{Back in the Big Easy, Part 1}

In my magazine life, one of my favorite shoots was a profile on Cindy Brennan, of the famed New Orleans restaurant family. The dinner party she threw in her Rue Royal apartment was humming with a jazzy energy (there was even a live trio pumping out brassy tunes), despite the photographer, food stylist, prop stylist, and writer (me!) tromping around disrupting the flow. Back then, I wrote that gathering over meals is what the people of New Orleans do best, and it’s at this intersection of food and friendliness that you usually find a Brennan.

This was the summer before Katrina hit—displacing thousands, including my cousin Lauren, a New Orleans transplant, and her husband Neil, a New Orleans native. It took years for them to get their house (and lives) back in action and this fall, I came back to New Orleans along with a gang of Greeks (aka my family), for a weekend of cooking, feasting, and another lesson in New Orleans hospitality.

Lauren and Neal managed to squeeze the seven of us into their tenderly restored cottage and still make it feel like we were in a hotel. (Neil graciously kicked himself out of the house, which was deemed an all-female zone for the weekend.) The kitchen—inviting and warm with its rich red cabinets—set the stage for our day of cooking. We were there to cook the nona’s recipes—bourekas, spanikopita, dolmathes and tzaziki, yesmista, prassa kefthedes—and remember the women who fed us well for so many years.

But before the cooking began, we meandered past the ornately-carved tombs of the Metairie Cemetery, wandered the French Quarter, taking in its texture and color, and visited Neil’s store—Royal Antiques, a glorious collection of French and English Antiques where I faux-shopped for my someday house.

And we ate. A lot. (Too much?) We experienced brunch at Commander’s Palace (and I do mean experienced—it’s a wonder just to watch their gracefully choreographed service, and they didn’t blink at our tables’ gluten-free and vegetarian requests). We filled up on powdered beignets at Café du Monde. And I had the most decadent pecan pie of my life at Brigtsens, a cozy restaurant tucked into an Uptown neighborhood where Neil has been a regular for fifteen years. And then, to set the tone for the momentous Day O’ Cooking, Lauren led us through a moving session of yoga set to a soothing soundtrack of Ladino music.