Our office is closed today due to it being Good Friday. New Orleans is very catholic, so it’s a no-brainer that today the city is closed. Once, CS went to a local seafood restaurant on a Friday during Lent and (gasp!) ordered a hamburger. There was apparently a hush in the room before the waiter said they would serve no meat to him. Food and catholicism–two strong tenets in this city.

So as I was driving around today I was listening to local talk radio (fact is, most of the radio in this city is now talk radio–is that weird?). The guest on the show was Tom Fitzmorris, local food critic. He was talking about his list of 33 best local fish and shellfish. Oysters came in number one (and I totally agree!!) and pompano came in number two (I do like a good Pompano en Papillote even though Fitzmorris says this way of preparing it stifles the flavor of the fish). There was some debate whether frogs and turtles should be included on this list (it was even pointed out that turtles have shells!), but Fitzmorris stuck to his guns. Of course, all this talk of food so early in the morning caused me to go to McDonald’s for breakfast. Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone down here, but not only did I not fast (some will argue since I am pregnant I am exempt, and my position is that I simply don’t follow these church rules in any event, but if I did, I’d be “old school” about them and follow them to the letter–I mean, people, how hard is it to be “forced” to eat seafood here once a week?? It’s a treat and a tradition!) but I ate sausage, too.

I drove down St. Charles Avenue–something I do about once a week–and I recently noticed these gargoyles atop a church. I like them because they are non-ostentatious and easy to overlook. Then I zipped over to Magazine to show you this. Sorry he’s blurry–I am still getting back into the swing of taking my own photographs. He’s a cement pig (he’s actually one of a set) that stands guard in front of someone’s house (mostly you see lions–they are the only pigs I’ve ever seen). For St. Patrick’s Day, they adorned the pigs with green wigs and green sparkly hats. I always slow down to get a good look at these.

Fitzmorris was also talking about restaurants that’d be open for Easter–apparently some places will be open that are usually closed on Sundays. But here’s what he said that was most interesting to me: Pre-Katrina there were 809 restaurants open in the NOLA area. Wanna guess what that number is today? I’d have put it at about, mmmm, no more than 2/3s (but closer to half). The actual number: 798. We are only 11 restaurants short of where we were Pre-K. Seriously folks, wow. What this says to me isn’t that the city is “back to normal” but that, man, we likes our food here! I mean, apparently we can live without hospitals and police stations and pumping stations. But get our restaurants back opened already!! Seriously, from a market standpoint, restaurants are free enterprise–not dependent on the government or its money. And they are blowing and going. Whereas those government projects (hospitals and police stations and pumping stations and the like) continue to be in a quagmire. What Fitzmorris said is that New Orleanians’ relationship with food is steeped in tradition and culture and that is why so many restaurants are back online. Amen, brother.

One last NOLA tidbit. Metroblogging New Orleans has an interesting post about the three Easter parades that you can catch by standing in one place in the French Quarter this Sunday. The post ends with asking, “where else?” Indeed.