The Most Alive City On Earth: A Local's Guide To New Orleans

There's a moment, Robin Barnes tells me, when you step off the plane in New Orleans and something shifts. "People say they can taste the city when they land," she says, laughing. "I call that humidity. But there is something." She pauses, then: "It makes you feel at home instantly."

Barnes would know. The Songbird of New Orleans is a ninth-generation local of a city with history that stretches back further than the United States itself. New Orleans is over 300 years old; America is celebrating 250. The city was already throwing parties before the nation existed, and hasn't really stopped since. She has toured the world on the back of her latest album, Louisiana Love, and keeps coming home. When I ask her to be our guide for a first visit, she leans forward and doesn't come up for air for the better part of an hour.

Eat

Food, in New Orleans, is not a backdrop to the experience. It is the experience. "If I like you, I want to feed you," Barnes says. "You're coming to my house, we're going to break bread. You're probably going to eat something you've never heard of in your life – like crawfish – and it's going to be amazing."

Start your mornings at Café Du Monde – beignets, café au lait, and one of the 800-year-old oak trees that shade the path to the café's open-air terrace. It's the obvious choice, and it's obvious for a reason. For a proper Creole brunch, Barnes sends you to Little Dizzy's on Esplanade Avenue, a family-owned restaurant she's been going to since she was five. "I used to volunteer to pick up lunch for everyone at my summer job just to get a little lagniappe," she says – lagniappe being the Louisiana term for something extra, a concept that governs most things here.

For lunch, the move is Pêche – a seafood restaurant where you order the fried bread rolls (submerged in butter, not hush puppies, something considerably better), a dozen Murder Point oysters, and seafood gumbo with no rice. "Cut out the middleman," Barnes says, with the authority of someone who knows what she’s talking about. "Just get all gumbo.”

For a meal with genuine history, she steers visitors toward Dooky Chase in the Tremé – one of the most significant Black restaurants in America, a Civil Rights gathering point where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr once ate. The late chef Leah Chase was so iconic that Disney based the cook in The Princess and the Frog on her. Emeril Lagasse trained in her kitchen. The Creole cooking is as good as the story.

And wherever you eat dinner, one non-negotiable dessert: Bananas Foster at Brennan's, invented in that very kitchen by the family Barnes calls the Kennedys of Louisiana. Banana, whiskey, ice cream, and a tableside flambé that is more theatre than strictly necessary. In this city, that's a recommendation, not a criticism.

Listen

Bourbon Street is for people who don't know about Frenchman Street. A few blocks from the Quarter, Frenchman is where New Orleans music lives in its most honest form – original, evolving, and performed by musicians who are giving everything for a percentage of the bar. Barnes's venues of choice are the Spotted Cat Music Club and DBA, both hosting live music until 2, 3, sometimes 4 in the morning. Before you walk in, tune into WWOZ (90.7 FM): the city's community radio station broadcasts a "Live Wire" segment every hour listing exactly who's playing where that night.

One rule: tip the bands. Generously.

New Orleans music isn't confined to venues. Walk through the French Quarter on any given day and a band might just start playing in the street because they felt like it. Stand still long enough and the music finds you.

See

Most visitors confine themselves to the French Quarter and go home thinking they've seen New Orleans. They haven't.

City Park – the one of the largest urban parks in the United States – offers trails, lagoons, wildlife and towering live oaks that have been standing for centuries. Crescent Park runs two miles along the Mississippi, with views of the river and the city's famous skyline that most visitors never encounter.

In the French Quarter, the New Orleans Historic Collection is unlike any museum Barnes has seen anywhere. "Most museums, it's like, here's one or two rooms," she says. "This is the entire Quarter." A map leads you through ten to fifteen preserved historical homes across several blocks – you're in the street, not looking at a display case. Jackson Square, nearby, is worth more than a passing glance: get a tarot card reading, watch the street performers, or simply sit in a place that has been at the centre of American history for three centuries.

For something entirely off the tourist trail, Barnes sends you to StudioBE in the Bywater – an abandoned warehouse transformed floor-to-ceiling by artist BMike, whose large-scale portraits of Black cultural icons cover every surface. "Any celebrity, any larger-than-life artist or dignitary – they go to this place," she says.

Shop

Magazine Street is where Barnes does her shopping, and where New Orleans's neighbourhood retail feels genuinely alive. Suit stores, hat shops, jewellery – walk it after a long lunch and let it take as long as it takes.

Do: Mardi Gras

Barnes's favourite day of the year is the Friday before Mardi Gras.

It begins at six in the morning with the Greasing of the Poles on Royal Street – a tradition in which local celebrities grease the French Quarter's iron balcony poles with Vaseline, theoretically to stop partygoers climbing them, practically as an excuse for thousands of people to pack the street at dawn and watch. "Each year it's a different theme," Barnes says. "When I did it, I just sang – I've got nothing else. But some people do a full costume and a dance-off. It's insane."

After breakfast, the city splits. Women head to events like the Shim Sham Ball – day parties where, Barnes says, "the most beautiful women in the world dress like zebras, full prosthetics, everything." Men have their own gathering. They reconvene at noon, usually at Galatoire's, before the afternoon spills onto Bourbon Street – where the collective chaos hits its zenith

From there: a pre-parade party headlined by a major act, then four hours of parades through the streets, then home to change, then the ball – formal, extravagant, with the kind of headliners Barnes rattles off without seeming particularly impressed: Lionel Richie, Sting, The Who. "Back to back to back," she says. The ball ends around 4am. The next day, the parades start at eight.

"You can always just go to one thing," she adds, charitably.

If Mardi Gras isn't possible, New Orleans runs festivals year-round – more than any other city in the United States. There's a festival for jazz, for food, for French film. At one point, Barnes notes, "we had a festival for everything. There was a mac and cheese festival. A bacon festival." The mayor has since put a cap on them. This is, apparently, a point of some local controversy.

New Orleans, Barnes says near the end of our conversation, has something no other city does – something harder to package than jazz or gumbo or century-old architecture. "Whether you meet someone from here or just step off the plane, there's this loveable warmth that makes you feel at home instantly."

I tell her she's describing herself. She laughs. "Oh, me? Well, thank you."

But she means it about the city. And the most New Orleans thing she says comes when I ask how a place absorbs so much loss – the hurricanes, the floods, decades of hardship – and keeps going with such apparent joy.

"We're taught from birth that loss is guaranteed. So every day needs to be a celebration of life." She lets it sit. "That's why we party so much."

Planning a trip to the American South? Head to visittheusa.com for more recommendations.