Deep-fried pickles and art museums

If there's one good reason to come to town a few days before the Festival, it's to squeeze in a few more meals and a little more sightseeing. Yesterday I hit Liuzza's, a Mid-City institution that got creamed by Katrina and finally reopened last July. It's classic New Orleans blue-collar Italian fare--shrimp-and-artichoke soup, gumbo, po-boys, red beans, and all the comfort foods that mean so much to people here, particularly after The Thing. I had a smoked sausage po-boy and a plate of Liuzza's surprisingly light and completely addictive fried pickle chips:


Waddled off that lunch with a walk up N. Carrollton Avenue, where the streetcars are running again--but they're the old olive-green streetcars from St. Charles Avenue, not the bright-red ones that normally run up Carrollton (they were flooded). Green streetcars on N. Carrollton? I guess you have to live here to understand how wrong that looks.

Over in City Park, I thought about going into the New Orleans Museum of Art to see "Femme, Femme, Femme: Paintings of Women in French Society from Daumier to Picasso," their new exhibit on loan from the government of France. But it was late in the afternoon and the weather was too perfect, so I walked in the museum's sculpture garden instead. Whatever damage Katrina did there isn't visible; it looks better than it did before the storm. And there was a new, post-K addition: George Rodrigue's Blue Dog, which, surprisingly, looks more natural in the Louisiana landscape than it does on the wall of an art gallery.