A great trip lingers with you long after you return home. A successful vacation is one where memories are unpacked long after the suitcase is emptied and the laundry is done. For me, the best journeys are the ones that get inside my heart and rearranging things.
It’s been more than a week since I came back from Louisiana and I’m starting to realize that my trip reorganized a few things in my life while I was away: I’ve got new beautiful friendships to foster and a whole new set of cravings to grapple with.
Since my return to LA, my imagination whirls over gems of stories of the Louisiana food world. My daily routine is peppered with flavored memories of diners, ice cream shops, a water-side bar where the locals cook up craw fish outside under a tent, and the all-night beignet restaurant littered with empty plates covered in powdered sugar.
Food isn’t just a meal in New Orleans, it’s a way of life.
Of all the states I’ve visited, I have never been to any other American city where its inhabitants are so closely aware of their cultural history and culinary traditions.
New Orleans is a mélange of spicy cultures (French Canadian, Spanish, Africans, English, German, Italians, and Native American) that has created a uniquely colorful people with strong ties to family, food traditions and a shared heritage. I was charmed by the stone-lined sidewalks, Creole townhouses with iron-worked balconies, and hotels like the French Quarter’s Bourbon Orleans Hotel that have marketing materials that tout ghoulish history more than amenities. Brass bands paraded through the streets as second-liners [see glossary, below] danced a two step and waved handkerchiefs over their heads in celebration of marriage.
New Orleans after a rain storm
Always, the locals repeated this constant refrain: indulge in the city’s most famous dishes and forget about the caloric aftermath.
Regulars at Camillia Grill
The food tour
For almost one full week, the food blogging tour of Louisiana was given unlimited access to culinary professionals and abundant samples of the state’s culinary bounty. Luckily for our bellies, our itinerary of eating started slow. But as the days went on we managed to shock even ourselves–professional eaters that we are–by the sheer amount of food we were able to consume.
On our first night in the city, Blake Killian, the man behind BlakeMakes, summoned us to our first dinner at Bistro Maison de Ville. Bow-tied waiters served a multi-course dinner dedicated to the theme of showcasing the best of Louisiana seafood. Course after course, we marveled at the freshness of the seafood and the firm texture of the perfectly cooked shrimp.
Camillia Grill
Camellia Grill’s exterior signage
The following morning I joined a small, ambitious group of professional eaters (Chichi Wang, Maggy Keet, and Daniel Delany) to sneak in an extra meal before our first official eating excursion of the day. Daniel lead us to Camillia Grill, an all-day favorite with the locals since 1946. We ordered a few classics, including a show-stopping stack of pecan-studded pancakes. I don’t often shorten my words here at Food Woolf, but OMG.
Pecan pancake with maple syrup
After polishing off a Manhattan Omelet (corned beef hash, cheddar cheese and potato stuffed eggs) and pecan pancakes, we staggered through the oppressive heat with swaying bellies. We gathered together under the watchful eye of Blake for a festival celebrating Creole Tomatoes, Cajun Zydeco music, and Louisiana Seafood.
“When you think of all the news you’ve seen about Louisiana, what images flash through your mind?” asked Mike Voisin, a seventh-generation Louisiana oysterman. Voisin, the CEO of Motivatit Oysters, paced around the air-conditioned conference room as he spoke to his visiting guests.
An assortment of bloggers and food writers from across the States–hand-picked to observe Louisiana’s seafood industries and partake in the state’s diverse food culture–sat around the conference room table conjuring up images: submerged homes, flood-stranded dogs, desperate men and women on rooftops waving white sheets for help, oil-slicked wildlife, and tar-soaked birds.
“We are not what the perception of what the media has made us,” Voisin said. Despite the fact that almost one hundred percent of the state’s fisheries are open and functioning and have passed national and state testing for health and safety, much of the seafood buying public fear the Gulf-state’s products aren’t safe to eat. According to Voisin, the unprecedented attention of the media has given Louisiana’s seafood industry a bad reputation.
“It’s kind of hard to get that image of an oil slicked pelican out of your mind when you’ve seen it a million times, isn’t it?” Voisin said. “Louisiana has a branding problem…We have shrimp, crabs, and oysters but what we don’t have are people willing to buy.”
The uniquely difficult challenge facing the Louisiana seafood industry is exactly why Louisiana Seafood Promotions and Marketing Board decided they needed to reach out to consumers in a revolutionary way–through food.
An Invitation to see the real Louisiana
When it comes to news headlines, a couple of things sell really well: natural disasters, tragic loss of life, celebrity gossip, hero stories, and adorable animals. When one single news event touches all these aspects with one soaring narrative, it’s a media goldmine.
Blame it on the perfect storm of natural disasters that’s befallen Louisiana over the past seven years, but the state has certainly been the source of a lot of headline news. With Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Deep Water Horizon’s oil spill in April of 2010, international media teams swooped into the coastal state to document the disasters. Stories of tragedy, redemption, faith, hope, celebrity interest, and distress were easy to find in this Creole/Cajun state.
Thanks to a huge influx of money to the state of Louisiana, much progress has been made in just one year since the oil spill. Houses and businesses have been rebuilt, fisheries and rice fields are producing again, and tourism is improving (According to the tourism board, the state earned 5.3 billion dollars in tourism last year). Yet despite the positive changes and commitment to becoming a strong and successful state, Louisiana’s seafood industry is struggling.
Seeing a problem, Louisiana’s Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board did some research and quickly realized the general public couldn’t get over the horrifying images of the past so easily. So, in order to change perceptions about the seafood and motivate people to start buying Louisiana seafood again, they began devising a different sort of plan to get the word out.
Rather than coming up with slick slogans, cunning advertising, or a give away contest, the Seafood Board decided to call upon a handful of trusted voices in the food world to come and experience Louisiana from a culinary and cultural point of view. Who better to get the word out about a food crisis than a bunch of hungry and inquisitive food bloggers?
Bloggers (Amateur Gourmet, Serious Eats, Family Fresh Cooking, and Three Many Cooks) observe the day’s blue crab catch.
I’m a film school grad, but you wouldn’t know it from reading this site. You’ve never read any drafts of my screenplays, I don’t rant about movies, and you’ve certainly never seen any short films. But the times they are a changing, my friends.
Don’t worry. I’m not looking to change the way I do things around here, but when I realized I could shoot and edit great photos and even make a short film with my iPhone, I started to re-think my Luddite ways. Why not take advantage of all this new-fangled technology that’s at my finger tips (literally). I can not and will not slip into default mode of being a slow adopter of new technology. No sir!
So taking a cue from all my tech-savvy food blogging buddies, I join the world of amateur video. And it’s about time.
Now before you spend the two plus minutes watching my humble video post, I should mention that the subject of this short is about a five day trip to New Orleans I just got back from. Thanks to the generosity of Louisiana Seafood Board, I was flown to Louisiana (along with a handful of this country’s top food bloggers) for a tour of New Orleans’ culinary scene and Louisiana’s fisheries and seafood processing plants. The excursion was designed to show us (and give us tastes of) all the great seafood that Louisiana has to offer.
It was an incredible trip that has my mind spinning, stomach extended, and photo library brimming with so many incredible photos I’ve been struggling to figure out where to begin. So rather than start off with an extra long essay on the subject of Louisiana seafood, I thought I’d start you off with a brief visual teaser of what’s to come.
So without any further ado, I present to you my first iPhone short film.
Food Blog Masters trip to New Orleans
*Full Disclosure: My trip was furnished by the Louisiana Seafood Board. I was not paid to supply any opinions or material on the behalf of the organization or the state of Louisiana.
