The BIG Easy

Hi, y'all.  The lovely Chris and I have just returned from a trip to the Big Easy, aka New Orleans, so if I come over all Southern from time to time in this post, I hope you will forgive me.  I'm not sure how  many of you have been there, but it's quite some place, especially if you like to party.  This was Chris's first trip, and my second , although my first trip was more years ago than I care to remember.  In between, of course, there was Katrina, which devastated the city, but fortunately barely touched the French Quarter, the historic centre and tourist magnet of New Orleans, a part of which is pictured below.  There's so much to tell in this post, that I'm not quite sure where to start, so I'm going to go with some themes, the clue to the first of which is in the title.

My regular readers will know that I like to have some fun with the titles to my posts and the message in this one will be clear to anyone who has visited New Orleans, or probably any other

city in the U.S. recently.  This is America's "obesity problem" come to life.  Now I'm no skelf (my Scottish friends will know what I mean - the rest of you will have to Google it) and I spend much of my life in Singapore - where most of the women are a U.K. size 6 and I'm a 14 - feeling outsize,  but I felt positively petite in Nawlins.  It was especially noticeable in restaurants, and I'm talking about the waiting staff as well as the diners, but when you consider the food that's generally on offer, then it's not such a surprise.  One example: New Orleans is heaven for seafood lovers, even though the BP oil spill created a huge problem for the Louisiana fishermen, and while you can find oysters served raw, it's much easier to find them fried, largely because it's much easier to find everything fried.  Now, as a native of the land of the fried Mars Bar, you may be thinking pots and kettles, but trust me on this, New Orleans  could teach Glasgow a thing or two about turning its population into heart attacks just waiting to happen.  Consider the example below.

It took Chris and me just a couple of meals to realise that ordering only one course each was the way to have any chance of finishing what we had ordered; in some places, just one starter each was plenty, but this approach is not common in the Big E.  This is a photo that I took of the table next to us one evening.  Unfortunately, because I took it from above, you don't get the full impression of how high this tower of fried seafood is, but I'd say over a foot.  The people beside us had ordered one platter for a table of four and couldn't finish it, but some tables around seemed to be ordering one per person!  Scary.  New Orleans has a great reputation for food, and there are some specialities that are worth trying to experience the local Creole cuisine, which is a blend of many different influences.  Beignets are a sort of fried doughnut, very popular served with cafe au lait, Po'boys and Muffulettas are sandwiches, the former made with a baguette and feature  fried oysters, shrimp or crayfish.  Jambalaya is a sort of stew with seafood and rice and gumbo is a soup made with similar ingredients.  There is nothing light about this cuisine!

As we were taking the photo, we got chatting to the people at the next table – a couple from New Orleans and their friends who were visiting them from Australia - one of whom turned out to be the person who developed the concept of “apparent temperature”.  Now I’d never heard of this before, but I have experienced it, especially since moving to Singapore.  The apparent temperature is a “measure of relative discomfort due to combined heat and high humidity”.  The person who put this together is one R.G. Steadman (Bob to his friends), who is also the author of the wonderfully titled “The assessment of sultriness”.  Sadly, this turns out not to be about how to compute your own vamp rating, but it is worth a read nevertheless, particularly if you live in the tropics (or New Orleans).  Bob, if you read this, thank you for pointing me in the direction of your work.  You are a true gentleman.

So, moving on to my second theme, as well as eating, the other thing that is really noticeable about the New Orleans way of life is drinking.  In most cities in the U.S. it is against the law to drink outside, in New Orleans, it's positively the norm.  Most bars serve drinks (Margaritas and Daiquiris are especially popular) in big plastic takeaway cups and everywhere you go in the French Quarter you see people sipping away.  Since many of the bars are open 24/7, you see this a lot!

Of course New Orleans has other attractions, like some wonderful architecture, most of which was fortunately untouched by Katrina, the hurricane that wreaked havoc on the area just over 5 years ago. The tour we went on covered the lower 9th ward, the area of New Orleans that was worst affected by Katrina, as well as the architectural beauties of the French Quarter and the Garden District – and what a contrast.  While everything in the latter areas is ship shape and flourishing, much of the damage that was done to the lower 9th ward, which was absolutely devastated by the flooding, has not been rectified.  Houses with holes cut in the roof (to let the residents out when the emergency services came to rescue them) are slowly rotting where they stand; schools and hospitals remain boarded up; some shops have never re-opened. It’s sad to see. But there is good news as well.  At the time of Katrina, a number of celebrities pitched in, perhaps most famously Brad Pitt, who set up a charity to help build hurricane-safe, sustainable homes for working families in the lower 9th ward.  The charity is called Make it Right; have a look at their website – it’s inspiring.

Over the top

This is actually my second time of writing this piece, so apologies to those of you who await each new post with bated breath and who read this last week only to discover, when you went back for a re-read,  that it had disappeared ( I realise that this is a very small pool of people, in which probably only one person  - my sister - swims, but hey). It was the darnedest thing.  I'd written it, published it, then went back in to add something and the next thing I know I'd managed to make it disappear - text, photos and all.  Weird.  

So this is my second go at describing our over the top experience at the Marina Bay Sands hotel two weekends ago.  My regular readers will know that Chris and I went to the first of the integrated resorts on Sentosa shortly after it opened, and we we were mightily disappointed - hence the title of that post, "Casino banal".  We'd had our share of disappointment too on our first visit to the Marina Bay Sands hotel.  The Chinese restaurant there was the scene of the most expensive plate of rice in the world episode, which I wrote up in the "Baywatch" post - but this visit changed all that.

Spending the night in a hotel in our home city is not something we do very often; in fact, this is only the second time we've done it since we've been living here.  The first was on Valentine's Day this year, when Chris booked us into the aptly named Scarlet hotel for a night of romance.  On this occasion, a dear friend had given us a night at the hotel as a present, knowing how fascinated I am by the architecture (see picture) and how much I was looking forward to swimming  in the world's highest and longest infinity pool, more of which later.  Chris was already there when I arrived, lounging on the king size bed of our luxurious room on the the 42nd floor.  I have never been prone to vertigo, but I must admit to a slight nervousness when looking out of the floor to ceiling windows on this occasion.  That said, the views are absolutely stunning.  We had booked dinner in Santi, one of the "celebrity restaurants" but we wandered up to the skypark on the 56th floor (the boat shaped thingy that straddles the three hotel towers) for a pre-dinner drink and to take in the views of the city as darkness was falling.  It was quite magical.  If you are ever travelling to Singapore on business, or stopping over on the way to somewhere else, think about treating yourself to a night here.


We weren't sure what to expect from dinner at Santi.  The restaurant is the Singapore outpost of a Catalan restaurant run by a chef called Santi Santamaria, of whom I'd not heard previously.  The basic premise is "cocina de mercado", i.e.  "market cuisine,  whereby the menus revolve around what is good in the market on the day.  Now I can understand this approach in Barcelona, or any large European city, but given that Singapore has no agriculture to speak of, it does sound a bit strange (and by strange I think I probably mean pretentious) as an approach to cooking here.  However, the speciality of Santi is fish, and Singapore does,. in fact, have a fish market, which is something I didn't know before writing this post.   In any case, I needn't have worried.  The food was tremendous.  Of particular note (ironically, given our previous experience) was the dish called "seafood rice".  The simplicity of the description belies the complexity of the flavours and the downright deliciousness of the dish, which I won't even try to render here for fear of sounding pretentious myself.  It was scrummy!


As with almost all of the Singapore restaurants we have visited, the service was a let down.  When we arrived, a dozen waiting staff were milling around, looking as though they didn't know what they were really doing - which turned out to be pretty much the case.  Well intentioned, but lacking the organisation of the firm hand of a good maitre  d'.  We didn't mind the wait between courses, as it gave us the time to savour what we had just eaten as we anticipated the next event.  That said, if Singapore wants to take its place in the top echelons of the restaurant world, it's going have to do a whole lot better on the service front.


Delicious as dinner was, the highlight of the experience for me was definitely the next morning, when we made our way to the 56th floor to take in the rays and frolic in the infinity pool.  The photo gives a great sense of the views and the "infinity experience" but not the length of the pool, which takes up about two thirds of the skypark.  It was truly incredible.  Here's a haiku:


The top of the world
is a great place to visit.
Infinitely so.