Beignet All Day

By David W. Brown, Photo by Romney Caruso

Café du Monde is always a little confusing the nearer to the doorways you get. The line along Decatur is typically long, the sun is somehow always at high noon, and by the time you are near enough to the building to smell the sweet goodies inside, an organized disorder takes hold, with you focused on the food, the tourists staggering out (powdered white and slightly dazed at the delights they’ve experienced), and street musicians beating drums and blowing horns. The more mirthful are singing and dancing, and the whole thing is a sort of merry mayhem.

I expect the usual when I visit one recent morning in July, and I do not find it. The magnificent band is still there, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” for the 15 millionth time that day. Except for their music, however, it is quiet. No one is dancing. The line is too short and it all feels somehow like a sweltering, woeful winter. Faces are wrapped with masks and everyone is spaced in six-foot intervals. This poses problems for the musicians — it’s hard to get a party started when every person is two yards apart, after all — and though the singer does his level best, he and his jazz trio manage only to get a few bottoms moving.

The line leading to Café du Monde takes guests not into the New Orleans landmark built a scant decade after the United States bought Louisiana, but rather, to tables blocking the entrance, behind which stands a server eager to take your order.

“One order of beignets, one water,” I say. (I know, I know: I should have ordered the café au lait, but I’d just walked from Mid-City, not a cloud in the sky but a bright, merciless sun overhead, and I wasn’t willing to risk a heat stroke and coronavirus for this article.)

“Seven dollars,” she says.

I give her the cash and drop a dollar in the cup, and she hands over a cold bottle and hot bag with three beignets inside. New Orleans to-go.

But not too far. The open-air patio was still open — seating, however, far fewer than was the norm during the Before Times — with the tables spaced carefully to account for the scourge of COVID-19. Looking around, Café du Monde is the same place it’s always been; the same place where I’ve had 10,000 beignets across 40 years. There are the same white-topped tables, the same green-backed chairs, and an awning to match both. Ceiling fans work heroically against levels of heat and humidity that defy explanation by modern meteorology. The same small signs are bolted to walls: PLEASE WATCH YOUR VALUABLES. Beneath my feet (where I got my shoes), is a black floor of stone tile that has had, for a century and a half, enough powdered sugar ground into it to create some new, delicious geologic stratigraphy.

Café du Monde, in other words, is the same. In particular, its signature menu item, the beignet, is the same, thank goodness — I tested them thoroughly — but in every other way, the whole world around us is different.

Culture, it has been said, is food plus time, which is why the ineffable experience of New Orleans is incomparable with any city in the world. We’ve had 300 years of cuisine from every corner of the Earth arrive and influence everything that came before. A few stand out above others as grand dames of the city’s characteristic cuisine. Red beans and rice. King cake. Gumbo. Sno-balls. And yes, beignets. What I love most about that list is the egalitarianism of it: Princes would enjoy any of those dishes, but even paupers can afford them.

Of the foods most synonymous with New Orleans, the beignet is special, a sort of culinary Mardi Gras or Bourbon Street. Though the famed “French doughnut” came here from France, it was not born there, but rather, had its origins in ancient Rome. (See elsewhere in this magazine the story of French toast, with its similar non-French origins. Those guys get all the credit.) The word beignet is French, though, so that’ll have to do. The dish made its way here in the 1700s by way of French settlers and the Acadians.

There’s more than one way to make a beignet. It is sometimes made with pâte à choux — a light pastry dough made of butter, water, eggs and flour (that is, by the way, the foundation of the classic éclair). The combo is deep fried and dusted — well, smothered — with powdered sugar. Café du Monde’s beignets — the platonic ideal of the Parisian pastry — are a bit more complex, made just so and resulting in a light, chewy texture unlike any other. The dough is said to use yeast, sugar, warm water, milk, eggs, flour, shortening and salt. The whole thing is rolled, sliced, fried and flipped like little pillows in hot LouAna Pure Cottonseed Oil. The big mountain of powdered sugar, though? That’s the same no matter how you make the dough.

For much of the history of the Café du Monde coffee stand (it’s right there on the awning — “coffee stand” — the modest name a quirk of history and nod to tradition, though the New Orleans institution is no more a coffee stand than Commander’s Palace is a bistro), beignets were described on the menu as “doughnuts.” But let’s face it: You’re in from Chicago on business, and you order a doughnut at this famous French Quarter haunt, and they give you this square thing heaped with sugar, and is there some sort of mistake here, ma’am? I ordered a doughnut. It wasn’t until the 1950s that Café du Monde relented and described their staple item on the menu as a “beignet.” (The menus today go both ways, calling them “French doughnuts” under a beignet category.)

Sometimes, you just roll with the punches. When COVID came and the shelter-in-place was ordered, Café du Monde did something it hadn’t done since Katrina: It locked its doors for weeks. In part because, like every other dining establishment in the city, they had to figure out how to go forward. How to safely serve patrons. When you’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you rarely get an opportunity to step back and take stock of things, so the owners wasted no time. While the business was closed, they also repaired some ancient plumbing, repainted the interior, and replaced wiring and lighting fixtures.

It reopened in May, but gone were the heavy ceramic cups and saucers, mitigating a vector of transmission that might infect staff and other patrons. Gone also were the round-the-clock hours of operation. Though they plan eventually to return to 24-hour days, they are presently open only from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. for understandable reasons: The tourists are gone and the locals (well, most of them) are too smart to risk hospitalization for a foolhardy night on the town.

And the sadness of this, the morose age in which we live, shows. As I leave Café du Monde and walk into Jackson Square, the drums and horns of street musicians fade in the distance. I reach St. Louis Cathedral, and I’m the only person in Jackson Square. The silence is louder than an air raid siren. It feels apocalyptic, and restaurants and storefronts that I didn’t even know had locks are bolted shut and sometimes chained. Some might never open again. Never before have I so needed a drink, and in this city, never before has it been so hard to find one.