaya concept a gentle Louisiana twist at Sukeban. Here, tamaki hand rolls (starting at $7) can be adorned with mild Cajun Bowfin caviar ($10), and potato salad ($7), that old Southern standby, is reimagined with pickled carrots and the crispy, tiny dried fish known as niboshi.

Mornings might be the best time to enjoy a walk in the French Quarter and the Faubourg Marigny, the Quarter’s more reserved sister neighborhood just next door. The amateur drinkers have been scooped off the streets, cleaning crews have worked to neutralize the previous night’s party-town bouquet, and the sun is not yet out in full force. End up at Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore in the Marigny that opens early (it’s also a coffee shop), and showcases Black authors — from Dick Gregory, the comic and activist, to the New Orleans fiction master Maurice Carlos Ruffin to the vegan comfort-food entrepreneur Pinky Cole. Even on Sunday mornings, the place can feel like an old-school literary salon, with customers passionately debating and discussing current events.