St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, March, 2003
By Michael Depp

If New Orleans has a real winter, it might be the long and pious 40 days of Lent, a season of traditional Catholic reflection and repentance following the bacchanal of Mardi Gras. For those aspirants to heaven, it's a time of leaner meals and lighter drinking but for one blessed reprieve - St. Patrick's Day.

St. Pat's is a kind of divine intervention on the calendar for those with even the most tenuous claims to Irishness (I once met a woman celebrating who claimed she was Irish through her ex-husband). For the city's Sons and Daughters of Erin, it's the perfect pretense to drink their weight in Guinness on a Monday (where it falls this year). And for those with a general interest in Celtic food, drink and dancing, there's enough going on across New Orleans to keep you going from sunup to the wee morning hours.

The Traditional

At O'Flaherty's Irish Channel Pub (housed in the French Quarter despite its name), St. Patrick's Day begins as it might in cities and towns across the great isle itself - with a Mass in the courtyard. "After Mass is over," notes Danny O'Flaherty, the pub's proprietor and resident balladeer, "festivities begin." These include traditional Irish dancing, local musicians playing in the pub's three separate bars and a special appearance by Dubliner Danny Doyle, who'll lecture on the history of the saint himself in the morning and then sing into the night. Meanwhile, O'Flaherty's kitchen will be serving up ham and cabbage (an alternate to the U.S.-favored corned beef), Irish stew, shepherd's pie and Guinness beef stew to fortify revelers through a long day's drinking.

The Local Traditional

After a minor tussel with its neighbors, the annual St. Patrick's celebration at Parasol's Bar is back on its feet in the Irish Channel. As per the usual, one block of Third St. between Magazine and Constance will be blocked off for the partaking of voluminous amounts of stout and the American favorite - green beer. Green will be worn, deejays will play and the city will be again reminded that Parasol's actually serves up some of the most extraordinary po' boy's in town. Roast beef (their signature), shrimp, turkey and ham will be sold right on the street, though I'd try to sneak inside for an oyster po' boy if you can brave the crowds. Yeats would've dropped his Grecian urn if he'd had the chance to try one.

The Gourmand's Choice

It's a little known fact that Brennan's offers its own take on corned beef and cabbage but once a year when chef Michael Roussel puts it on his menu "for the family" (the Brennan family, that is). Served only as a special, it's arguably the city's most sublime rendering of the dish with a little horseradish bite for good measure. Of course, every dish at Brennan's normally bears at least one Irish signature - the grilled tomato on every plate - which is a staple of the traditional Irish breakfast. And taking in a corned beef lunch at Brennan's also conveniently puts one in the city's densest concentration of Irish pubs in the Quarter, which also hosts the day's only parade.

St. Patrick Meets Mardi Gras

Any honest Irishman will tell you that you won't ever see the likes of a New Orleans parade on Dublin's streets each March 17th. Ireland's parades are far more solemn affairs then the cabbage-tossing, bead-hurling, kiss-the-ladies-in-the-crowd-for-a-plastic-rose throwdowns we have here, but care to guess which ones are more fun?

Among several parades across town is one sponsored by the Irish Channel Marching Club, which rolls the Saturday prior to the day itself. Many a bystander has collected a week's produce from this parade alone as cabbages and carrots rain down on the crowd like an Irish downpour. The city's fathers have tried to put a damper on that tradition this year - cabbages must be handed down, not thrown or dropped, the edict says - so the unannointed may never know the pleasures of catching a leafy cannonball in one hand while holding a beer or whiskey in the other. The Downtown Irish Club marches on St. Patrick's Day itself starting in the 9th Ward, passing through Marigny and the Quarter, where it disbands after stopping for numerous toasts. Bagpipes, kilts, roses and floats are all on the bill.

Of course, if authenticity is your bag, you may want to cap off with a home-cooked meal like my friend Aidan Gill, the Uptown retailer/barber, used to have when he was growing up in Dublin. "We had cabbage, potatoes and carrots, and my mother used to make it so that it looked like the flag," he says. "It was the same with the ice cream. We'd have vanilla and then orange and green jello on either side. It was our little nationalist dessert."