New Orleans

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THE BIG EASY has had it pretty hard over the past few years. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina all but destroyed much of New Orleans. In 2008, its port – at the mouth of the Mississippi – was hit by the economic downturn, and last summer the BP oil spill halted its vital shrimping industry.

And yet … walk down Bourbon Street, the backbone of the 18th century French Quarter and it’s like nothing has happened since these classical terrace houses, with their delicate wrought-iron balconies, were built more than 200 years ago. On one corner, a band is thumping out jazz and blues.

On another, a little boy tap-dances in a pair of old brogues, with flattened Coke cans pinned to the soles. In the Napoleon House, an endearingly shabby 1797 mansion on nearby Chartres Street, they are dishing up jambalaya – a Creole chicken, sausage and rice stew, with spicy Cajun shrimp gumbo.

A band is thumping out jazz and blues

The shrimping ban in the Gulf of Mexico was lifted in August – the French Quarter bounced back even earlier. Because the colonists wisely built the Quarter above sea level, it didn’t flood when Katrina struck, unlike 80 per cent of the city, below sea level and supposedly protected by a series of levees, earth and concrete banks.

When they broke under the pressure of Katrina’s storm swell, the disaster half-expected for decades was wreaked. Walk round the Quarter, though, and you’ll see little sign of the bad times – apart from the latest most popular fancy-dress: a pair of oil-spattered BP overalls. Peak fancy-dress time is Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday, which was on March 8 this year, a carnival introduced by the French. For a fortnight parades and street parties are held throughout the city.

Bourbon Street is at the heart of it all; it’s also the heart of drunken, if harmless, reveller land – where overrefreshed young women can be persuaded to whip off their tops in return for a string of beads.

Because of its colonial history – first under the French, then the Spanish – New Orleans has a greater European feel than the rest of the U.S. The Turtle Bay bar, on Decatur Street, is more raucous British pub than American bar. Here’s the place to watch the local American Football team, the New Orleans Saints, who brought a little fairytale cheer to the battered city last year when they won the Superbowl.

I watched a Saints game next to a girl in a Shockey 88 American Football top (in honour of Saints’ hero Jeremy Shockey), straddling an open window frame in the Southern heat. She screamed and swore like a Mississippi tugboat captain, cigarette dangling from her left hand, bottle of Abita beer (good stuff, from Abita Springs, Louisiana) in her right. Despite the salty language, there was no menace in the air, and absolutely no anti-British feeling after the BP disaster.

One waitress, Deborah Gilchrist, in Fiorella’s on Decatur Street in the French Quarter, told me how proud she was of her British ancestry. She even felt sorry for Tony Hayward, the former BP chief.

You should try Deborah’s etouffee (Cajun shrimp stew) or her red beans and rice, the favourite dish of Bonnie Parker (as in Bonnie and Clyde). Parker, who’d have turned 100 in October, kept nipping home for red beans and rice while she and Clyde Barrow were on the run.

You should try Deborah’s Cajun shrimp stew

While you’re in the city, take a Mississippi paddlesteamer up America’s largest river system. A day trip takes you as far as Chalmette, site of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the last great fight between Britain and the Americans – when future President Andrew Jackson thrashed us in the closing conflict of the War of 1812. ‘Old Hickory’ Jackson is commemorated in a spirited equestrian statue in Jackson Square, in the French Quarter.

Also in the square is the classical St Louis cathedral and the best historical museum, the Cabildo – a colonnaded, pedimented number, once the seat of government in the Spanish colonial period. But music is the thing you should really go in search of. If you want to hear the really good stuff, venture out of the Quarter.

There are some dangerous parts in New Orleans, but you’ll be fine if you take a ten minute cab east to Vaughan’s (800 Lesseps St), a jazz bar just like the one in that old Southern Comfort cinema commercial, the now poignant ad where they dance the night away as a hurricane approaches.

It's alive and vital to America’s musical soul

In the old slave quarter of Treme – where jazz was born a century ago – you’ll find the Candlelight Lounge, where funeral processions take place on Sundays (like the one in the Bond film, Live And Let Die). Mourners who aren’t close relatives follow the cortege to one of the city’s elegantly decayed cemeteries, but don't take part in the actual funeral. Afterwards, though, they join in the wild wake with effortlessly tuneful abandon.

The smarter part of town is the Garden District, all creamy wedding- cake colonial mansions straight out of Gone With The Wind. You’ll pass the upscale restaurant, Herbsaint, on St Charles Avenue, known for sauteed jumbo shrimp. As you work on your Louisiana brown Jamaica rice risotto, you'll see – and hear – the St Charles Streetcar rumble by.

There is no streetcar named Desire, but these Twenties carriages have all the romance and heart-racing, glamorous thrill that Tennessee Williams bottled in the play. The streetcar is only $1.25 a ride.

New Orleans hasn’t completely recovered all its pre-Katrina romance. Large stretches remain ravaged by the hurricane. Jungle has swallowed up some houses that were under 14ft of water for a month.

Many others, though, have been rebuilt (some by Brad Pitt, through his Make It Right foundation). The tours aren’t ghoulish. I encourage you to take them. They will remind you of the horrors that might have killed this great city, if it wasn’t so exceptionally alive and so vital to America’s musical, spiritual and historical soul.