Brian R.
Yelp
Bitter, horrible espresso. The pastries and basic breakfasts are pretty good for anywhere other than pre-Ida and pre-COVID New Orleans, once America's food Mecca.
In a New Orleans where so many food places remain shuttered from the flight of culinary and service people caused by the twin catastrophes?
Beggars can't be choosers.
With only one equally challenged competitor, in the Ponchetrain Hotel, without going way out of the way in search of breakfast, it's a winner, even if I have to drink water, and find a PJs or a Starbucks, later.
The salmon bagel is flavor overload. Everything bagel. Overly flavored cream cheese. Capers onions and some very iffy cucumber piled on in rite homage to what a stock salmon bagel is supposed to be. I did it on a plain bagel and it was too much. The salmon, which is delicious, on its own, gets lost in the culinary brutality.
The savory pastry with cheese and herbs that is a sort of a kouign amann was delicious.
The bigger problem is, like many NOLA eateries, there's not much of it.
When you only put out a tiny handful of your pastries, a day, to a line of people 10-15 long all morning, on a Wednesday where surviving restaurants take day 3-4 days off, every week, because of this and that shortage, you're not serving the community or the large legions of tourists, well.
You're wasting the opportunity to establish the place, as well, with tank coffee out of a poorly calibrated machine.
Service is pleasant but stressed at the counter. The only person who was truly pleasant was the gal dropping food, who had more ink on her than the pages of a Charles Dickens novel.
(People, of the ADD Internet Age, who get bored reading a gator farm tourism pamphlet, ask a grandparent, who remembers rotary phones, Yellow Pages, and books, about that joke.)
If Streetcar Cafe, next door, was still open, as were several of the nearby hotel restaurants, this place would be a whistling ghost town, with coffee, quantity and counter service fails like that.
Welcome to the NOLA New Normal.
