Crawfish Boil 2020: Hotels

          Just a reminder, the crawfish boil is being held at Maison Lafitte in Mandeville, Louisiana on Saturday March 7, 2020. Mandeville is on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. So we'll divide the recommendations depending on if you want to stay near the boil or in New Orleans. For anyone unfamiliar with the Greater New Orleans area, getting across the lake is a breeze thanks to the Causeway that cuts right across the lake.  

          On the South Shore, New Orleans boasts a bevy of great places to stay. We recommend that visitors make their accommodations in the city as much of the trip to Covington is on the Causeway. And if you’re going to stay in New Orleans, you may as well stay in the French Quarter (especially if you’ve never been to New Orleans before). Staying in the Quarter is a unique experience and puts you right into the action. Most of the city's tourist attractions are easily accessible and there’s always something going on nearby.

          If you're looking for an AirBnB, there are plenty available inside and outside the Quarter. Prices will be lower than they would be in the previous weeks because the Boil is coming after Mardi Gras. Prices are generally similar to what you spend  a nice hotel room. 

The interior of the Roosevelt 

          Currently, our favorite hotel in the city is the Roosevelt. It's part of the Hilton-Waldorf Astoria luxury hotel chain and about 10 years ago it underwent a complete renovation that modernized the interior but kept its New Orleans charm. The renovation restored the hotel's iconic Sazerac Bar to its original 1940s decor. The Sazerac excels at cocktails in a historic New Orleans space where Huey "Kingfish" Long used to drink and meet with constituents. If you want a comfortable hotel that also exudes old school New Orleans, the Roosevelt is the place to stay. 

W New Orleans - French Quarter hotel. The hotel is in a quieter part of the Quarter down on Chartres Street, but still only a couple of blocks from Bourbon.

The JW Marriott is on Canal Street, and is very close to the Quarter. Here you can be within easy walking distance of the Quarter without being surrounded by it.

Interior of the Southern Hotel 

          Now, we'll cover some accommodations in the Mandeville/Covington area. Covington has the standard range of visitors' hotels, but we thought it would be better to recommend some places for guests who prefer a quiet location close to the boil. 

          There's also the Southern Hotel in Covington.  It's located in the heart of downtown Covington and houses one of our favorite local restaurants, Ox Lot 9.  The restaurant also has a great bar that makes fantastic cocktails. The rooms are spacious and there's a spa located within the hotel. 

          Covington also has a Courtyard by Marriott and Annadele's B&B. Annadele's is a lovely plantation home near Old Covington. The grounds and rooms are charming and the restaurant is generally pretty good, especially for breakfast.

          We'll be back next week with restaurant recommendations. Because if you're coming to New Orleans, there's no excuse not to eat well. 

Crawfish Boil 2020: Who was Leah Chase?

            Leah Chase, the famed New Orleans chef and restauranteur, is featured prominently on the poster for the DGA Friends and Family Crawfish Boil poster. Chase was a household name in New Orleans for her role as a chef and civil rights pioneer. We thought it might be a good idea to provide a little background on her and her remarkable life.

            Chase passed away on June 1, 2019 at the age of 96.  Born in New Orleans, Chase grew up in Madisonville, Louisiana, the oldest of 11 children. When she was a teenager, Chase moved back to New Orleans to complete high school—since Madisonville did not have a high school for students of color. 

            After graduation, she worked a variety of jobs including for a local bookie and as the manager of two amateur boxers. She also worked as a waitress at the long-defunct Colonial Restaurant in the French Quarter. In 1946, she married Edgar “Dooky” Chase, a local musician whose parents owned a street corner stand in Treme that sold lottery tickets and po’ boys. In the ensuing years, Edgar and Leah began converting the stand into a full-service restaurant. Leah took over the kitchen and combined her experience helping out on her family’s farm growing up and her time spent in the service industry to create a menu deeply rooted in the New Orleans culinary tradition.

            During the Civil Rights era, the restaurant, now named Dooky Chase after her husband, hosted African-American and white leaders. Local civil rights leaders A.P. Tureaud and Dutch Morial often met at Dooky Chase to plan protests. In the upstairs meeting rooms, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders organized the Montgomery Bus boycott based on the work of Baton Rouge activists. All the while, Chase participated in these discussions and served everyone gumbo and fried chicken. The Chases hosted voter registration campaigns, NAACP meetings, and a myriad of other activities. Police and city authorities, meanwhile, refused to interfere with the meetings or close down the restaurant. The restaurant served as a neutral ground for city authorities and activists and shutting it down would only enrage the community further. 

            Over the years, Dooky Chase Restaurant began a local institution in the African-American community of New Orleans. The Chases patronized local artists and musicians, hanging their art in the restaurant and invited them to play. The restaurant also became known for its Holy Thursday tradition. Leah Chase would prepare her famous gumbo z’herbes—a meatless gumbo made from various greens—and fried chicken.  Chase found that food had a remarkable power to bring people together. As she explained, "Food builds big bridges. If you can eat with someone, you can learn from them, and when you learn from someone, you can make big changes. We changed the course of America in this restaurant over bowls of gumbo. We can talk to each other and relate to each other when we eat together."  

            Dooky Chase Restaurant flooded during Hurricane Katrina. Leah Chase, now in her 80s, lived across the street in a FEMA trailer for over a year while she and her family worked to raise money to rebuild the restaurant. After reopening, Chase and her family ran the restaurant under limited hours to prevent Chase from overworking herself. She won about every culinary award imaginable both in New Orleans and across the country. She was the inspiration for the Disney film The Princess and the Frog. Chase famously stopped Barack Obama from trying to add hot sauce to her gumbo. 

            Chase was a New Orleans legend, not only for her food, but for her activism, belief in civil rights, her support of local artists and musicians, and her unwavering belief that food could bridge the differences between people.   

DGA Crawfish Boil 2020!

It's that time of year again--time to officially announce the 2020 DGA Family and Friends Crawfish Boil!

In the coming weeks, we'll have hotel and restaurant recommendations, suggestions of how to have a great time in New Orleans (before and after the Crawfish boil obviously), band announcements and bios, and explainers about crawfish and how to eat them. 

See you March 7!  

King Cake Season!

Cake to celebrate these guys? Sure, why not? 

King cake season lasts from January 6 until Mardi Gras. Why January 6? January 6 is the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrating the visit of the Three Magi (or Kings) to the infant baby Jesus. The first king cakes appeared in France during the Medieval period as a way to celebrate this important moment in the Christian calendar. They soon became an important feature of Carnival (otherwise known as Mardi Gras). 

When the French came to New Orleans in the early 17th century, they brought their holidays and traditions with them. Explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville landed on the coast about sixty miles south of present day New Orleans on March 2, 1699—the day before Mardi Gras. The holiday and the subsequent French colony stuck. 

The king cake, however, did not take hold until the early 1870s. French immigrants brought their king cake recipes with them and in classic New Orleans fashion, a new tradition merged with the old to create something wonderful. It took until about 1950 for the king cake to become a popular staple of New Orleans cuisine. In the past decade or so, king cakes have really come into their own. Popular interest in all things New Orleans grew after Hurricane Katrina and next day shipping have allowed king cakes to be shipped across the country, spreading their influence and deliciousness.

Is that the baby Jesus there?

Now let’s talk about the cake itself. The King cake began as a circular bread dough topped with sugar with a bean inside. Over the past several hundred years, however, the king cake has evolved into a sweet cake covered with sugar and icing. The dough, previously hollow, is now braided and stuffed with cinnamon, cream cheese, or other fillings.  The colors atop a King cake are the same as the ones of Mardi Gras—purple for justice, green for faith, and gold for power.  

King cakes also feature a small plastic baby hidden somewhere in or underneath the cake. Tradition holds that the person who finds the baby is responsible for buying the next cake. Some claim that the baby represents the baby Jesus and that McKenzie's Pastry Shoppes, a New Orleans area bakery, were the first to put the baby in the cake. In 1990, McKenzie's owner Donald Entringer Sr. denied that the baby had anything to do with Jesus. He told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “I've heard people say it's supposed to represent the Christ Child, but that's not true. Why we picked this, I don't know. It was cute. It was just a trinket that happened to be a baby.” Whatever the truth may be, watch out for the baby when you bite into your first slice of King cake.

Unsurprisingly here at DGA, everyone has their own king cake preferences. Bill is a big fan of the King cakes from Butter Krisp Diner in Covington. He prefers homemade king cakes and ones filled with strawberry cream cheese. 

Benson has a lasting affection for the king cakes once made by McKenzie’s. Luckily, the Tastee Donut chain in-and-around New Orleans purchased McKenzie’s old recipe and sells them at their stores. McKenzie’s consists of a simple brioche without cinnamon or filling. There’s only colored sugar topping the cake. 

Matt prefers the Mandeville Bake Shop because it's near his house, though the best one he’s ever had came from Randazzo’s. 

Doug’s favorite king cake is whatever one appears at his house. 

Christmas Eve Bonfires

           The French, Spanish, German, Haitian, West African, Caribbean, Vietnamese, and other ethnic groups that have settled Louisiana in the past three hundred plus years have fused together to create a culture unique to Louisiana. In honor of the Christmas season, let's talk about a Louisiana tradition: Christmas Eve bonfires. 

             On Christmas Eve, and more generally in the month of December, residents of Louisiana who live along the Mississippi river, especially between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, construct bonfires on the earthen levees that surround the river. Most of the time, the levees protect the surrounding homes from flood waters. These areas of high ground also make them prime locations for the construction of bonfires. Tradition holds that the bonfires are intended to help Santa Claus—or as the Cajuns call him Papa Noel, because of course the Cajuns have their own name—find his way to the homes of residents of Southern Louisiana. Louisianans construct wooden pyramid like structures, with smaller support logs that give them the appearance of fences. This is the typical appearance for one of these structures, but over the years people have become more artistic in their creations. Many pay homage to Louisiana’s culture, taking the shape of famous plantation homes, paddleboats, or even the ubiquitous crawfish. St. James Parish, located about 30-40 miles upriver from New Orleans, has the heaviest concentration of bonfires, especially in the towns of Gramercy, Lutcher, and Paulina. Lutcher even hosts the annual Festival of the Bonfires at Lutcher Recreational Park where they feature live entertainment, food, local crafts, and of course, bonfires. 

            The origins of the Christmas Eve bonfires are not entirely clear. French and German immigrants settled in St. James Parish in the early 18^th century. One theory holds that these settlers continued European traditions of holding bonfires on or around the winter and summer solstices after they established themselves in Louisiana. These original pagan practices were incorporated into Christian beliefs as a way of smoothing the way for conversion. The historical record, however, does not support the claim of a widespread practice of bonfires until the 1920s and 1930s. Groups of young men formed bonfire clubs, where they cut down trees, stripped them of their branches, and dragged them to the levees. After constructing the pyramid-like structures, people filled with rubber tires and other flammable materials. After World War 2, the bonfires grew in popularity due to the development of St. James and the surrounding river parishes. And in a rare victory for environmentalism in Louisiana, local governments banned the burning of rubber tires and other toxins—recognizing that they were bad for people’s health. Now these events serve as important cultural and communal events. As with many of Louisiana’s great traditions, they provide an opportunity to listen to music, eat delicious food, and for people to come together as a community and celebrate the holiday season.  

Christmas at the Roosevelt

The Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans is known for many things--the famous Sazerac Bar, Domenica, the hotel's pizza and Italian restaurant, among others.

At Christmas time, the Roosevelt becomes a winter wonderland in the heart of New Orleans. Take a look at the video below to see the hotel transform itself.


Watch this video to see the Roosevelt in all its Christmas glory.

Christmas at the Gaylord Texan

            The Gaylord Texan is a mammoth all-inclusive resort located in Grapevine, Texas, just outside of Dallas. Its amenities include a 25,000 sq ft spa, indoor and outdoor pools, five acres of gardens, a seasonal water park, a convention center, four restaurants, a bar, an on-site night club, and a café. The Gaylord has over 1,600 guest rooms and 152 suites. The Texas themed atrium includes a replica of the San Antonio Riverwalk. 

            At Christmas time, the Gaylord offers a host of holiday activities for families. The highlights begin with ICE! a holiday ice exhibit carved from 2 million pounds of ice. Kept at a chilly 9 degrees, the 14,000-square-foot exhibit hall features scenes from Charlie Brown’s Christmas. Carved over the course of several months by more than 40 ice sculptors, ICE! also features ice slides for participants to slide down. It also includes one-and-a-half million twinkling lights, 12,000 ornaments, a 52-foot-tall rotating Christmas tree, and a life-sized gingerbread house. 

            ICE!, however, is just one part of the Christmas experience at the Gaylord. There’s also the Lone Star Christmas featuring stilt walkers, singing cowboys, Santa and Mrs. Claus, balloon artists, snow-tubing, snowball making, ice skating, a Christmas carousel, Build-A-Bear, and a gingerbread decorating corner. The video below shows the Gaylord Texan at peak Christmas.