Healthy Festival Eats and New Orleans as You Have Never Experienced It
My New Orleans - April 21, 2022
APRIL 21, 2022
Gone are the days when I would show up at a festival with a friend and proceed to eat and drink everything in sight with utter abandon then just skip a couple of meals the following week and all would be well. These days those indiscretions have staying power. I also just feel crummy after polishing off Indian Fry Bread, with a Yakisoba Poor Boy and a Fried Chicken chaser. So I was pretty excited to receive information from Molly Kimball about the latest goings on with Ochsner Eat Fit and a collaboration with festival food vendors to incorporate health conscious Eat Fit dishes at the French Quarter Festival presented by Chevron this weekend (tomorrow through Sunday). Look here for a full list of Eat Fit dishes at the French Quarter Festival, which will be denoted by the Eat Fit Logo on the message boards. Download the free app for nutrition facts on all Eat Fit dishes at the French Quarter Festival. Available for Apple and Android devices.
Next weekend (April 29-May 1) and the one after (May 5-8) at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival presented by Shell some Eat Fit items will bedenoted on the menu boards while others are visible only via the free Eat Fit smartphone app. Look here for a list of Eat Fit dishes at the French Quarter Festival Download the free Eat Fit mobile app for nutrition facts of all Eat Fit dishes at the JazzFest beginning Monday April 25]. Available for Apple and Android devices.
Have guests coming for the festivals? What was once the Top of the Mart, a revolving, vaguely cheesy, lizard lounge atop the World Trade Center has been replaced by Vue Orleans, the city’s only 360° observatory, a first class venue offering stunning views of the city and beyond in every direction.
No opportunity to awe and impress was sparred at Vue Orleans, including the elevators, which ascend thirty-four floors in just less than 60 seconds. Passengers are enveloped in a dazzling digital projection that moves them through time from the formation of the city to modern day metropolis and back again. Vue Orleans affords an effortless opportunity to engage children in a thrilling learning experience that is anything but ho-hum for adults, too.
Once off the elevator numerous exhibits allow guests to immerse themselves in the stories and historic figures who make New Orleans a tale that is always worth telling. All the bases are covered here: history, culture, food, art, festivals, and music. The stunning exhibits are structured in such a way that guests can become acquainted with the historical figures whose cultural customs and traditions formed and flavored our hometown.
Interactive technology allows guests to “try on” dazzling costumes worn at some of our famous festivals and the Story Café allows guests to choose from a menu of iconic dishes then watch Chef Kevin Belton prepare them.
“Meet” musicians and composers whose contributions birthed jazz music and more in the city that moves to its own unique rhythm. The music is presented in a way that allows one or two people to huddle close while experiencing stunning acoustics that will be imperceptible to others five feet away.
Through digital interaction guests can also navigate a vessel down the river and around its signature hairpin curve. And yes, you can crash your vessel just to see what happens.
The Vue River Theatre offers an immersive, Technicolor experience of the compelling and exciting story of how the Mississippi River plays an integral part in the past, present, and future of New Orleans.
The full experience takes about an hour. Plan accordingly and begin or end your pre-festival outing with breakfast at Chemin a la Mer, Donald Link’s gorgeous restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel (it shares a campus with Vue Orleans), which affords outdoor balcony seating overlooking the majestic bend in the river. The Ora King Salmon Gravlax is sensational.