IT TAKES A VILLAGE

ON THE EVER-SRIFTING BANKS OF THE MISSISSIPPI SITS NEW ORLEANS, A SINGULAR MECCA OF JAZZ, JAMBALAYA, AND MARDI GRAS. TWENTY YEARS AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA, LESLIE PARISEAU LAYS BARE HER RESILIENT COMMUNITY

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New Orleans is a city of mood.” So says chef Serigne Mbaye, who I'm sitting with one morning in September. We've been discussing the merits of Parkway's po'boys—those iconic Louisiana sandwiches—and the old-school kitchen at Commander's Palace. Growing up in Senegal and New York City, Mbaye would cook with his mother. His Uptown restaurant, Dakar Nola, weaves together childhood memories with his haute restaurant experiences and the African roots of New Orleans.

“New Orleans is a woman,” declares Biba Islah. An eighth-generation French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole New Orleanian, Islah does hair, make-up, and healing, and she reads tarot at Patron Saint, the wineshop and bar that my husband, Tony Biancosino, and I opened a year ago in the Lower Garden District. We talk in her studio, tucked away on the ground floor of an old bread factory in the Irish Channel neighbourhood. The night before we debuted our restaurant and tavern, St Pizza, a couple of doors down from Patron Saint, she cleansed it with sage and rum. “New Orleans is empathetic. She feels everything,” suggests Islah.

“New Orleans is a two-way embrace,” offers Ben Jaffe, creative director of French Quarter jazz club institution, Preservation Hall, when I ask him what it takes to endure here. “It comes with what I call the New Orleans tax.” This manifests not in dollars, he explains, but in the responsibility to love and understand the city as it is.