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The Independent
21-02-2025
- The Independent
Gators, gumbo and good times: The heady new Louisiana food trail you need to try
The swamp airboat skimmed across the beer-bottle waters of the Atchafalaya Basin in a putt-putting bluster of noise. The vast wetland east of Lafayette mirrored the large Louisiana sky, cloud-smudged and cornflower blue. Shards of dried cypress punctured the wrinkled waters like fish teeth, distracting my unpractised eyes from spotting our elusive quarry. My skipper was Armond Berard – a delightfully unvarnished bayou boatman complete with hoary beard and a voice like a double bass. Unlike Armond, I claim no expertise in alligator spotting or swamp tours, but had always assumed that the gators generally stayed on the outside of the boat: not so. Armond waved over the only other vessel in sight: a black tin shell that looked like it had seen battle. A couple perched on its gunwales, laid-back in camo shorts, daisy dukes and the burning midday sun. As our boat drifted alongside, I could see they were not alone. Three alligators engulfed the hull, their prehistoric skulls sporting crimson bullet holes. 'The big ones need to be hunted,' explained Armond. 'If we don't keep them in check, they eat everything here, they come into town...' he trailed off. It wasn't quite the nature experience I had expected, but these gators will be put to good use on local menus. It was hard to feel too much pity for the culled creatures when I considered the alligator sausage po' boy sandwich I'd demolished a few days before in New Orleans — a sweet, smokey number that bent and burst with flavour, clear juices oozing into crusty bread. New Orleans is where my US road trip began, on a new food trail that weaves through Louisiana 's southern cities. To the surprise of many, New Orleans (NOLA) is not the state capital. Instead it's Louisiana's queen mother; a wily grande dame wreathed in jewels, jazz and not a little liquor. It's hard not to love NOLA's unhinged elegance, hopping from MS Rau's glittering fine arts to street psychics clutching cups of Pimms, and accompanied by the merry blast of brass trickling from somewhere nearby. NOLA's heady fusion of tradition and rebellion is reflected in its cuisine. Kitchens have kept a tight hold on classic dishes while letting others run wild, resulting in a city overflowing with great food. After ticking off famous po' boys, muffuletta sandwiches, seafood gumbo, red beans and rice, try Pêche's unbeatable crab rice, effortlessly cool Coquette's locally-sourced menu, and crowning glory Jewel – one of the World's 50 Best Bars and a James Beard Award winner. Despite such gorging, I couldn't resist a final beignet hit as I left the city. These heavenly, yeasted pillows are a Creole breakfast staple, excavated from under powdered mountains of sugar. At the last possible outpost of beignet bastion, Café du Monde, I took a seat with my doughnuts and watched two children at the next table. Faces and hands snow-white with icing sugar, they were delightedly clapping clouds of the stuff into sunlit beams as their mother watched. I expected to see stony-faced staff, but they laughed along, ready brooms in hand. In Louisiana, there's a real sense that food should be fun. An hour-and-a-half drive along the I-10 past lush, glittering swamplands brings you to the state capital. A fusion of Cajun-Creole cuisine sits at the heart of Baton Rouge, but American college football is in its blood. The LSU Tigers rule the town with banners of imperial purple and gold; game days see every person in Baton Rouge rock up to the arena parking for tailgates – all-day revelries of food and drink. The city is also home to Red Stick Spice Co., where Anne Milneck offers hour-long cooking classes teaching the history and recipes of local cuisine. The standout is her crawfish étouffée – phenomenally soft and sweet crawfish smothered in creamy, Cajun-seasoned sauce. Like many Louisiana dishes, étouffée starts with the all-important roux: a flour and fat thickener that varies wildly from town to town, kitchen to kitchen. Mention roux in Louisiana and locals start reciting shades of brown like a malfunctioning Dulux paint mixer – 'peanut butter', 'caramel', 'paper bag'. Driving across the alligator-full Atchafalaya Basin and onto Lafayette, the roux turns the colour of conkers. On the city's Cajun Food Tour, I get a taste of rich chicken gumbo, crispy fried alligator and all-important boudin. This flavourful Cajun sausage is a blend of pork, rice, onion, peppers and seasoning, and is so popular there are even boudin drive-throughs. Boudin is a piece of Cajun history, created when Acadian farmers raised a pig each year for a 'boucherie' — a day-long party where neighbours helped slaughter and smoke the meat to preserve it. While the lard was saved for that dark roux, the remainder of the pig was ground up and thickened with blood – later rice – to feed the helpers. Boucheries live on at Johnson's Boucanière: an unfussy, family-run haunt where punchy garlic sausages are seared on the barbecue until they smoke and crisp – and boudin is best alongside pulled pork in a sickly-delicious sandwich. Lafayette isn't all about tradition though – its downtown is full of slick modern restaurants and bars, where well-travelled young chefs like Vestal's Sullivan Zant bring fusion takes to Cajun food. Adding miles and inches under my struggling belt, I continued west, passing old plantations and oak trees emerald thick with Jesus moss. Lake Charles is the food trail's final stop, a shining city that swells about its huge, eponymous lake. Known as 'Louisiana's playground', Lake Charles is known for gambling and good times, hosting plentiful Texans who border-hop to play blackjack. The city swirls with a strange mix of homeliness and hedonism – there's vintage shopping, casinos, luxury pontooning on the lake, picnics of brisket and fudgy pralines under wind-tickled trees. My last day of indulgence brought Donnie's karaoke cycling tour, which blasted through my buttoned-up Britishness with Nineties tunes, blistering heat and the careful application of breakfast margaritas. The party continued with drive-through daiquiris: mine the size of a bourbon barrel, nuclear green, with a pair of witches legs sticking out the top. After a dinner of locally-grown 'boutique' oysters at Salt Revival, my eight-day trail ended in a final fantastical evening of Louisiana hospitality. Plied with live jazz and further cocktails at Panorama Music House, I danced with warm-hearted locals under neon lights, feeling like Alice in a well-spiked Wonderland. Travel essentials How to do it You can join a Red Stick Cooking Co. course from $105pp (£83pp). Explore the Atchafalaya swamp with McGee's from $55 (£43) per adult, minimum three people, and taste Lafayette's culinary scene with Cajun Food Tours for $69pp (£55pp). At Lake Charles, join Donnie's karaoke bike tour for $40pp (£32pp), or take a private lake pontoon tour for up to six people with Sarge Antoine Jr – $120pp (£95pp) for the first hour, then $80pp (£64pp) per additional hour. America As You Like It (020 8742 8299) has a 10-night holiday to New Orleans from £1,910pp, including direct return flights to New Orleans, car hire, three nights at the Hotel Saint Vincent in New Orleans, two nights at the Origin hotel in Baton Rouge, three nights at the L'Auberge Casino Resort in Lake Charles, and two nights at the Mouton Plantation in Lafayette. Where to stay Hotel Saint Vincent, New Orleans Get a taste of tradition at this 1861 former infant asylum. Set in New Orleans' charmingly cool Lower Garden District, Saint Vincent mixes old-fashioned elegance and modern touches, with art gilding each cosy corner. There's a courtyard pool and garden, two bars and restaurants and 75 newly-designed rooms complete with verandas. Enjoy a cavalcade of casino fun with L'Auberge's landscaped gardens, extensive golf course, pool and lazy river. There's multiple bars, restaurants and fireside lounges, shopping arcades as well as a comprehensive spa. Spacious and sleek, its 26 stories and 1,000 rooms have just had an $80 million renovation.
Washington Post
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In its third season, ‘The White Lotus' seeks enlightenment
Welcome to a kinder, gentler season of 'The White Lotus': one where the staff is largely content, the guests are less demanding, and relations between the two groups seem — compared to previous installments — curiously unvexed. 'What happened to Mike White?' I texted a friend after watching the first six episodes of the third season. 'Has he found peace? Is it possible he's happy?' White, the show's creator, showrunner and sole writer, launched the 'White Lotus' franchise at a stage of pandemic living when the world was drifting timidly back to a pale sense of normalcy. Psychically speaking, it was a delicate time. No one had it easy, but all sorts of social faultlines had tacitly emerged. 'Bubble' cliques. Masking debates. Those with children were frayed and exhausted from trying to work a job while watching their children wither from isolation and distance learning. Those privileged enough to have worked from home were trying not to think too hard about the 'essential workers' who risked their lives in person, day after day, during those dark times. Of the essential workers who'd survived, most were trying not to be governed wholly by resentment. It was a rich broth of grievances, and in the first season of 'White Lotus,' White's brutal satire about luxury travel captured social crosscurrents people didn't always feel free to openly discuss. A veteran of the show 'Survivor,' White has learned, through bitter experience, how to leaven some of his more ambitious and nuanced ideas with kitschy bait. The third season, set at a sumptuous 'White Lotus' resort in Thailand, opens as the first and second did — with an unidentified dead body. The violence of the anthology series has at least theoretically escalated: Gunfire interrupts a meditation session, and the character who discovers the body does so while wading through water trying not to get shot. A corpse, White has said, is a good hook. Audiences rush to guess who died, and that cheesy opening gesture, which has come to define the 'White Lotus' formula, keeps them watching long enough for White to showcase spectacularly uncomfortable, eerily realistic conversations. And ethical scenarios so engaging and fraught that no outcome really feels good or right. The first season abounded in prickly tangles. White captured how much the compulsory courtesy expected of people in the service industry privately costs them. Armond (Murray Bartlett), the delightful, Basil Fawlty-type hotel manager, harbored a veritable volcano of repressed bile. The guests' finicky understanding of pleasure was fine-grained, specific and frequently insulting. They were oblivious. They were nightmares. While Armond was technically wrong to give a rich guy (Shane Patton, played by Jake Lacy) a different room than the one he'd paid for, Shane was such a pill that audiences couldn't help but turn on him. So, briefly, did his wife (played by Alexandra Daddario). That everyone sort of had a point generated the kind of dramatic torque you see often in real life and rarely on television. The same was true of the untenably affectionate dynamic between a wealthy college student (Sydney Sweeney) who enjoyed lording her liberal values over her family, and the college friend (Brittany O'Grady) she'd brought along — ostensibly as an equal, but perhaps, a little bit, as a charity case. The third season has less of that stuff. A lot less. It feels, in every way, like a slower and kinder copy; perhaps that's in keeping with some of the ambient Buddhism. Even the guests feel like echoes of earlier incarnations. The Ratliffs, degraded North Carolina royalty, superficially resemble the Mossbachers from Season 1. There are some differences: Timothy (Jason Isaacs) the stoic patriarch, works in finance. His wife Victoria (Parker Posey) gives every appearance of being affectionate, conventional, dull and insular. (Two episodes remain; I'm hoping for a twist.) But their brotastic eldest son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who superficially resembles Shane, lectures his siblings on power, masculinity and how people secretly want to be used. Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), their college-age daughter, feels like a kinder and more serious version of Sweeney's character mixed with Albie Di Grasso (Adam DiMarco), the embattled grandson from Season 2. And Lochlan (Sam Nivola), their high-school-age son, feels like Quinn 2.0 (the Mossbachers' youngest) — a dreamy sibling hunched over and trying to disappear as his family bickers. He's also (socially speaking) an improvement over his predecessor: Rather than tune his siblings out to play video games, he gives them chance after chance to connect (with decidedly mixed results). Six episodes in, the Ratliffs take up the most screen time with the least payoff. The other guests include Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins), a morose and somewhat sinister figure who spends his days ignoring the earnest but annoying entreaties of his much-younger partner Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood, who routinely steals the show). And — in a welcome surprise — Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the caring massage therapist from the show's first season who befriended the delightful, insufferable Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge). She's been sent to the Thai resort in a kind of extended work trip, and her storyline is in some respects the show's sweetest. But the highlight of the season, guestwise, is a fabulous trio of women in their 40s who used to be childhood friends. Michelle Monaghan plays Jaclyn Lemon, a TV star and minor celebrity who's funding the trip for Kate (Leslie Bibb), who seems to have married into wealth and lives in Texas, and Laurie (Carrie Coon), a single lawyer with a troubled child who lives in New York. Coon is of course extraordinary, Monaghan is messy and bold and Bibb excels at projecting a rigid, pleasant diplomacy that gets increasingly brittle as the season unfolds. That old 'White Lotus' magic comes back full force in every scene these three share (with the exception of one extremely long partying montage). Each conversation nudges the obvious tensions forward just a tad. It's propulsive. It's believable. It's very, very funny. The same can't be said of the dialogue among the other two clusters of guests. There are so many scenes in which Chelsea and Victoria ask their male partners variations of 'What's going on?' and whether everything is okay — and get no response — that it starts to feel like a joke. Also absent is any real sign of dissatisfaction (or complexity) among the Thai characters, particularly the workers. A saccharine love story between Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), an amiable security guard, and Mook (Lalisa 'Lisa from Blackpink' Manobal), another employee, barely intersects with the main plot. Belinda's interactions with the staff are less than illuminating; no one she speaks with seems to have any real complaints. Even the anxious hotel manager — who has his faults — seem basically well-intentioned. One employee seems free to party with guests whenever he chooses. Another routinely abandons his post and barely gets a reprimand. The only overt sign of exploitation comes thanks to Chelsea, who checks in with a clerk who survived a robbery, and reports back that she wasn't even given the day off afterward. In fact, the weirdest thing about this iteration of 'White Lotus' is that virtually everyone turns out to be a little bit better than they initially seem. While it's superficially similar, little of the misanthropy animating the first season remains. When the second season aired, White said the first season covered class, the second sex and that the third might focus on spirituality. That tracks; there are a surprising number of speeches that sound rather like sermons. There's an obvious interest in the bankruptcy of desire, and in repetition, redemption and release. The trouble is that the characters who seem to be headed for a spiritual shake-up are so shut down they barely speak. It's fascinating to watch Goggins in particular — who's usually such a scamp — in this subdued mode, but I do wish the show had let him start thawing earlier. As it stands, three-fourths of the way through the season, so little has happened that the show's cheesier, more propulsive 'bait' plot seems poised to take over. I don't know that I wanted a healthier, kinder, more virtuous 'White Lotus.' The new season is slow. It's not nearly as sharp at picking apart contrarian impulses among wealthy tourists — or at articulating the malaise of the present moment. But it has moments of leisurely, contemplative beauty that remind me a great deal of 'Enlightenment,' White's earlier series for HBO. And, this being his project, it's still pretty darn fun to watch. The White Lotus, Season 3, premieres Sunday on Max.
