December 13, 2019 • 57 mins
The forces that made New Orleans’ drinking culture unique in the U.S. also made the city what it is today. We sit down with a historian who explores and explains New Orleans through its cocktails, Elizabeth Pearce of Drink and Learn.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Although I'm welcome to say your production of iHeartRadio and
Stuff Media. I'm Annies and I'm Lauren Vocal Bam. And
today we have an interview for you with one Elizabeth
pres And uh, this is one from our New Orleans trip,
which was just about a year ago. It will a
bit more now, Yeah, I was right before Thanksgiving. Gosh right, okay. Um.
Elizabeth Here's um is a drinks historian, Um who lives
(00:31):
in New Orleans and has this amazing podcast called Drink
and Learn, which is also a tour. She she will
take you on tour around New Orleans and talk about
some of the classic cocktails and ingredients that you will
find in the bars there. She's also the author of
Drink Debt New Orleans. UM. This is a book that
is a guide to the best cocktail bars, neighborhood pubs,
and all night dives. Yeah, and you probably if you
(00:55):
listen to our New Orleans mini series, you probably will
recognize her voice. For used put a bit of her
because she was just a wealth of fantastic information. It's
delight to talk to you, oh so much so. Yeah,
and particularly like New Orleans is a place that's very
famous for its drinking culture right now. Um. But also
alcohol has really shaped a lot of the industry there
(01:18):
for the entire time that New Orleans has been a thing. Yeah,
and it's a really unique drinking scene from probably anywhere
else in the United States. Absolutely, Um, for reasons that
that Elizabeth gets into an amazing, fascinating, bizarre detail. Yeah,
we could have kept going and talking to her forever,
but we had such a pack schedule. I just remember
(01:40):
at the end being like, but wait, you can you
can tell me about the water and she's like, yes,
you have to. Yeah, yeah, and right this this was
one that went on way longer than I think we
intended for it to, um, but was not long enough.
So many of our interviews could be described that way. Lute. Yeah,
(02:02):
but yeah we will at former Lauren and Annie and
Elizabeth take it away. I'm Elizabeth Pierce. I'm a drinks
the storian here in New Orleans. Good story, right, Yeah,
it seems obvious and then people say how did you
how did you end up here and not New Orleans?
(02:23):
But you know, like how did you start doing this?
And do you want to hear it's a It's a
super short story. Even if it were a long story, okay.
So I helped to create and open the Southern Food
and Beverage Museum. I was the founding curator there, despite
having no academic background in museums or history. A strong
liberal arts education prepares you to do anything, which I
(02:45):
bet both of you, all of you who might agree
with right absolutely so um. I worked with Lois Williams
for four years um learning how to make something out
of nothing, and that mattered because the museum opened in
early two thousand eight, and of course that year ended
with the Great Financial Apocalypse. Funny dried up, everybody got
laid off. I went on unemployment, drank heavily, and dated
(03:09):
a musician, which is the holy trinity if you just
need to shift your professional path. So two thousand nine
was the last year. It was a year there were
no jobs. It was the year that I learned that
both unemployment and musicians run out after six months. My
favorite joke, even though we're both still friends and the
museum stayed open through volunteers, that I needed a paying gig.
(03:30):
So I decided to take all of the programming that
I had been presenting that I had written and presenting
with the museum and I began to sell that to
convention and meeting planners. So it was the history of
New Orleans through food and drink, And after a couple
of years, I saw which way the wind was blowing.
There are a lot of people in this town that
can talk about gumbo, but very few were grounding the
narrative of the city through its drinks. Thus was born
(03:52):
drink and learn what a what a drink? And learned
to drink and learn attempts to um, to ground the
narrative of a place through its drengths in the same
way that we're all pretty comfortable understanding history through war
is very grim um or politics or religion, um or
(04:14):
even art. Uh. And now I think even food people
are much more comfortable with um consuming culture or or
under framing culture. You know, in terms of food, the
drinks thing is always a surprise. But the thing is
it's there even when it's not there. So even when
it's illegal, it's still part of the story. And when
I say drinks historian, because I'm in New Orleans, everybody
(04:36):
assumes that means booze, but it doesn't. Necessarily I can
talk about the non alcoholic stuff, and frankly water. The
story of like drinkable water is um is fantastic and
important and um and obviously still not available in parts
of the world. So it is Uh. It's the history
of commerce and sanitation and of despair, enjoy and prohibition
(05:02):
and consumption and all of those things are are in
our drinks. Um. I'm stopping myself from going on a
giant water radical rate. That sounds incredibly Yeah. I just
put it over there. Yeah yeah, how however long you
have to talk with us, I'm going to come back
to it. But UM, but so how did how did
(05:26):
New Orleans become the I mean so many drinks started here? Um?
What environment let that happen? So I'm gonna answer a
slightly larger question than that, which is like why New
Orleans and drinking? Because that is that is how people
and New Orleans and drinking is how many people understand
(05:50):
my city. UM. Some people come for the architecture, and
they totally should. We have beautiful architecture, we have amazing
food and music. But there are other cities that also
have these elements. But somehow or additionally, UM, people come
here and they expect to drink a lot, or they
(06:12):
expect to see a lot of people drinking, even if
they're not drinking, and they will either look upon in
amusement or judgment or horror. Um. But the expectation is
always there. And it's actually part of the reason that
I ended up kind of focusing on the drinking, because
I felt like it was a distinguishing element about the city.
(06:34):
Like you cannot understand New Orleans unless you understand it's drinking.
You're not required to participate in it, but you listen,
need to know what's going on. And um, I think, well,
there are a lot of factors, but you gotta go
all the way back to the founding of the colony,
and we were pretty much left alone by Frozen. You're
(07:00):
founded by France. We were left alone by France because
they couldn't figure out a way to make money from
New Orleans. Tried indigo, didn't really work, furs would spoil
unlike UM. I mean, there's some some tanning that went on,
but not like Canada where anything's freezing like forever furs
um cotton. Cotton will grow here, it's too wet, and
(07:23):
they hadn't figured out sugar. And plus they had all
of these colonies in the Caribbean, Santa Bang in particular,
so sugar they had, and not long after, you know,
they had the colony, but they were not really taking
care of it, which meant that boats were not coming here. Um,
(07:44):
the food was not coming on the regular. A lot
of people that were sent here were not people who
could necessarily take care of themselves in a swampy environment,
like thieves and prostitutes and criminals in general. Um. The
illustrative quote about that is there was a governor, our
last French governor, Carolac. He was sent over to kind
(08:04):
of clean up the town and he told Louis whichever
Louis it was fourteen fifteen suthing like if I sent
home all of the criminal elements of New Orleans or Louisiana,
there would be no one left. So but what that
what that means is, um, you had people who were
(08:26):
already stewed to not entirely respect the law and then
had nothing to support the thought that they should. So
smuggling begins quickly, um with primarily the Caribbean, because it's
like right there, although things are also coming down the
river on Mrsimi River and you're getting um, you know,
(08:47):
basic food stuffs, but you're also getting liquor because liquor keeps.
People wanted wine wine from France if they could get it,
but wine on a sea voyage unless it's fortified like
port or Madeira, it's not showing up in the best
of state. UM. So like from I think seventeen forty
(09:08):
seven forty two because when you have the first taverns
that open licensed by the crown, and the fees to open.
These taverns supported uh the charity hospital and a and
like and also assisted orphans. So I love this. From
(09:30):
the very early states, we were drinking, you know, for
the sick and the children. Um. But but it's because
like we're in a swamp. Life was hard, the government's
ignoring you. Things are goind of crappy. Then like you
you drink, right, this is what people do and people
continue to do in difficult situations. And you can contrast
(09:52):
that with another colony that is growing around the same time,
and that would be in New England. But the people
who settled in New England, we're not thieves, criminals. They
were very earnest, they were hard working. They believed in um,
you know that that God had brought them to this
new place and the way that the pilgrims drank was
(10:18):
they drank beer because that was safe, you know, safe
safe drinking instead of water. Um, and being a drunk
was was viewed as something that could be very detrimental
to the colony. If you're drunk, thing you can't plow,
can't build a cabin or whatever. It wasn't only about
(10:38):
the morality of intoxication. It was about the logistics of
the colony. And that was not around here. That was
not an issue. It was a very independent streak um.
And also way more men than families. The women come later, um.
(11:05):
And so you have you have a lot of single
men in a pretty crappy situation with unreliable food. Maybe
you know, hunting, maybe the Native Americans are going to
give you something. But like the one solid the one
through line is rom doesn't spoil um or brandy if
(11:31):
you could get it. And this continues even as New
Orleans grows and we become prosperous because we get into
the sugar industry, which I think Jessica might have talked
with you all about a little bit like the influence
of the Caribbean and Santa may So the city flourishes
in the eighteen thirties, So now we have families and stuff. However,
(11:52):
who is coming here to unload their raft from Kentucky?
These like wild drinking, They were called kane. Tuck's just
still a word we toss around it right now and then.
And you know, it's like a jug of whiskey chained
to the rudder you're pulling down the river. You arrive,
(12:16):
you sell whatever it is you're selling, and now you're
a single man in a port town with money in
your pocket, and you multiply that by the thousands. So
it is this. It isn't the only thing that's happening here,
but it is happening for a considerable amount of time
(12:40):
that New Orleans is a party town. And in fact,
even when we were still a French colony, like the
news back in Spain which just kind of talk about
New Orleans as this like exotic other we were always
framed kind of in terms of the way that the
Caribbean was, but we didn't have the place intation economy yet. Um.
(13:02):
There were people of color were enslaved, some free also, Um,
So it was this zotic locale, but not in the
same way that Santa Me wants um. But anyway, so
all of these like facets contribute to an identity, and
that one of the pillars of that identity is about
(13:24):
cutting loose, and drinking is an integral part of that.
Eventually that is like woven into how people understand New Orleans.
And the food is coming into because of France, you know,
like French, just like you're what you eat is a
part of who you are. And and then we you know,
(13:46):
we've become Americans, like a particular kind of a folks
coming down the river, and and then you know, and
then here we are, and everything that gets sort of
created or tied onto that reinforces this very very early
iteration of the city's sensibility. There's a really great book
(14:08):
that you will not have time to read, and it
is called Accidental City and it gets to you to
eighteen o three, the Louisiana Purchase. And I read that
book and I was like, like, that's my city. Like
we had we were who we were by eighteen o three,
and then it just continued. Now, oh, when did the
(14:31):
bar scene develop kind of kind of what it is
like like sort of what you see to today, which
is actually a very large question. I suppose because there's
a lot of different bars around the room. Game. Yeah, um,
so I think that again the the So there's this
(14:51):
Southern sense of hospitality, and that comes from the fact
that most of the South was a grarian and rural
So this is like going back to the Greeks and
stuff like, you have to be hospitable to the stranger
because they've probably traveled very far and there's nowhere else,
you know, there's no else to go. And so that
Southern nous is something that becomes a part of New Orleans,
(15:14):
even though we are a city. So hospitality is like
in there, and that translates to a plus, like how
can you make money. We have a lot of people
coming here and they're thirsty or they're hungry, and so
bars open in places where they're going to be successful,
(15:35):
which means you need a thriving economy or you need
enough economy to sustain it. So by the eighteen thirties,
New Orleans is becoming very, very wealthy. And while fortunes
dip after the Civil War, they don't entirely because we're
a port town. In contrast to um parts of the
South that were completely depended on cotton and like that's
(15:58):
all they had or something. Um. And we were a
tourist town and we didn't you know, we weren't burned.
And people people keep coming here. UM. So places are
open because they're going to be able to stay open
because people want to come here. And by by the
late nineteenth century, everybody was like, oh, it's a fun
place to be. So I think you you draw entrepreneurs um,
(16:23):
whatever that means, to places to open a business that
they believe it will be successful in. And New Orleans
has like there are there are things were not very
good at. But one of the things we are good
at is showing showing people a good time, and so
you want to It's kind of like what happened in Nashville.
It's like it starts with one brewery and then you're, oh,
(16:43):
the brewis goes not so bad, and then let's have
another brewery, and then you know, and then it grows
and grows. And so I would say the the quantity
of the bars is you know, sort of comes up
out of that long line of like knowing I'm an
open there's a lot of people They're gonna come drink. Also,
locals drink because the summer's summer slow, and so you
(17:09):
need the locals to keep you open when it's not
you know, tourist season. However, um, I would say over
the last well, like since Katrina, definitely, but maybe over
the last twenty years or so, the city has been
um embracing external trends, like we never quit serving cocktails,
(17:35):
but the consoles were pretty like basic, like a you know,
the old fashioned in the Manhattan. The standbys never went
away because people drink like their parents and their grandparents here.
I think the rest of America by the sixties and
seventies people are like, screw the old man, whatever he's doing,
I'm not going to do that. But here people would
(17:55):
continue to go to restaurants and bars that they their
parents have gone to grandparents, and you order sort of
the same thing. The old fashioned never died. But eventually
you have other people who come in and say, there's
this craft movement like fresh Juice and you know, and
(18:16):
all of that, and you know, I mean got Neil
Bodenheimer at Cure. He really was like he's a homeboy,
and he went away and then he came back and
he opened here and he said, he's like this is
gonna be This is a New York bar, This is
not any Warleans bar. And and he actually uh ended
(18:40):
up kind of anchoring and a neighborhood that has been revitalized.
Uh So he saw that opportunity and he kind of
could see ahead too that this could be a town
that can embrace not just an older way of drinking,
but a newer way of drinking. Why do you think
that sense of tradition um exists here? And where you know,
(19:04):
every time we do an episode about a park tale
like we're like and then there was a dark time
of the nineteen eighties, Yeah, where everything sacks on the
beach and um, what what do you think that that's
as a traditions instrum here? Well, I mean I think
that we are a city whose sportunes have been built
on presenting an ideal that people arrive here expecting that
(19:33):
simultaneously we also believe in so like if no one
ever came to listen to a jazz musician ever again,
people would still like learn to play instruments because that
is a part of our cities culture. But we and
(19:56):
I it's like as New Orleanians, but especially those of
us who work in the hospitality industry. We are performing
New Orleans for you. And so these elements, this like
cocktail culture or drinking culture, actually let's call it drinking culture,
was defined early on, like late nineteenth century, like these,
(20:20):
these the satarak, the old fashion in Manhattan, like these
things have just been part of the through line, this thread,
and so we just kept doing the same dance over
and over. Plus we like them. They're delicious, uh, I mean,
there are historic cocktails that nobody drinks anymore because they're disgusting,
(20:42):
you know, like the good ones, the good ones emerge.
We have some more for you of our interview with
Elizabeth the First we have a quick break for word
from our sponsor. We're back, Thank you sponsor. Let's get
(21:02):
back into the interview. So I do want to tell
you something though, because I think you're your listeners would
be interested in knowing why we have open containers, right absolutely, yeah,
all right, So you're going to get a very short
history of drinking in public in America. Looks like five
centiss So, drinking in America in public was legal until
(21:27):
about the nineteen sixties. What was illegal was public drunkenness,
and that goes like the pilgrim thing that I told
you about. So in the nineteen fifties, there was an
alderman in Chicago who had been hearing from the police
that they were struggling with this thing that was called bottles.
(21:49):
So it's a group of singlemen, indigence or homeless or whatever,
and they pull their money and they buy one bottle
liquor stand on a corner, passing around. Eventually there'd be
a fight, would be some sort of trouble, and the
cops said, we want to stop this before it starts.
(22:09):
How can we do this? And so the city council said, okay,
no more drinking in public. Now you don't have to
wait for somebody to be drunk or to cause a
fight or whatever. We're gonna nip this problem in the button.
Over time, other cities began adopting this because vagrancy laws
(22:35):
began to be tossed out as um unconstitutional. You can't
arrest some money just because they're hanging around, and so
this was a way for cities to get in front
of a homeless problem, what I can call the hobo factor.
And of course there were some people who were targeted
(22:57):
in some people who weren't people of color, You're core
and um these laws are enacted piecemeal cities, counties across
the country, and then of course if one county does it,
then the county next to it will do because then
people are just moving right, So eventually it becomes pretty
(23:18):
much illegal to drink anywhere in public in the United
States by like the mid nineteen seventies. In the meantime,
the Orleans had a vice district prior to World War One.
It closed actually because of World War One, because all
of these soldiers were getting STDs, and the U. S
(23:40):
Government was like, if you want to be a port
and embarkation, you have to um not have all the
free love. So uh, this Vice district was also a
home of jazz. Story Bill and like Louis Armstrong play
the Storyville King all or all these great musicians. So
(24:03):
that gets shut down and then it's prohibition, which like
everybody Charlie durned during Prohibition. But the clubs are you know,
less um less accessible, less uh less reliable because there
were still raids and things. And it's not until World
(24:25):
War two when we become a port of embarkation again
and you have tens of thousands of single young men
with money in their pocket coming through here looking for
a good time. And Bourbon Street was a commercial street.
It was not an entertainment district. But a lot of
these clubs that had closed before World War One kind
(24:46):
of begin reopening. You create this new district. And so
it's not until after and there's this it's actually I'm
pulling this information from a book by Richard Campanella, which
is Bourbon's Bourbon's Street, a geography. Um so he he
did all the hard work on this, and so it's
(25:07):
not until after World War two that you really begin
to see Bourbon Street showing up in like travel magazines
or tourism things. And again it's clubs where people go
inside to listen to music, to eat, and it's it's
like going to Vegas and going to see a show,
you know, and locals went there. It was classy, where
(25:29):
your gloves you had, you know. So unfortunately, many of
these places were owned by the mob, and they were
money laundering. There was prostitutional gambling happening in the back.
And eventually we get an earnest d a who's like,
I'm gonna shut all this down, conducting lots of raids,
(25:49):
and it becomes this quote of seedier and seedier locals
don't want to go um. If you don't have vice money,
then you can't keep up the the shine the inside
and little I little these clubs UM they either close
or they're barely staying open, and nobody wants to go in.
And so one bright day, an unknown employee opened a
(26:15):
window and sold a drink through that window. You don't
even have to come in my club. I'll just sell
you a drink right here. And soon a lot of
people started doing it, particularly on Bourbon Street. The city
council tried to shut it down. Um the vall was
overturned as being like too vague because I think they
(26:36):
wrote it hastily. But then by then everybody's making a
lot of money and people really like it because you
can't do it anywhere else in the United States. Initially
the plan was to just keep it in the French Quarter,
and they decided it would be too confusing for tourists,
which is actually what Savannah did. Savannah kept it in
a historic district, but not the rest of the city.
(26:59):
But even pushing it, everybody's pushing it because if you're
like one block over. Why can't I do that? You know? So?
Uh so here we are, so that is why it
is legal to walk around with a drink here. But
I really I always encourage visitors to try to drink
in the open like we do, which is it's not
(27:22):
a desperate, forced march where you have to arrive at
a destination of profound intoxication in a very short time.
But instead it's just like we pour a go cop
as we call him, go cup. My husband and I
(27:45):
poor a go cup and we walk our dog, or
if we're walking down the street to a friends for
dinner a couple of blocks away, poor a go cup,
which is frankly, I think a lot of people do
in in this country, but they put it in a furnace,
you know. Um we I have had beer at children's
birthday parties in public, you know, on the on the levee.
(28:08):
And it isn't this unlike the rest of the country
where drinking in public is now associated with vagrancy and
poverty and it's seedy or vulgar um. Here it just
is it's just a delight. It's very civilized and it
(28:31):
isn't hasty. And if you have a drink in your hand.
And this is true for coffee too, but you have
a beer, it'll kind of slow you down and makes
you pause, kind of look around, like, oh, I had
noticed that house in my neighborhood before that balcony, stop
(28:52):
and listen to a musician, Like it alters the way
that you interact in public space. And the other thing
that I think it does, and this is stretching it
a little bit, but like go with me, Okay, when
you are in a restaurant, we all were all at
(29:14):
a table and if someone came and joined us, we
would look askance at them. That is weird because this
is like our area and it's like we planted a
flag right safer. But if you're at a bar where
(29:35):
people sit next to you and they will talk to you,
and you do not think there is anything amiss with that.
Now you may not talk back to them, or I
maybe creepy or whatever, but the the interaction is publicly
sanctioned and it often leads to some really delightful encounters unexpected.
(29:58):
You know, you meet people in a bar, you don't
meet in a restaurant the same way. And so I
believe that the walking with the drink and carry the
spirit of the bar, which that it makes you just
a little more open to the chance encounter the possibility. Um.
(30:23):
Yeah too engage with the world around you. Yeah. And
if it's not, I mean a lot of other a
lot of other cultures in America, I think think of
drinking as like a way to get drunks and it
has to be No. I mean it does, it does,
(30:46):
and it can and we do. Um. But the other
thing is, in general, I mean, let's all acknowledge like
alcoholism is an illness and it is a problem. There
are a lot of but there are a lot of
problems that are around. So I'm not condoning anybody who
(31:08):
you know, struggles with that. Having said that, Um, we
live in what was in a country that is governed
by a very profound Protestant ethic. Um. You know, how
many listicals about productivity can there possibly be? You think
you're you think you've seen them all, and there's there's
(31:31):
just more and books about getting things done right. And
that is not a It's not high in the list
of values of New Orleans. It doesn't mean that we
don't It doesn't mean that we don't accomplish anything, but
we value you know, interaction and family and friends, you
(31:55):
know all that. And so because of that, if you
have too much to do and you wake up hungover,
as long as you have not bothered anybody, then no
one is shaking their finger at you and saying, oh,
you wasted. You know, at the time, it's like this happens.
(32:15):
Trying not to make it happen too regularly. Um, but
like this is what it is to be human. It
is one of the things. And it goes like way back,
just so far back that you know, as early as
there was alcohol, there was toasting. And it's this way
(32:39):
to create an engage with community. And no, you don't
have to have it, but for some reason it helps
I tast No, I guess I say cheers. Yeah, it's
(33:03):
also my I signed my emails cheers. And it's how
Abigail and I end our podcast. Yeah. So now that
I think about it, they say, chairs, yeah, it's a
good one. Um. Do you do have a favorite cocktail
stories from most of those some of the big ones
in the class? Bo uh? I mean, you know, you
get I'm sure that most of them come down to
(33:25):
I was born at my bar and bourt things into
a glass but are there are there any really really
good works? Okay, So I'm not going to give too
much away about the Sazarak because I would encourage your
listeners to check out the Drink and Learn podcast and
listen to the Sazarak episode. UM. And the reason that
(33:47):
you should do that is because Um, Abigail and I
tell the entire history of New Orleans using only the
ingredients and a Sazerak cocktail. So the Sazarak is the
official cocktail of New Orleans. In two thousand eight, the
easy in a legislature passed a resolution making the Sazeract
the city's official drink. And that sounds like a joke,
but in fact it is. It is just rounded in
(34:09):
the story of the city and every component of it
was either invented here, found a home here is illustrative
of people who came here, whether it's French, Caribbean, American,
all of these forces that kind of combined to um
to inform the evolution of the city. UM. So that's
(34:36):
I mean, that's kind of it's it's a story I
tell a lot because I, uh, because I get hired
to do it. Um. But but yeah, they and I
think really more than any cocktail I can think of.
There's so much just literally in the glass. I like,
(34:58):
I listened to y'all's Manhattan, which tends to be more
representative of other cocktail histories, and it's like they're started
to be the seven. There was a new product Vermouth.
People are trying to figure out how to use it.
Maybe it happened here, maybe it happened there. It got
this great name of a place that was has a
(35:18):
lot of people. So everybody's like, hey, let's drink in Manhattan. UM.
And I have I've read Phil Green's book. It's great, UM,
but particularly because he talks about like what Vermouth did
and how it changes, how it so the Manhattan occurs
on a continuum of drinks starting with the original cocktail,
(35:38):
whiskey cocktail, UM, and it becomes called an old fashioned
because people begin doing all kinds of stuff with this
very basic thing. And then you have what I like
to call old man who shakes fists at skuy, who's like,
I want my whiskey cocktail the old fashioned way, And
eventually that is that's how it becomes called that. So
(36:02):
many cocktails the story that they tell they can be standalone,
but they're more interesting in looking at the continuum, it's
like what came before? How did this evolve? And it's
rarely about one guy um And I think that if
(36:24):
there's any takeaway here, you are never inventing a cocktail
in a vacuum. And all of your environment and all
of the history of drinking is like informing you. So
whenever people talk about like who invented the dacri, it's
(36:45):
like the Caribbean invented the dacori because you have rum,
and you have a lime, and you have sugar and
they're all there. And so people have been drinking dacris
like forever and then eventually it's like, oh, it's in
Cuba and there's this room and this sugar and this look,
(37:06):
this is the name of a place and I'm drinking
it here and I'm a white guy who you know
is gonna go back and tell my story. But so
that's like I guess. But when I say, like, when
you asked me like for a good story, that's that
to me is like the better story. And that's what this,
That's what drink and Learn is about. It's like if
(37:26):
you've got them all in a line, got all the
like all the cocktails you would get like the World
World History, and everyone says they wish that I were
their American history teacher, and I say it whiskey helps,
but but it's true. Um, I will tell you this
is probably not gonna make it in there, but I'm
(37:46):
going to tell you one of my favorite stories of
somebody making a drink. My friends Stevia Mata, who works
at Latitude twenty nine, fantastic TV bar, super talented bartender.
Um kind of made his way, worked his way, did
a lot of catering gigs withky soda, rum and coke
kind of thing. Didn't know anything about uh cocktails, and
(38:11):
so he parleyed a job into parleyed like this past
catering experience when I think he was underage, you know,
and the eventually gets a job at Bubba Gumps. So
somebody orders an old Fashioned and he doesn't know what
that is, and so we asked the bartender. It was
like a little guy, It's like, how do I make that?
What do I do? Because there was no internet? There's
(38:32):
not on your phone right like there was probably a
Mr Boston's or something. So he says, grab the bottle
with the paper on it. Meaning the bidders just make
it to put some put some whiskey and sugar, mush
up a cherry and then the bottle. At the paper
(38:52):
Steve made an old old Fashioned with Worcester sauce, and
it was it was not sent back. He made four
of them that night, presumably for the same person who
thought was an interesting I mean, like at its essence,
it is a bitter product, you know. Ummi. But yeah,
(39:15):
so that's my favorite, Megan a drink story, you know,
had Steve. If this makes it in there, it's not
anywhere else story. I don't think maybe he was here.
I've never thought about it, but I think that like
that anchovy note and risty she would it could actually
be really good with whiskey. Yeah, you have to have
a very little bit that I feel like he was
(39:36):
blug blug yeah. Um. Speaking again about the sense of
community around here, how does a lot of cultures are
a little bit jealousy close with their uh with with
some of their their cultural elements, you know, like or
(39:58):
or that they have a hard time I'm welcoming strangers
into participating. But food, it's rarely like that. Most people
want to share food and dream um and be that
is not what New Orleans is about? How uh can
you speak a little bit about that? So I grew
(40:19):
up an hour from here. My mother would would say,
would tell you that I am not from New Orleans.
And if you all live in Atlanta, you understand the
South is very It's like where are you from? It
means where you're born. And for a very long time,
if you said that you are from New Orleans and
somebody would say, where'd you go to school? And they
(40:40):
then high school so they can organized understand you in
terms of this city. Um, throughout all that time, we
were offering, we were selling our cities culture. Um, happily
(41:04):
you know, it's a good's pretty good way to make
a living and or you know, offering hospitality people come
and visit. But I do think that there was and
in some ways continues to be, and it's probably true
in a lot of cities there's two cities. There's the
city that you get to experience when you come here,
(41:27):
that we offer to you or sell you or show you.
And then every now and then you have little moments
where you get to peek into the other city is
the city where people live. And sometimes it's less glamorous
because like we have to do laundry and sometimes there's
something that's just very honest. I really I prefer not
(41:53):
to use the word authentic um that because like what
you know, what like what is offen? Everything is real,
nothing is fake. You know, you can touch it. But
is um a view that is lived a little more
lived in and it can be in some ways more
(42:15):
magical and in some ways more raw or disappointing. So
prior to Katrina, that was like the model of the
two cities, and there was a very big line even
if you moved here that I think you were not
(42:37):
of here. And since then, um, you know, of the
city flooded. It's just that's a damn lot and it's
a thing that people um forget. Like if your house burnt,
(42:57):
so I hope it doesn't, you would still have a job,
you would still have a post office and a grocery,
you would have community to support you. But if everything burned,
it's like then what like it? It was very hard,
(43:19):
and it was harder for some people than others who
had resources not just financial but just like social cultural resources,
and we needed people's help. And so people came and
a lot of people came and they were like, there's
something that's really special about this place, what they value,
(43:42):
what you can kind of be yourself here, or for
some people they could either their selves and they're like,
I want to I want to stay here, And a
lot of people stayed, and since then, more and more
people have been coming as they discovered this great place.
This is the same thing with ash Um, because they're
(44:03):
looking for something real. Just thinking about the babies and beer.
We were half that although people have children here, we
have like schools and stuff. You know, it's the city
of families, and so there's been a loosening of this divide.
(44:25):
But it's also been kind of fraught because people worry about, oh,
the people moving in, But I'm like people have been
damn moving in since the cane touch showed up. You know,
like it's it does, isn't. It isn't to say that
city planning isn't important. There shouldn't be an awareness of
like how can things change and people getting priced out
of neighborhoods or gentrification, which sometimes gentrification just means fixing
(44:47):
up a house that looks like crap before, and you know,
like there's there's a lot of words. There's a lot
of things in that. But um, since Kashrina, since the storm,
so that's what we call it here. You only reads
people say in storm. Um, there has been more tolerance
(45:07):
of like where are you from? And like I and
now in the circle because I'm from southern Louisiana. My
husband's from Lafayette apparently that's which is like two and
a half hours away. That's close enough to um so.
But I think this is true of a lot of
(45:27):
places that depend on tourism. I had some women from
on my tour from Hawaii and we had a really
long talk about that. How you do a thing that
is a part, integral, integral part of your culture, like
the hula dance, and you know what it means in here,
(45:48):
and you do it for people who say that's pretty
and it means nothing, but it doesn't mean that. You're like,
I'm not showing you ma hula dance too bad? So
I you and you give like this little that. We
have second lines here, so many wedding second lines, and
(46:09):
all these people are going around and I know I
had to dance because they're self conscious because they're like,
I'm in a parade and everyone is staring and maybe
I should dance. I don't know. And that is not
how second lines happen in other neighborhoods. But do I
feel like, no second lines unless you are a real
New Orleans. No pay the musicians, pay the cops. Everybody's broke,
(46:30):
you know, you know, I mean the musicians are often broke,
and so are as those are a police force. You know,
Like it'd be great if if the wedding planner who's
like putting this together, could say, hey, this is what
this means. This is the origin of this thing that
you're doing. But I've also kind of come to a
(46:51):
place a piece with this because do you know why
we feed each other cake at a wedding? Why why
the bride the room feed each other know, and we
all do it, and so you'll have sweet words in
your mouth. You start your marriage with with sweetness in
your mouth. You have sweet words, right. Body knows when
we do that. Nobody knows the garter is because you're
gonna go. Nobody knows about like you know, like I know,
(47:15):
that's not mean anything. It's like that's what I mean.
You know, we just do these things and we and
it's like, oh, that sounds that sounds good. I want
to parade. Okay, so I got off the drinking thing.
But it's all I connected. It really is. Everything is connected.
And this interview is not over yet. But we have
first one more quick break for a word from our sponsor,
(47:45):
and we're back. Thank you sponsor, and back to the interview.
That's a lot of those beautiful things about I mean,
like you're saying way back in the beginning, like the
stories of mere wheat lives have been determined by and
certain of water. Um usually was because you know, we
have we have made here before, we had parts with
(48:08):
real like me infant with alcohol before. Yeah, I feel
like this is just a work priority priorities. Also beast
of bacteria. Uh. I wanted to ask what what experiences
with food and drink did you have growing up? Oh,
my mother was a very adventurous cook at a time
(48:31):
when people opened a lot of hands, and she um
like took cooking classes and uh we made like homade, pizza,
pasta and Chinese when that was only like one you know,
there was no Mandarin or uh there or our various
(48:53):
regions and you know, so you like American Chinese rood,
but like we made our own roll and in thy
seven that was pretty was pretty cool in a very
small town. Um. My mother is a tremendous fan of
the old fashioned, and my dad used to make them
for her. We went out to dinner a lot with
(49:14):
my grandparents, and I was the only grandchild, so um,
I always brought a book. But I learned how to
how to eat and drink out, to like to behave
yourself in a restaurant, and to enjoy myself. And uh,
I don't know what this means about where I ended
up now, but there was. My grandfather owned a feed
(49:35):
store for over forty years. He and he and my
grandmother owned this and UM, a lot of times my
my mom and dad would would work there sometimes on
the weekends. Can't kind of help out, And so we
would all go out to this the local fancy place
in Covington, and we had a waiter, Mr Jack, and
he knew everyone's streetquarder. Grandmother would get a glass of chardonnay,
(49:58):
grandfather got crowned on. My dad would usually just get
jacked anials in the rocks. My mother get an old
fashioned not too sweet, and I would say the usual please,
which was orange juice in crediting, not a Shirley temple
in a rocks glass like everybody else. And so I
learned like the pleasure of the whole for dinner cocktail
(50:23):
and that everybody would enjoy this. Nobody's getting hammered, you know,
like it's like this, it's this part you have a
cocktail and then you have you know, soup, soad or whatever.
And yeah, I just kind of think that that U
And when we traveled, Um again, my my parents were
(50:46):
both um, very not adventurous in the sense of like
climbing mountains, but um, we would seek out like what
what was of the place and and recognizing that the food.
Let I would say, less the drink because that was
a sort of a harder thing in the seventies and
(51:07):
early eighties. Um, but yeah, like what's the food here?
What do we eat here? And so learning that food
and drink is um part of cultural personality. This was
something I learned really early on. Thanks Mom, and I
(51:30):
don't I don't think we've covered this. How how did
you decide to make cocktails and their history your your career? Oh,
so it was from working with the Food Museum and
I was doing food and drink and then it it
(51:53):
was a combination of immersed a bit of mercenary attitude
and also know my own shifting interests. The very first
exhibit I did for the Food Museum with Liz Williams,
she like, I had known Liz for a while and
I knew I wanted to work in food and drink stuff.
(52:14):
I was teaching at the University of New Orleans, and
she said, do you want to curate an exhibit? And
I didn't know what that meant, so I said yes,
and she said, we have a donated location. It's gonna
be on the drinks of New Orleans, and like that's
what she gave me, along with a couple of people
to call. And so I made an exhibit in nine weeks.
(52:35):
And I didn't know I could do that, but she
hoped I could, I guess. But then after that I
got into like we did more more food stuff. Um.
But as I so, when I worked at the museum,
I was doing food and drink without I would say
more food because it's sort of more sets, more southern story.
(52:59):
But then when I got laid off off and I
started doing demos for conventions all around the city. It
is way easier to tote a bag of liquor than
like a burner and pots and make gumbo. So it
was a little bit of bad um, But also it
was just a recognition that, um, I think, like the drink,
(53:23):
drink culture, drink history, this is still new relatively speaking,
even if you're just looking at like the books that
people are writing. Um, there's a lot more food culture
being covered than drink culture. Tons of cocktail recipes, so
many cocktail books, but not a lot really looking at
um history and culture in place and anthropology and all that.
(53:46):
And and I just thought, like I lived in this town.
I'm gonna do a drinks but overtime now because I
do some work at the Sazarat liquor company, so I've
been learning a lot more about whiskey and a mayor
in history. And then and then I get asked to
do things. So like you all talked to Amanda at
the h n OC they did it rum symposium and
(54:07):
can tell you all about Louisiana a round now. And
you know, so this is how these things have been.
You get somebody says, can you give a talk and
you've never researched it at all? You lie you're like,
of course they can give a talk about that. How
long does it have to be? And then you learn it?
And so now I got all that in my back
pocket and for you know the future. Yeah. Um, where
(54:32):
where can people fund your podcast? So? Um, the Southern
Food and Beverage Museum has is sort of a host.
Uh if you're looking for the like a website. Does
anybody listen to podcast on a website? I don't know? Yeah,
what's conspiracy people? Okay, So you can find the Drink
(54:56):
and Learn podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, and uh.
You can also find me at Drink and Learn a
Drink and Learn in all the ways, Drink and Learn
dot com and Drink and Learn on Instagram. I drink
you know all the drink and learn. Um. I do
have a book out which I don't know if you
all Nope, Nope. It's called Drink Debt, which is a
(55:17):
guide to the bars of New Orleans. I visited them
all so you don't have to, and it gives you
kind of insight into the sensibility personality of each bar.
It's not a review, it's just because people ask me
all the time, what's the best bar in New Orleans,
and I say, you know, did you just get engaged
or do you want to drinks to forget your name?
(55:39):
Cheap very different places? Yeah? Oh and come take it
to work right, yes? Yes, yes, I don't know if
you're gonna say, like, how you'll introduce me or we're
like because I know you, because you all talk about
other stuff, eating up to and whatever. Yeah, I should come.
(56:00):
This brings us to the end of this interview. We
hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed doing it. Yes, yes, uh.
And if anyone's working on some interesting cocktails around this
this season, we would love to hear about those, oh
absolutely always yes. And also I have a lot of
friends actually that are going to New Orleans, mostly for
New Year's Okay, yeah, so if any of you listeners
(56:23):
are going that way, are you live there and you
want to tell us your cocktail tales, Yeah, we would
love to hear them. We would or or a book
a tour with Elizabeth with a Drink and Learn. Yes, yes, um,
and we would love to hear from you. If you
would like to emails, you can. Our email is Hello
at savor pod dot com. We're also on social Media.
(56:45):
You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at
Savor pod and we do hope to hear from you.
Savor is a production of I Heart Radio and Stuff Media.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our super
producers Dylan Fagin and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
(57:06):
your way.
Although I'm welcome to say your production of iHeartRadio and
Stuff Media. I'm Annies and I'm Lauren Vocal Bam. And
today we have an interview for you with one Elizabeth
pres And uh, this is one from our New Orleans trip,
which was just about a year ago. It will a
bit more now, Yeah, I was right before Thanksgiving. Gosh right, okay. Um.
Elizabeth Here's um is a drinks historian, Um who lives
(00:31):
in New Orleans and has this amazing podcast called Drink
and Learn, which is also a tour. She she will
take you on tour around New Orleans and talk about
some of the classic cocktails and ingredients that you will
find in the bars there. She's also the author of
Drink Debt New Orleans. UM. This is a book that
is a guide to the best cocktail bars, neighborhood pubs,
and all night dives. Yeah, and you probably if you
(00:55):
listen to our New Orleans mini series, you probably will
recognize her voice. For used put a bit of her
because she was just a wealth of fantastic information. It's
delight to talk to you, oh so much so. Yeah,
and particularly like New Orleans is a place that's very
famous for its drinking culture right now. Um. But also
alcohol has really shaped a lot of the industry there
(01:18):
for the entire time that New Orleans has been a thing. Yeah,
and it's a really unique drinking scene from probably anywhere
else in the United States. Absolutely, Um, for reasons that
that Elizabeth gets into an amazing, fascinating, bizarre detail. Yeah,
we could have kept going and talking to her forever,
but we had such a pack schedule. I just remember
(01:40):
at the end being like, but wait, you can you
can tell me about the water and she's like, yes,
you have to. Yeah, yeah, and right this this was
one that went on way longer than I think we
intended for it to, um, but was not long enough.
So many of our interviews could be described that way. Lute. Yeah,
(02:02):
but yeah we will at former Lauren and Annie and
Elizabeth take it away. I'm Elizabeth Pierce. I'm a drinks
the storian here in New Orleans. Good story, right, Yeah,
it seems obvious and then people say how did you
how did you end up here and not New Orleans?
(02:23):
But you know, like how did you start doing this?
And do you want to hear it's a It's a
super short story. Even if it were a long story, okay.
So I helped to create and open the Southern Food
and Beverage Museum. I was the founding curator there, despite
having no academic background in museums or history. A strong
liberal arts education prepares you to do anything, which I
(02:45):
bet both of you, all of you who might agree
with right absolutely so um. I worked with Lois Williams
for four years um learning how to make something out
of nothing, and that mattered because the museum opened in
early two thousand eight, and of course that year ended
with the Great Financial Apocalypse. Funny dried up, everybody got
laid off. I went on unemployment, drank heavily, and dated
(03:09):
a musician, which is the holy trinity if you just
need to shift your professional path. So two thousand nine
was the last year. It was a year there were
no jobs. It was the year that I learned that
both unemployment and musicians run out after six months. My
favorite joke, even though we're both still friends and the
museum stayed open through volunteers, that I needed a paying gig.
(03:30):
So I decided to take all of the programming that
I had been presenting that I had written and presenting
with the museum and I began to sell that to
convention and meeting planners. So it was the history of
New Orleans through food and drink, And after a couple
of years, I saw which way the wind was blowing.
There are a lot of people in this town that
can talk about gumbo, but very few were grounding the
narrative of the city through its drinks. Thus was born
(03:52):
drink and learn what a what a drink? And learned
to drink and learn attempts to um, to ground the
narrative of a place through its drengths in the same
way that we're all pretty comfortable understanding history through war
is very grim um or politics or religion, um or
(04:14):
even art. Uh. And now I think even food people
are much more comfortable with um consuming culture or or
under framing culture. You know, in terms of food, the
drinks thing is always a surprise. But the thing is
it's there even when it's not there. So even when
it's illegal, it's still part of the story. And when
I say drinks historian, because I'm in New Orleans, everybody
(04:36):
assumes that means booze, but it doesn't. Necessarily I can
talk about the non alcoholic stuff, and frankly water. The
story of like drinkable water is um is fantastic and
important and um and obviously still not available in parts
of the world. So it is Uh. It's the history
of commerce and sanitation and of despair, enjoy and prohibition
(05:02):
and consumption and all of those things are are in
our drinks. Um. I'm stopping myself from going on a
giant water radical rate. That sounds incredibly Yeah. I just
put it over there. Yeah yeah, how however long you
have to talk with us, I'm going to come back
to it. But UM, but so how did how did
(05:26):
New Orleans become the I mean so many drinks started here? Um?
What environment let that happen? So I'm gonna answer a
slightly larger question than that, which is like why New
Orleans and drinking? Because that is that is how people
and New Orleans and drinking is how many people understand
(05:50):
my city. UM. Some people come for the architecture, and
they totally should. We have beautiful architecture, we have amazing
food and music. But there are other cities that also
have these elements. But somehow or additionally, UM, people come
here and they expect to drink a lot, or they
(06:12):
expect to see a lot of people drinking, even if
they're not drinking, and they will either look upon in
amusement or judgment or horror. Um. But the expectation is
always there. And it's actually part of the reason that
I ended up kind of focusing on the drinking, because
I felt like it was a distinguishing element about the city.
(06:34):
Like you cannot understand New Orleans unless you understand it's drinking.
You're not required to participate in it, but you listen,
need to know what's going on. And um, I think, well,
there are a lot of factors, but you gotta go
all the way back to the founding of the colony,
and we were pretty much left alone by Frozen. You're
(07:00):
founded by France. We were left alone by France because
they couldn't figure out a way to make money from
New Orleans. Tried indigo, didn't really work, furs would spoil
unlike UM. I mean, there's some some tanning that went on,
but not like Canada where anything's freezing like forever furs
um cotton. Cotton will grow here, it's too wet, and
(07:23):
they hadn't figured out sugar. And plus they had all
of these colonies in the Caribbean, Santa Bang in particular,
so sugar they had, and not long after, you know,
they had the colony, but they were not really taking
care of it, which meant that boats were not coming here. Um,
(07:44):
the food was not coming on the regular. A lot
of people that were sent here were not people who
could necessarily take care of themselves in a swampy environment,
like thieves and prostitutes and criminals in general. Um. The
illustrative quote about that is there was a governor, our
last French governor, Carolac. He was sent over to kind
(08:04):
of clean up the town and he told Louis whichever
Louis it was fourteen fifteen suthing like if I sent
home all of the criminal elements of New Orleans or Louisiana,
there would be no one left. So but what that
what that means is, um, you had people who were
(08:26):
already stewed to not entirely respect the law and then
had nothing to support the thought that they should. So
smuggling begins quickly, um with primarily the Caribbean, because it's
like right there, although things are also coming down the
river on Mrsimi River and you're getting um, you know,
(08:47):
basic food stuffs, but you're also getting liquor because liquor keeps.
People wanted wine wine from France if they could get it,
but wine on a sea voyage unless it's fortified like
port or Madeira, it's not showing up in the best
of state. UM. So like from I think seventeen forty
(09:08):
seven forty two because when you have the first taverns
that open licensed by the crown, and the fees to open.
These taverns supported uh the charity hospital and a and
like and also assisted orphans. So I love this. From
(09:30):
the very early states, we were drinking, you know, for
the sick and the children. Um. But but it's because
like we're in a swamp. Life was hard, the government's
ignoring you. Things are goind of crappy. Then like you
you drink, right, this is what people do and people
continue to do in difficult situations. And you can contrast
(09:52):
that with another colony that is growing around the same time,
and that would be in New England. But the people
who settled in New England, we're not thieves, criminals. They
were very earnest, they were hard working. They believed in um,
you know that that God had brought them to this
new place and the way that the pilgrims drank was
(10:18):
they drank beer because that was safe, you know, safe
safe drinking instead of water. Um, and being a drunk
was was viewed as something that could be very detrimental
to the colony. If you're drunk, thing you can't plow,
can't build a cabin or whatever. It wasn't only about
(10:38):
the morality of intoxication. It was about the logistics of
the colony. And that was not around here. That was
not an issue. It was a very independent streak um.
And also way more men than families. The women come later, um.
(11:05):
And so you have you have a lot of single
men in a pretty crappy situation with unreliable food. Maybe
you know, hunting, maybe the Native Americans are going to
give you something. But like the one solid the one
through line is rom doesn't spoil um or brandy if
(11:31):
you could get it. And this continues even as New
Orleans grows and we become prosperous because we get into
the sugar industry, which I think Jessica might have talked
with you all about a little bit like the influence
of the Caribbean and Santa may So the city flourishes
in the eighteen thirties, So now we have families and stuff. However,
(11:52):
who is coming here to unload their raft from Kentucky?
These like wild drinking, They were called kane. Tuck's just
still a word we toss around it right now and then.
And you know, it's like a jug of whiskey chained
to the rudder you're pulling down the river. You arrive,
(12:16):
you sell whatever it is you're selling, and now you're
a single man in a port town with money in
your pocket, and you multiply that by the thousands. So
it is this. It isn't the only thing that's happening here,
but it is happening for a considerable amount of time
(12:40):
that New Orleans is a party town. And in fact,
even when we were still a French colony, like the
news back in Spain which just kind of talk about
New Orleans as this like exotic other we were always
framed kind of in terms of the way that the
Caribbean was, but we didn't have the place intation economy yet. Um.
(13:02):
There were people of color were enslaved, some free also, Um,
So it was this zotic locale, but not in the
same way that Santa Me wants um. But anyway, so
all of these like facets contribute to an identity, and
that one of the pillars of that identity is about
(13:24):
cutting loose, and drinking is an integral part of that.
Eventually that is like woven into how people understand New Orleans.
And the food is coming into because of France, you know,
like French, just like you're what you eat is a
part of who you are. And and then we you know,
(13:46):
we've become Americans, like a particular kind of a folks
coming down the river, and and then you know, and
then here we are, and everything that gets sort of
created or tied onto that reinforces this very very early
iteration of the city's sensibility. There's a really great book
(14:08):
that you will not have time to read, and it
is called Accidental City and it gets to you to
eighteen o three, the Louisiana Purchase. And I read that
book and I was like, like, that's my city. Like
we had we were who we were by eighteen o three,
and then it just continued. Now, oh, when did the
(14:31):
bar scene develop kind of kind of what it is
like like sort of what you see to today, which
is actually a very large question. I suppose because there's
a lot of different bars around the room. Game. Yeah, um,
so I think that again the the So there's this
(14:51):
Southern sense of hospitality, and that comes from the fact
that most of the South was a grarian and rural
So this is like going back to the Greeks and
stuff like, you have to be hospitable to the stranger
because they've probably traveled very far and there's nowhere else,
you know, there's no else to go. And so that
Southern nous is something that becomes a part of New Orleans,
(15:14):
even though we are a city. So hospitality is like
in there, and that translates to a plus, like how
can you make money. We have a lot of people
coming here and they're thirsty or they're hungry, and so
bars open in places where they're going to be successful,
(15:35):
which means you need a thriving economy or you need
enough economy to sustain it. So by the eighteen thirties,
New Orleans is becoming very, very wealthy. And while fortunes
dip after the Civil War, they don't entirely because we're
a port town. In contrast to um parts of the
South that were completely depended on cotton and like that's
(15:58):
all they had or something. Um. And we were a
tourist town and we didn't you know, we weren't burned.
And people people keep coming here. UM. So places are
open because they're going to be able to stay open
because people want to come here. And by by the
late nineteenth century, everybody was like, oh, it's a fun
place to be. So I think you you draw entrepreneurs um,
(16:23):
whatever that means, to places to open a business that
they believe it will be successful in. And New Orleans
has like there are there are things were not very
good at. But one of the things we are good
at is showing showing people a good time, and so
you want to It's kind of like what happened in Nashville.
It's like it starts with one brewery and then you're, oh,
(16:43):
the brewis goes not so bad, and then let's have
another brewery, and then you know, and then it grows
and grows. And so I would say the the quantity
of the bars is you know, sort of comes up
out of that long line of like knowing I'm an
open there's a lot of people They're gonna come drink. Also,
locals drink because the summer's summer slow, and so you
(17:09):
need the locals to keep you open when it's not
you know, tourist season. However, um, I would say over
the last well, like since Katrina, definitely, but maybe over
the last twenty years or so, the city has been
um embracing external trends, like we never quit serving cocktails,
(17:35):
but the consoles were pretty like basic, like a you know,
the old fashioned in the Manhattan. The standbys never went
away because people drink like their parents and their grandparents here.
I think the rest of America by the sixties and
seventies people are like, screw the old man, whatever he's doing,
I'm not going to do that. But here people would
(17:55):
continue to go to restaurants and bars that they their
parents have gone to grandparents, and you order sort of
the same thing. The old fashioned never died. But eventually
you have other people who come in and say, there's
this craft movement like fresh Juice and you know, and
(18:16):
all of that, and you know, I mean got Neil
Bodenheimer at Cure. He really was like he's a homeboy,
and he went away and then he came back and
he opened here and he said, he's like this is
gonna be This is a New York bar, This is
not any Warleans bar. And and he actually uh ended
(18:40):
up kind of anchoring and a neighborhood that has been revitalized.
Uh So he saw that opportunity and he kind of
could see ahead too that this could be a town
that can embrace not just an older way of drinking,
but a newer way of drinking. Why do you think
that sense of tradition um exists here? And where you know,
(19:04):
every time we do an episode about a park tale
like we're like and then there was a dark time
of the nineteen eighties, Yeah, where everything sacks on the
beach and um, what what do you think that that's
as a traditions instrum here? Well, I mean I think
that we are a city whose sportunes have been built
on presenting an ideal that people arrive here expecting that
(19:33):
simultaneously we also believe in so like if no one
ever came to listen to a jazz musician ever again,
people would still like learn to play instruments because that
is a part of our cities culture. But we and
(19:56):
I it's like as New Orleanians, but especially those of
us who work in the hospitality industry. We are performing
New Orleans for you. And so these elements, this like
cocktail culture or drinking culture, actually let's call it drinking culture,
was defined early on, like late nineteenth century, like these,
(20:20):
these the satarak, the old fashion in Manhattan, like these
things have just been part of the through line, this thread,
and so we just kept doing the same dance over
and over. Plus we like them. They're delicious, uh, I mean,
there are historic cocktails that nobody drinks anymore because they're disgusting,
(20:42):
you know, like the good ones, the good ones emerge.
We have some more for you of our interview with
Elizabeth the First we have a quick break for word
from our sponsor. We're back, Thank you sponsor. Let's get
(21:02):
back into the interview. So I do want to tell
you something though, because I think you're your listeners would
be interested in knowing why we have open containers, right absolutely, yeah,
all right, So you're going to get a very short
history of drinking in public in America. Looks like five
centiss So, drinking in America in public was legal until
(21:27):
about the nineteen sixties. What was illegal was public drunkenness,
and that goes like the pilgrim thing that I told
you about. So in the nineteen fifties, there was an
alderman in Chicago who had been hearing from the police
that they were struggling with this thing that was called bottles.
(21:49):
So it's a group of singlemen, indigence or homeless or whatever,
and they pull their money and they buy one bottle
liquor stand on a corner, passing around. Eventually there'd be
a fight, would be some sort of trouble, and the
cops said, we want to stop this before it starts.
(22:09):
How can we do this? And so the city council said, okay,
no more drinking in public. Now you don't have to
wait for somebody to be drunk or to cause a
fight or whatever. We're gonna nip this problem in the button.
Over time, other cities began adopting this because vagrancy laws
(22:35):
began to be tossed out as um unconstitutional. You can't
arrest some money just because they're hanging around, and so
this was a way for cities to get in front
of a homeless problem, what I can call the hobo factor.
And of course there were some people who were targeted
(22:57):
in some people who weren't people of color, You're core
and um these laws are enacted piecemeal cities, counties across
the country, and then of course if one county does it,
then the county next to it will do because then
people are just moving right, So eventually it becomes pretty
(23:18):
much illegal to drink anywhere in public in the United
States by like the mid nineteen seventies. In the meantime,
the Orleans had a vice district prior to World War One.
It closed actually because of World War One, because all
of these soldiers were getting STDs, and the U. S
(23:40):
Government was like, if you want to be a port
and embarkation, you have to um not have all the
free love. So uh, this Vice district was also a
home of jazz. Story Bill and like Louis Armstrong play
the Storyville King all or all these great musicians. So
(24:03):
that gets shut down and then it's prohibition, which like
everybody Charlie durned during Prohibition. But the clubs are you know,
less um less accessible, less uh less reliable because there
were still raids and things. And it's not until World
(24:25):
War two when we become a port of embarkation again
and you have tens of thousands of single young men
with money in their pocket coming through here looking for
a good time. And Bourbon Street was a commercial street.
It was not an entertainment district. But a lot of
these clubs that had closed before World War One kind
(24:46):
of begin reopening. You create this new district. And so
it's not until after and there's this it's actually I'm
pulling this information from a book by Richard Campanella, which
is Bourbon's Bourbon's Street, a geography. Um so he he
did all the hard work on this, and so it's
(25:07):
not until after World War two that you really begin
to see Bourbon Street showing up in like travel magazines
or tourism things. And again it's clubs where people go
inside to listen to music, to eat, and it's it's
like going to Vegas and going to see a show,
you know, and locals went there. It was classy, where
(25:29):
your gloves you had, you know. So unfortunately, many of
these places were owned by the mob, and they were
money laundering. There was prostitutional gambling happening in the back.
And eventually we get an earnest d a who's like,
I'm gonna shut all this down, conducting lots of raids,
(25:49):
and it becomes this quote of seedier and seedier locals
don't want to go um. If you don't have vice money,
then you can't keep up the the shine the inside
and little I little these clubs UM they either close
or they're barely staying open, and nobody wants to go in.
And so one bright day, an unknown employee opened a
(26:15):
window and sold a drink through that window. You don't
even have to come in my club. I'll just sell
you a drink right here. And soon a lot of
people started doing it, particularly on Bourbon Street. The city
council tried to shut it down. Um the vall was
overturned as being like too vague because I think they
(26:36):
wrote it hastily. But then by then everybody's making a
lot of money and people really like it because you
can't do it anywhere else in the United States. Initially
the plan was to just keep it in the French Quarter,
and they decided it would be too confusing for tourists,
which is actually what Savannah did. Savannah kept it in
a historic district, but not the rest of the city.
(26:59):
But even pushing it, everybody's pushing it because if you're
like one block over. Why can't I do that? You know? So?
Uh so here we are, so that is why it
is legal to walk around with a drink here. But
I really I always encourage visitors to try to drink
in the open like we do, which is it's not
(27:22):
a desperate, forced march where you have to arrive at
a destination of profound intoxication in a very short time.
But instead it's just like we pour a go cop
as we call him, go cup. My husband and I
(27:45):
poor a go cup and we walk our dog, or
if we're walking down the street to a friends for
dinner a couple of blocks away, poor a go cup,
which is frankly, I think a lot of people do
in in this country, but they put it in a furnace,
you know. Um we I have had beer at children's
birthday parties in public, you know, on the on the levee.
(28:08):
And it isn't this unlike the rest of the country
where drinking in public is now associated with vagrancy and
poverty and it's seedy or vulgar um. Here it just
is it's just a delight. It's very civilized and it
(28:31):
isn't hasty. And if you have a drink in your hand.
And this is true for coffee too, but you have
a beer, it'll kind of slow you down and makes
you pause, kind of look around, like, oh, I had
noticed that house in my neighborhood before that balcony, stop
(28:52):
and listen to a musician, Like it alters the way
that you interact in public space. And the other thing
that I think it does, and this is stretching it
a little bit, but like go with me, Okay, when
you are in a restaurant, we all were all at
(29:14):
a table and if someone came and joined us, we
would look askance at them. That is weird because this
is like our area and it's like we planted a
flag right safer. But if you're at a bar where
(29:35):
people sit next to you and they will talk to you,
and you do not think there is anything amiss with that.
Now you may not talk back to them, or I
maybe creepy or whatever, but the the interaction is publicly
sanctioned and it often leads to some really delightful encounters unexpected.
(29:58):
You know, you meet people in a bar, you don't
meet in a restaurant the same way. And so I
believe that the walking with the drink and carry the
spirit of the bar, which that it makes you just
a little more open to the chance encounter the possibility. Um.
(30:23):
Yeah too engage with the world around you. Yeah. And
if it's not, I mean a lot of other a
lot of other cultures in America, I think think of
drinking as like a way to get drunks and it
has to be No. I mean it does, it does,
(30:46):
and it can and we do. Um. But the other
thing is, in general, I mean, let's all acknowledge like
alcoholism is an illness and it is a problem. There
are a lot of but there are a lot of
problems that are around. So I'm not condoning anybody who
(31:08):
you know, struggles with that. Having said that, Um, we
live in what was in a country that is governed
by a very profound Protestant ethic. Um. You know, how
many listicals about productivity can there possibly be? You think
you're you think you've seen them all, and there's there's
(31:31):
just more and books about getting things done right. And
that is not a It's not high in the list
of values of New Orleans. It doesn't mean that we
don't It doesn't mean that we don't accomplish anything, but
we value you know, interaction and family and friends, you
(31:55):
know all that. And so because of that, if you
have too much to do and you wake up hungover,
as long as you have not bothered anybody, then no
one is shaking their finger at you and saying, oh,
you wasted. You know, at the time, it's like this happens.
(32:15):
Trying not to make it happen too regularly. Um, but
like this is what it is to be human. It
is one of the things. And it goes like way back,
just so far back that you know, as early as
there was alcohol, there was toasting. And it's this way
(32:39):
to create an engage with community. And no, you don't
have to have it, but for some reason it helps
I tast No, I guess I say cheers. Yeah, it's
(33:03):
also my I signed my emails cheers. And it's how
Abigail and I end our podcast. Yeah. So now that
I think about it, they say, chairs, yeah, it's a
good one. Um. Do you do have a favorite cocktail
stories from most of those some of the big ones
in the class? Bo uh? I mean, you know, you
get I'm sure that most of them come down to
(33:25):
I was born at my bar and bourt things into
a glass but are there are there any really really
good works? Okay, So I'm not going to give too
much away about the Sazarak because I would encourage your
listeners to check out the Drink and Learn podcast and
listen to the Sazarak episode. UM. And the reason that
(33:47):
you should do that is because Um, Abigail and I
tell the entire history of New Orleans using only the
ingredients and a Sazerak cocktail. So the Sazarak is the
official cocktail of New Orleans. In two thousand eight, the
easy in a legislature passed a resolution making the Sazeract
the city's official drink. And that sounds like a joke,
but in fact it is. It is just rounded in
(34:09):
the story of the city and every component of it
was either invented here, found a home here is illustrative
of people who came here, whether it's French, Caribbean, American,
all of these forces that kind of combined to um
to inform the evolution of the city. UM. So that's
(34:36):
I mean, that's kind of it's it's a story I
tell a lot because I, uh, because I get hired
to do it. Um. But but yeah, they and I
think really more than any cocktail I can think of.
There's so much just literally in the glass. I like,
(34:58):
I listened to y'all's Manhattan, which tends to be more
representative of other cocktail histories, and it's like they're started
to be the seven. There was a new product Vermouth.
People are trying to figure out how to use it.
Maybe it happened here, maybe it happened there. It got
this great name of a place that was has a
(35:18):
lot of people. So everybody's like, hey, let's drink in Manhattan. UM.
And I have I've read Phil Green's book. It's great, UM,
but particularly because he talks about like what Vermouth did
and how it changes, how it so the Manhattan occurs
on a continuum of drinks starting with the original cocktail,
(35:38):
whiskey cocktail, UM, and it becomes called an old fashioned
because people begin doing all kinds of stuff with this
very basic thing. And then you have what I like
to call old man who shakes fists at skuy, who's like,
I want my whiskey cocktail the old fashioned way, And
eventually that is that's how it becomes called that. So
(36:02):
many cocktails the story that they tell they can be standalone,
but they're more interesting in looking at the continuum, it's
like what came before? How did this evolve? And it's
rarely about one guy um And I think that if
(36:24):
there's any takeaway here, you are never inventing a cocktail
in a vacuum. And all of your environment and all
of the history of drinking is like informing you. So
whenever people talk about like who invented the dacri, it's
(36:45):
like the Caribbean invented the dacori because you have rum,
and you have a lime, and you have sugar and
they're all there. And so people have been drinking dacris
like forever and then eventually it's like, oh, it's in
Cuba and there's this room and this sugar and this look,
(37:06):
this is the name of a place and I'm drinking
it here and I'm a white guy who you know
is gonna go back and tell my story. But so
that's like I guess. But when I say, like, when
you asked me like for a good story, that's that
to me is like the better story. And that's what this,
That's what drink and Learn is about. It's like if
(37:26):
you've got them all in a line, got all the
like all the cocktails you would get like the World
World History, and everyone says they wish that I were
their American history teacher, and I say it whiskey helps,
but but it's true. Um, I will tell you this
is probably not gonna make it in there, but I'm
(37:46):
going to tell you one of my favorite stories of
somebody making a drink. My friends Stevia Mata, who works
at Latitude twenty nine, fantastic TV bar, super talented bartender.
Um kind of made his way, worked his way, did
a lot of catering gigs withky soda, rum and coke
kind of thing. Didn't know anything about uh cocktails, and
(38:11):
so he parleyed a job into parleyed like this past
catering experience when I think he was underage, you know,
and the eventually gets a job at Bubba Gumps. So
somebody orders an old Fashioned and he doesn't know what
that is, and so we asked the bartender. It was
like a little guy, It's like, how do I make that?
What do I do? Because there was no internet? There's
(38:32):
not on your phone right like there was probably a
Mr Boston's or something. So he says, grab the bottle
with the paper on it. Meaning the bidders just make
it to put some put some whiskey and sugar, mush
up a cherry and then the bottle. At the paper
(38:52):
Steve made an old old Fashioned with Worcester sauce, and
it was it was not sent back. He made four
of them that night, presumably for the same person who
thought was an interesting I mean, like at its essence,
it is a bitter product, you know. Ummi. But yeah,
(39:15):
so that's my favorite, Megan a drink story, you know,
had Steve. If this makes it in there, it's not
anywhere else story. I don't think maybe he was here.
I've never thought about it, but I think that like
that anchovy note and risty she would it could actually
be really good with whiskey. Yeah, you have to have
a very little bit that I feel like he was
(39:36):
blug blug yeah. Um. Speaking again about the sense of
community around here, how does a lot of cultures are
a little bit jealousy close with their uh with with
some of their their cultural elements, you know, like or
(39:58):
or that they have a hard time I'm welcoming strangers
into participating. But food, it's rarely like that. Most people
want to share food and dream um and be that
is not what New Orleans is about? How uh can
you speak a little bit about that? So I grew
(40:19):
up an hour from here. My mother would would say,
would tell you that I am not from New Orleans.
And if you all live in Atlanta, you understand the
South is very It's like where are you from? It
means where you're born. And for a very long time,
if you said that you are from New Orleans and
somebody would say, where'd you go to school? And they
(40:40):
then high school so they can organized understand you in
terms of this city. Um, throughout all that time, we
were offering, we were selling our cities culture. Um, happily
(41:04):
you know, it's a good's pretty good way to make
a living and or you know, offering hospitality people come
and visit. But I do think that there was and
in some ways continues to be, and it's probably true
in a lot of cities there's two cities. There's the
city that you get to experience when you come here,
(41:27):
that we offer to you or sell you or show you.
And then every now and then you have little moments
where you get to peek into the other city is
the city where people live. And sometimes it's less glamorous
because like we have to do laundry and sometimes there's
something that's just very honest. I really I prefer not
(41:53):
to use the word authentic um that because like what
you know, what like what is offen? Everything is real,
nothing is fake. You know, you can touch it. But
is um a view that is lived a little more
lived in and it can be in some ways more
(42:15):
magical and in some ways more raw or disappointing. So
prior to Katrina, that was like the model of the
two cities, and there was a very big line even
if you moved here that I think you were not
(42:37):
of here. And since then, um, you know, of the
city flooded. It's just that's a damn lot and it's
a thing that people um forget. Like if your house burnt,
(42:57):
so I hope it doesn't, you would still have a job,
you would still have a post office and a grocery,
you would have community to support you. But if everything burned,
it's like then what like it? It was very hard,
(43:19):
and it was harder for some people than others who
had resources not just financial but just like social cultural resources,
and we needed people's help. And so people came and
a lot of people came and they were like, there's
something that's really special about this place, what they value,
(43:42):
what you can kind of be yourself here, or for
some people they could either their selves and they're like,
I want to I want to stay here, And a
lot of people stayed, and since then, more and more
people have been coming as they discovered this great place.
This is the same thing with ash Um, because they're
(44:03):
looking for something real. Just thinking about the babies and beer.
We were half that although people have children here, we
have like schools and stuff. You know, it's the city
of families, and so there's been a loosening of this divide.
(44:25):
But it's also been kind of fraught because people worry about, oh,
the people moving in, But I'm like people have been
damn moving in since the cane touch showed up. You know,
like it's it does, isn't. It isn't to say that
city planning isn't important. There shouldn't be an awareness of
like how can things change and people getting priced out
of neighborhoods or gentrification, which sometimes gentrification just means fixing
(44:47):
up a house that looks like crap before, and you know,
like there's there's a lot of words. There's a lot
of things in that. But um, since Kashrina, since the storm,
so that's what we call it here. You only reads
people say in storm. Um, there has been more tolerance
(45:07):
of like where are you from? And like I and
now in the circle because I'm from southern Louisiana. My
husband's from Lafayette apparently that's which is like two and
a half hours away. That's close enough to um so.
But I think this is true of a lot of
(45:27):
places that depend on tourism. I had some women from
on my tour from Hawaii and we had a really
long talk about that. How you do a thing that
is a part, integral, integral part of your culture, like
the hula dance, and you know what it means in here,
(45:48):
and you do it for people who say that's pretty
and it means nothing, but it doesn't mean that. You're like,
I'm not showing you ma hula dance too bad? So
I you and you give like this little that. We
have second lines here, so many wedding second lines, and
(46:09):
all these people are going around and I know I
had to dance because they're self conscious because they're like,
I'm in a parade and everyone is staring and maybe
I should dance. I don't know. And that is not
how second lines happen in other neighborhoods. But do I
feel like, no second lines unless you are a real
New Orleans. No pay the musicians, pay the cops. Everybody's broke,
(46:30):
you know, you know, I mean the musicians are often broke,
and so are as those are a police force. You know,
Like it'd be great if if the wedding planner who's
like putting this together, could say, hey, this is what
this means. This is the origin of this thing that
you're doing. But I've also kind of come to a
(46:51):
place a piece with this because do you know why
we feed each other cake at a wedding? Why why
the bride the room feed each other know, and we
all do it, and so you'll have sweet words in
your mouth. You start your marriage with with sweetness in
your mouth. You have sweet words, right. Body knows when
we do that. Nobody knows the garter is because you're
gonna go. Nobody knows about like you know, like I know,
(47:15):
that's not mean anything. It's like that's what I mean.
You know, we just do these things and we and
it's like, oh, that sounds that sounds good. I want
to parade. Okay, so I got off the drinking thing.
But it's all I connected. It really is. Everything is connected.
And this interview is not over yet. But we have
first one more quick break for a word from our sponsor,
(47:45):
and we're back. Thank you sponsor, and back to the interview.
That's a lot of those beautiful things about I mean,
like you're saying way back in the beginning, like the
stories of mere wheat lives have been determined by and
certain of water. Um usually was because you know, we
have we have made here before, we had parts with
(48:08):
real like me infant with alcohol before. Yeah, I feel
like this is just a work priority priorities. Also beast
of bacteria. Uh. I wanted to ask what what experiences
with food and drink did you have growing up? Oh,
my mother was a very adventurous cook at a time
(48:31):
when people opened a lot of hands, and she um
like took cooking classes and uh we made like homade, pizza,
pasta and Chinese when that was only like one you know,
there was no Mandarin or uh there or our various
(48:53):
regions and you know, so you like American Chinese rood,
but like we made our own roll and in thy
seven that was pretty was pretty cool in a very
small town. Um. My mother is a tremendous fan of
the old fashioned, and my dad used to make them
for her. We went out to dinner a lot with
(49:14):
my grandparents, and I was the only grandchild, so um,
I always brought a book. But I learned how to
how to eat and drink out, to like to behave
yourself in a restaurant, and to enjoy myself. And uh,
I don't know what this means about where I ended
up now, but there was. My grandfather owned a feed
(49:35):
store for over forty years. He and he and my
grandmother owned this and UM, a lot of times my
my mom and dad would would work there sometimes on
the weekends. Can't kind of help out, And so we
would all go out to this the local fancy place
in Covington, and we had a waiter, Mr Jack, and
he knew everyone's streetquarder. Grandmother would get a glass of chardonnay,
(49:58):
grandfather got crowned on. My dad would usually just get
jacked anials in the rocks. My mother get an old
fashioned not too sweet, and I would say the usual please,
which was orange juice in crediting, not a Shirley temple
in a rocks glass like everybody else. And so I
learned like the pleasure of the whole for dinner cocktail
(50:23):
and that everybody would enjoy this. Nobody's getting hammered, you know,
like it's like this, it's this part you have a
cocktail and then you have you know, soup, soad or whatever.
And yeah, I just kind of think that that U
And when we traveled, Um again, my my parents were
(50:46):
both um, very not adventurous in the sense of like
climbing mountains, but um, we would seek out like what
what was of the place and and recognizing that the food.
Let I would say, less the drink because that was
a sort of a harder thing in the seventies and
(51:07):
early eighties. Um, but yeah, like what's the food here?
What do we eat here? And so learning that food
and drink is um part of cultural personality. This was
something I learned really early on. Thanks Mom, and I
(51:30):
don't I don't think we've covered this. How how did
you decide to make cocktails and their history your your career? Oh,
so it was from working with the Food Museum and
I was doing food and drink and then it it
(51:53):
was a combination of immersed a bit of mercenary attitude
and also know my own shifting interests. The very first
exhibit I did for the Food Museum with Liz Williams,
she like, I had known Liz for a while and
I knew I wanted to work in food and drink stuff.
(52:14):
I was teaching at the University of New Orleans, and
she said, do you want to curate an exhibit? And
I didn't know what that meant, so I said yes,
and she said, we have a donated location. It's gonna
be on the drinks of New Orleans, and like that's
what she gave me, along with a couple of people
to call. And so I made an exhibit in nine weeks.
(52:35):
And I didn't know I could do that, but she
hoped I could, I guess. But then after that I
got into like we did more more food stuff. Um.
But as I so, when I worked at the museum,
I was doing food and drink without I would say
more food because it's sort of more sets, more southern story.
(52:59):
But then when I got laid off off and I
started doing demos for conventions all around the city. It
is way easier to tote a bag of liquor than
like a burner and pots and make gumbo. So it
was a little bit of bad um, But also it
was just a recognition that, um, I think, like the drink,
(53:23):
drink culture, drink history, this is still new relatively speaking,
even if you're just looking at like the books that
people are writing. Um, there's a lot more food culture
being covered than drink culture. Tons of cocktail recipes, so
many cocktail books, but not a lot really looking at
um history and culture in place and anthropology and all that.
(53:46):
And and I just thought, like I lived in this town.
I'm gonna do a drinks but overtime now because I
do some work at the Sazarat liquor company, so I've
been learning a lot more about whiskey and a mayor
in history. And then and then I get asked to
do things. So like you all talked to Amanda at
the h n OC they did it rum symposium and
(54:07):
can tell you all about Louisiana a round now. And
you know, so this is how these things have been.
You get somebody says, can you give a talk and
you've never researched it at all? You lie you're like,
of course they can give a talk about that. How
long does it have to be? And then you learn it?
And so now I got all that in my back
pocket and for you know the future. Yeah. Um, where
(54:32):
where can people fund your podcast? So? Um, the Southern
Food and Beverage Museum has is sort of a host.
Uh if you're looking for the like a website. Does
anybody listen to podcast on a website? I don't know? Yeah,
what's conspiracy people? Okay, So you can find the Drink
(54:56):
and Learn podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts, and uh.
You can also find me at Drink and Learn a
Drink and Learn in all the ways, Drink and Learn
dot com and Drink and Learn on Instagram. I drink
you know all the drink and learn. Um. I do
have a book out which I don't know if you
all Nope, Nope. It's called Drink Debt, which is a
(55:17):
guide to the bars of New Orleans. I visited them
all so you don't have to, and it gives you
kind of insight into the sensibility personality of each bar.
It's not a review, it's just because people ask me
all the time, what's the best bar in New Orleans,
and I say, you know, did you just get engaged
or do you want to drinks to forget your name?
(55:39):
Cheap very different places? Yeah? Oh and come take it
to work right, yes? Yes, yes, I don't know if
you're gonna say, like, how you'll introduce me or we're
like because I know you, because you all talk about
other stuff, eating up to and whatever. Yeah, I should come.
(56:00):
This brings us to the end of this interview. We
hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed doing it. Yes, yes, uh.
And if anyone's working on some interesting cocktails around this
this season, we would love to hear about those, oh
absolutely always yes. And also I have a lot of
friends actually that are going to New Orleans, mostly for
New Year's Okay, yeah, so if any of you listeners
(56:23):
are going that way, are you live there and you
want to tell us your cocktail tales, Yeah, we would
love to hear them. We would or or a book
a tour with Elizabeth with a Drink and Learn. Yes, yes, um,
and we would love to hear from you. If you
would like to emails, you can. Our email is Hello
at savor pod dot com. We're also on social Media.
(56:45):
You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at
Savor pod and we do hope to hear from you.
Savor is a production of I Heart Radio and Stuff Media.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our super
producers Dylan Fagin and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening,
and we hope that lots more good things are coming
(57:06):
your way.
Savor News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Lauren Vogelbaum
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