Food For Thought - New Orleans Cocktail Tour

This week on Food For Thought, highlights from my recent Cocktail Tour of the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Yes, I even got to have my first taste of Absinthe.  (French absinthe spelled Absente on the glass you see here)  If you want to listen to the mini-documentary in streaming RealAudio, click here.

Our tour guide was Joe Gendusa, a New Orleans native with a head full of facts, figures, trivia and lore.  We started by the railway tracks on the banks of the Mississippi, with a great view of the 'American' section of the city.

Unless you get out of the downtown core of the city and the French Quarter, there aren't that many clues to the hell people went through when Hurricane Katrina swept through last August.

The first bar we visited was Napoleon House, on the ground floor of a house that was built just in case the little emperor ever wanted to visit a far-flung outpost of the French empire.  The interior walls of this place haven't been touched since it was built in 1797!  The house cocktail is the Pimm's Cup, one of my favourites, as you see being mixed up right here.

The other highlight of the tour was our visit to The Court of Two Sisters, where Floria Woodward, or Miss Flo, holds court behind the bar these days.  Actually, she's held court behind the bar for the past 38 years!  She figures she has at least a couple of hundred cocktail recipes in her head.

Next week on Food For Thought, meet some of the folks in the food and beverage industry in New Orleans who have survived Hurricane Katrina and returned to the city to do what they do best.