US trip report ...

I went to New Orleans for a CiviCRM training. Getting there direct from AKL involved spending a lot of time at LAX. I opted to break the journey in San Francisco (on both directions) primarily to meet a few friends and wrap up some paperwork. On a related note, booking a multi-city trip on the Air NZ web site is pretty much impossible. I tried to use Judy our NZ travel agent to book the tix, but her response seemed to span quite a few days. Finally I just did it online and booked two separate round trip tix ( AKL <-> SFO and SFO <-> New Orleans)

Did not spend too much time in San Francisco. Did have a few good meals though :). Madras Cafe in Sunnyvale served a pretty yummy mysore masala dosa and a filter coffee (does not come close to the one at Mitra Samaj though). An excellent takeout meal from Shalimar (naan, chicken kofta, bhuna ghost and rice). A pretty good seafood meal at a Vietnamese place in South San Jose (at the vietnamese mall on Story Road). Phu preferred to eat at Cha Cha Cha's over Spices, so we ended up there for lunch. Luckily for us his older brother and family were also there. So it did help to have a bigger crowd and get to taste more dishes there. I think I'm done with Cha Cha Cha for the next decade. The sangria is good but not compelling enough to go back. I think we also need to introduce Phu's family to a few more places in the city :)

The New Orleans trip was a bit more hectic than i would have preferred. A combination of jet lag and 12+ hour work days did not really help things. As such our food experience was good but not great. I definitely would want to go back with mari and spend a week in that part of the country. Might not be a bad idea to do a couple of months road trip with mari, maya and pj on one the school holidays (with wireless network cards pretty much omnipresent in the US, its quite easy to be connected anyplace / anytime).

While walking to the group dinner, we stopped at Fiorella's for a quick snack. We split the catfish poboy (above average) and an incredibly awful gumbo. Not a great start to our NO food experience. Next up, was the group dinner at HerbSaint. I was fortunate to be seated next to Sarmeesha who also is a keen foodie. We decided to get the two soups (shrimp bisque and gumbo) and split 3 small plates (spaghetti with some great cheese and tasso on it, crawfish gratin and shrimp and crawfish over grits (my favorite dish)). All 5 dishes were excellent. I also managed to barter some food with dave for a taste of pork belly with side dishes of dirty rice and collard green. That dish did not seem to be as good as our plates. Dave did mention that his arugula salad with beets and cheese was amazingly good. Overall HerbSaint came out with a score of 7.5/10.

We had a quick breakfast of cafe au lait and beignets at Cafe Du Monde. The coffee was mediocre, the beignet were excellent (according to beignet expert dave). We did find a cafe with pretty good coffee, envie, on decatur street. So the next couple of days we had our coffee there.

Our two sandwich lunches were quite bad, so I will not mention the places here. Suffice to say, dont eat in the central business district of New Orleans. We were a bit disappointed that the line at Mother's was way too long, and hence with a sad heart skipped it. I also had lunch with the US PIRG folks at Casamentos. We had some raw oysters, an oyster loaf (basically a fried oyster sandwich) and a seafood platter. Most of the food was fried (good frying technique, not too greasy), but i do think that all fried food tastes quite good. You cannot judge a place on frying technique alone, so i'll avoid rating it :)

The next night we had dinner at Coops. We shared the jalapeno's stuffed with crawfish (mediocre), 2 pieces fried chicken (good) with rabbit jambalaya (mediocre, a bit too sweet for my taste) and an excellent shrimp etoufee. Unfortunately they had run out of mint (and hence mojitos), so i settled for a decent spicy bloody mary. Overall coop gets a 6/10

We had an excellent training session (in our opinion, need to get feedback from the folks who attended the training!), so we decided to celebrate with a good dinner. We lucked out and got a reservation at our first choice Brigsten's. So off we went. The appetizers seems to be a bit more interesting than the main courses, so we decided to split 3 appetizers and the seafood platter. The appetizers we had were: fried catfish (excellent), crawfish (good) and shrimp etoufee (excellent sauce). The seafood platter had a great jambalaya, and an excellent shrimp with pernod sauce. The rest of the platter (oysters and fish) was mediocre. The service was great and overall i'd give it an 8/10

New Orleans is definitely an interesting place to visit. Its a super touristy town, but also a bit poor compared to some of the other cities I've seen in the US. I suspect this was true even before Katrina and the neighbourhoods we walked thru (quarter, marigny, garden district), most blocks had a mixture of run down homes and good homes. It does seem quite well integrated racially and ethnically.