There are many restaurants that offer a jazz brunch. Usually, they are neither good jazz not good food. Two for the price of one often means not much at all, even for the price. A wonderful exception is Bacchanal Wine in New Orleans. As the name implies, it is really a wine bar first with jazz as an additional benefit. It is also a wine store with a pretty wide-ranging selection and a café with a menu that isn’t very wide-ranging at all. The food is more in the way of nibbles, with a soup and a sandwich available as well.
There’s jazz most of the day, starting with lunch. Jazz, wine and food are served in a courtyard in the back, or upstairs if the weather doesn’t cooperate.
Now, about the wine. While Bacchanal does have formal wine tastings (Wednesdays and Saturdays), the wines they have on offer at the bar are easy to treat as a wine-tasting. They are all reasonably priced at around $8.00 a glass. But if you go on a Monday, such as we did, they are all sold at $5.00. At that price a couple can sample quite a lot. We had the opportunity to taste two Rosés (Spanish and South African), two sparkling wines (American and French) and three reds: a Malbec from Argentina, a Nebbiolo from Langhe and a Rioja Tempranillo. Some of those weren’t glassfuls but rather sips to see if we liked them. A few we didn’t but most of them we did. A nice feature is that the wine store supplies the bar, so if you like something in particular, you can buy it and take it home.
We had particular fun with the jazz. The musician was Raphael Bas from Southwest France. He plays Gypsy jazz (also called manouche) on guitar and harmonica. He is a special favorite of ours, whom we’ve heard play and sing for about a decade when we visit New Orleans – which we do a lot. That day he was accompanied by Matt Schreiber on the accordion. You can listen to Raphael at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grHKKhnBqCM
Raphael and Matt play indoors on a rainy day
A word about the location. It’s a long way from the French Quarter in a sector called Bywater, probably because it’s by the waters of the Mississippi River. The road there, the extension of the same Chartres Street that’s so pretty in the French Quarter, is desolate and industrial, with a shipyard just across the street. When you do arrive at Bacchanal, you may well think you’re going into a dump, more of a tumbledown saloon that a place for wine and jazz. Take heart; it’s better inside and in the courtyard. It’s not a place to walk to, so you’d better take a cab and then get a number to call a cab to go back, because there are none trawling this neighborhood. The bar staff will help you with a number if you don’t have one.