Passionfruit Butter

What are you doing this weekend?

I’ll be attending this lovely bonanza of inexpensive glee, New Orleans food (always a winner), beautiful weather (though let us not take that for granted), and the kind of decadent, unrepenting, borderline insidious culture that I’ve been so lucky to grow up with.

Recently, the lovely Su-Jit at The Vicarious Food Whore so aptly noted that New Orleans goes crazy this time of year for festivals: French Quarter Fest, Taste of the Town, Jazz Fest, Ponchatoula Strawberry Fest (sweet mother of God, Ponchatoula Strawberry Fest), Oyster Fest, an Earth Day crawfish boil, an un-Jazz-Fest at Xavier to pump everyone up for the real deal… there are almost too many to list, and all of them happen in this brief frame of time in which loveliness is rampant, summer heats aren’t TOO sweltering, and everyone is just so. happy. to be. outside. Springtime is celebratory!

Anyway… this is the Road Food Fest’s first year, and I hope it won’t be the last. I will list its assets thusly:
1) Admission is free. What should we do this weekend? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we could pay $10 to go see “I Love You, Man” at Clearview. No, too expensive. We could support local businesses and pay $7 to go see something else at The Prytania, especially now that they sell gelato from La Divina Gelateria. Yes, but it’s far too beautiful outside to sit inside a cold dark theater, and besides, I’m hungry. Plus, I could do with saving a few bucks.
Um. Drag your poor butt to the French Quarter and you’ll get in for free. Small plates of deliciousness are only $3 to $5, so you could make an adventure out of it for potentially less money than you’d have spent on tickets and snacks at any movie theater.

2) 16 restaurants from all over the state of Louisiana, syndicated into one gorgeous setting for your epicurean pleasures.

3) Widespread involvement: this fest was put together by foodies located across the country, who wanted to bring good publicity and the best of the best of the best down-home Louisiana food to our city. Some big names involved are Jane and Michael Stern (they write for Gourmet) and Stephen Rushmore Jr. (only the creator of Road Food and Road Food Digest).

4) It coincides with the aforementioned Annual Oyster Jubilee on Bourbon Street, planned for this Saturday morning. Go there, eat up on those succulent, voluptuous, seductive little morsels (I, for one, subscribe to the urban myth that they’re aphrodisiacs), and join the NOLA-style second-line parade from Bourbon to Royal Street so you can partake of the road food heaven. Oysters are still in season. Get ‘em while they’re, uh, perfection in a rugged ugly shell.
4.5) The world’s longest oyster po-boy. ‘Nuff said.

5) By attending, you’ll be benefiting Café Reconcile: truly a remarkable, delicious, worthy-in-every-sense-of-the-word restaurant. Top-notch soul food that benefits the community by employing at-risk youth in the kitchen, on the floor, etc. It’s ingenious if you’re philanthropic and wholly delicious if you’re selfish. There is absolutely no reason you wouldn’t want to go.

6) Why would you ever pass up the opportunity to attend that communal, holy kind of crawfish/shrimp boil? There is no better way to consume crustaceans (and April is peak crawfish time). Okay, yeah, it’s not officially WITH the Road Food Fest, and, yeah, the free admission ends once you leave Royal Street. Tickets to this side project are $95 (and, yeah, I’ll be babysitting anyway), but it sounds like these people know what they’re doing. It should be a veritable feast and an unforgettable party.

7) Book signings abound! You’ll have plenty of summer reading to do.

8 ) If you’re from out of town, you can’t even use that as an excuse; the fest has struck up a deal with the august Hotel Monteleone, so you can get a room there for a relative bargain ($169/night).

9) I think that at this time of year, ecstasy is powdered and dispersed in the air. You thought that was pollen on your car? Think again. This hypothesis would probably explain why everyone and everything feels so joyous. Come out with us and inhale the euphoria.

10) Couch potatoes rejoice! This is a one-stop shop for your fried catfish, your oysters, your Plum Street snowballs, your everything.

There’s a full line-up here, but I’ll list a few of the things that have me bouncing up and down:
Bananas Foster bread pudding from Café Reconcile.
Creole crawfish sausage po-boy from Vaucresson.
12-hour roast beef with horseradish cream and pickled red onions from The Que Crawl.
Famous fried catfish (so good, so beautiful, so simple) from Dunbar’s Seafood.

I can hardly wait. Never before did I think I’d be disappointed to have tortellini for lunch, but today, it just pales in comparison. This will be sheer beauty, the second coming of Jesus, beatitude.

And, in case you were wondering, here’s a definition of roadfood, jacked from the eponymous website:

“Roadfood means great regional meals along highways, in small towns and in city neighborhoods. It is non-franchised, sleeves-up food made by cooks, bakers, pitmasters, and sandwich-makers who are America’s culinary folk artists. Roadfood is almost always informal and inexpensive; and the best Roadfood restaurants are colorful places enjoyed by locals (and savvy travelers) for their character as well as their menu.
It is our intention that Roadfood.com will lead the way to:

• great local color
• the best regional specialties
• unforgettable diners, celestial barbecue, and four-star pig-outs galore!”

So there you have it! The New Orleans Road Food Festival. I’d better see you there.