C. Morgan Babst's Blog
August 14, 2025
The New Matriarchs
In the second half of the twentieth century, two iconic restaurateurs, Leah Chase and Ella Brennan, redefined dining in New Orleans. Dooky Chase, run by Chase and her family, was radically welcoming, while Brennan’s Commander’s Palace was wildly celebratory. Both restaurants still make each diner feel like family: At Commander’s Palace, a birthday boy can expect balloons and a serenade from the band at brunch. At Dooky Chase, you might get fussed at for adding salt to your bowl of gumbo without tasting it first. Since the passing of these matriarchs, a new generation of women has taken up that mantle, helming restaurants that expand the idea of home.
GARDEN AND GUN | February/March 2025
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Recycled Splendor and a Wild Mardi Gras Masquerade
This early Mardi Gras, amid the costumed crowds cheering for the marching bands and the papier maché floats streaming down St. Charles, a giant mouth hangs open. The mouth of Opulina is three feet wide, lipped in pink cord, and toothed with tassels; it seems to speak from the beyond.
A creation of artist Basqo Bim, the six-foot-tall mask was hung on the façade of the Chloe as part of the hotel’s Carnival transformation into the ancestral meeting place of the Mystic Krewe of Eh La Bas—an immersive installation of sculpture, florals, and hundreds of yards of tulle created in collaboration with dynamic decorating duo the Judy Garlands. Opulina and her krewe-mates are no ordinary ornaments. Constructed from objects foraged during Basqo’s walks in the Upper Ninth ward, these masks manifest the spirit of New Orleans: a place that collects and excretes bouillon fringe and filigreed doorbells, costume jewelry, chandeliers, and lots and lots of beads.
GARDEN AND GUN | February 2024
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August 16, 2023
No Bad Season: How to Love a New Orleans Summer
I like to say New Orleans has three good seasons, and summer isn’t one. There are the hurricanes, of course, and then there’s the heat. No ordinary yellow clanging, it’s neither cut by sea breeze nor leavened by altitude, not dry like scorched cane stubble but swampy, bottomless, and wet. Our heat clings.
Standing in line for snowballs you smell it. Red-faced kids in swimsuits and baseball cleats glom together in sticky packs, playing clapping games. Dogs damp from rolling in wet grass collapse on the Hansen’s hot pink concrete, panting. A ceiling fan mixes a maelstrom of sweat and syrups: salt over strawberry over spearmint over orange, nectar cream, tiger’s blood, passion fruit, cardamom. Our shoes stick to the floor as we move slowly toward the machines making snow from huge clear blocks of ice. Their blades fill the air with throbbing. “It’s hot!” we say to one another—but it’s only when the cold hits your tongue that you remember what “hot” means. It’s all in the contrast, that sudden distinction between what’s you and what isn’t. Until then, you’ve been one with the atmosphere: ninety-eight degrees and mostly water, inside and out.
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Vigil Mass, or, A Friday Lunch at Galatoire’s
I was halfway through my pompano when a man in a gray wool suit stood up from his table along the mirrored wall and began to play the trumpet. In from Bourbon Street, a brass band filed to join him, raising their trombones above the rhinestone crowns of the women celebrating a birthday, angling their tubas between large men who’d pushed out their chairs. Galatoire’s was packed that day, Friday lunch a week after the plague had temporarily abated, and months before Ida would wallop the city — and the bayou communities to our south — hard.
All the tables — and then some — had been brought back in. The drummer kept his elbows tight, laughing as he passed the trumpeter in the fine gray suit. “Do What You Wanna,” they were playing, a Rebirth tune.
Friday lunch at Galatoire’s is ritual and reunion. As server John Fontenot, a 54 year veteran of the 116 year-old restaurant, once put it, “It’s like going to church; you meet all your friends.” When John was hospitalized with COVID during 2020’s awful spring, the whole city worried, reading newspaper updates aloud to each other over the phone. But he was there that day, a bouquet of wine glasses in his hand, as was Alicia, a waiter who trained under the waiter depicted in a photograph of her birthday party at Galatoire’s the year she turned eight.
Really, everyone was there: football matriarch Olivia Manning, and my cousin John, and the ghost of Tennessee Williams, and the ghost of my mother’s first dinner date, who dropped an oyster in the water carafe because she’d dropped an oyster in the water carafe, and a wine distributor my husband knew, and the family friend I once asked to prom. (He turned me down.) No one had seen anyone in a year, and everyone kept standing up to kiss each other on the cheek, spilling lapsful of French bread crumbs onto the mosaic tile.
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Forecast of an Aftermath : On Hurrican Ian
August 31, 2021, two days after Hurricane Ida made landfall as a Category 4 just outside New Orleans, where I live, I slept with the frozen bags of flour I’d been hoarding since Pandemic Year One. In the 87-degree heat, they held onto cold for long enough that I got an hour or two of sleep.
During the storm, our roof had peeled back, collapsing ceilings. My parents, who’d ridden out the storm in their vestibule, had gone the next day to check on the house. Standing in the foyer, my dad called to say he could see sky. Driving back from our evacuation in Florida had taken eight hours, and I’d arrived alone at dusk to shovel sodden plaster off the floors. I knew too well what becomes of a wet house; fourteen years earlier to the day, Katrina had done identical damage to my childhood home. In the months it took my parents to get the high roof tarped, mold bloomed on every surface, in every wall. This time, though, I was on it. As darkness fell, I couldn’t stop, not even to find the LED lantern I’d bought somewhere beyond Mobile. By the light of my cellphone, I dragged my daughter’s dollhouse outside, our home’s sad, wet mini-me. I was ducking in again through her window when I heard someone open the front door.
“Morgan! I’m coming in!”
Filthy, in my sports bra and paint-stained yoga pants, I stood at the head of the stairs and saw Betsy, our petite neighbor, whom my mother has known for sixty-six years, standing in my destroyed front hall.
“Why don’t you come on over!” she said. “We’re gonna watch Seabiscuit on DVD—got it hooked up to the generator.” When I didn’t answer, she waggled her eyebrows in the dim light. “We have wine.”
I declined the offer. I had to do what I had to do. I shoveled muck until I collapsed in a cold tub of dirty water, too exhausted to go on. But I was grateful to know there was someone there to drink wine with, if I’d had the strength. Apparently, there were cookies, too.
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A Louisiana Artist’s Beautiful Beasts: On Brandon Ballengé
A hundred yards behind Brandon Ballengée’s art studio, in a former cane field near Lafayette, Louisiana, his dog lollops right over a snake. “Oooh, look at that! A black-masked racer!” says Ballengée—a biologist by training—in a thrilled whisper. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay,” he tells the snake, before it slithers into the forest of pecan, holly, persimmon, and pine.
Four decades ago, these woods—home to tanagers and buntings, opossums and rice rats, coyotes and bobcats—were a monoculture, like the adjoining soy field turned prairie to which Ballengée and his family moved six years ago, fulfilling his dream of running a nature reserve. “There was nothing,” says Ballengée, who is forty-seven. “It looked like the surface of the moon.” But after years of planting, the fields have come alive. Grasses shoot roots into the soil, sequestering carbon. Butterflies browse the wildflowers, while Baccharis pollen floats like snow—a triumph of his science and art.
Ballengée spent his childhood in ponds and streams around his Ohio home, observing animals. After school, he’d trap tadpoles and fish and bring them to his bedroom lab, where he’d spend hours drawing them. Later, he studied deformed frogs in polluted landscapes during a PhD program at the University of Plymouth, in England, and the Zurich University of the Arts, in Switzerland, where he focused on the ways art can inspire conservation. For Malamp, the artistic culmination of that project, he displayed the frogs as relics—illuminated specimens and toddler-sized photographs of sacred individuals, lost through human action.
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March 3, 2021
The Wildly Creative Way New Orleans is Celebrating Mardi Gras
When the mayor of New Orleans cancelled Mardi Gras 2021 late last November, crews sheathed their half-built floats in plastic to await better times, and Caroline Thomas, a Mardi Gras artist, called her old friend Devin De Wulf with an idea.
Since March, De Wulf, founder of the Krewe of Red Beans, has spearheaded efforts to support New Orleanians effected by the pandemic through Feed the Front Line and Feed the Second Line, hiring out-of-work musicians and restaurant workers to prepare and deliver food to E.R. staff and Mardi Gras Indians, members of Social Aid & Pleasure clubs and other community elders. Now, there was a new opportunity to help those who create and sustain New Orleans’s culture.
As a painter and designer for Royal Artists, who creates the floats for Rex, Proteus, and Krewe d’Etat, Thomas knew that layoffs were coming. She also knew that New Orleans needed Mardi Gras this year more than ever. Carnival, after all, is designed to warm us in the winters of our lives. It is a feast in anticipation of fasting, a masquerade to remove the barriers that stand between us, a way to laugh at a world that’s too serious to take. “It’s a catharsis,” Thomas says, “before a symbolic death, with the understanding that there will be a rebirth in the spring.”
New Orleanians were ready to take the festivities into our own hands. If parades wouldn’t roll and we couldn’t leave our houses, we would make Mardi Gras happen in—and on—our own homes. Almost overnight, a Facebook page for the “Krewe of House Floats” gathered 7,000 followers, and Thomas was fielding dozens of requests from people hoping to hire her to decorate their homes.
But it was not that simple. Laid off from their regular jobs, artists wouldn’t have the workspaces, tools, and teams they needed to get big projects done. Thomas could also foresee that the true Carnival spirit, that Bakhtinian ideal of joyous and profane anti-elitism—a party in the streets—would be perverted if house floats became the sole province of the rich. So, Thomas proposed to de Wulf that they crowdsource funding instead, making each donation—from ten dollars to five thousand dollars—a raffle ticket. Every time a house float was funded, they’d pick a house out of a hat.
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October 9, 2020
The House of Myth: On the architecture of white supremacy
The house my grandparents built was one story, brick. It sat modestly on its suburban lot, a stone’s throw from New Orleans, its front door shaded by a small portico and hidden from the street by a young live oak. Inside, beyond the foyer, a paneled great room was lit by a wall of windows. Through them, every Sunday, we watched my grandfather circle the kidney-shaped pool in his Speedo, fishing for leaves. The house always smelled like cooking. Snapping turtle turned to sherried soup. The ducks my uncle hunted became gumbo. In the spring, there were crawfish boils under the carport’s overhang, Southern spaghetti after baptisms. Wakes were held in the formal rooms blanketed in deep white carpet, the sideboard heavy with lemon squares, rum cake, macaroons. On the parlor upright, my aunt, laughing, interminably played “The Spinning Song.”
But inside this house was another house. Hidden in the private corridor that led from master bedroom to guest, beside the powder room door, was a photograph, in black and white, of Rienzi, the Thibodaux mansion where my grandmother was born. It was a house divided into thirds: dark roof, veranda, floodable ground floor. Eight columns broke the façade into seven bays. From gallery to grass ran two sinuous stairs, one flight for ladies, I was told, one for men. It was the stairs that fascinated me—the idea of belles descending in wide crinolines. The building, otherwise, was unremarkable, flanked by oaks and painted white, as plantation houses invariably are.
I liked that house. I stared at it a lot when I was hiding from my cousins or the old ladies, with their butterscotch and damp hankies. I liked the story I was told about it: that the house was built for Empress Josephine, la reine of Rienzi, on speculation that she would come to French Louisiana upon her exile following the Napoleonic Wars. This story was less than legend, the truth of it so tenuous that my family never bothered to check our facts—we had the wrong queen, wrong etymology, wrong colonial power, wrong timeline. The story’s wrongness, though, was a powerful opiate, the fuel for further fantasies. I imagined my grandmother’s birth in the half-tester bed where a queen had once slept, imagined her brushing her long red hair—one hundred strokes a night. I imagined her walking along a long, dusty road to the schoolhouse where she taught or leaning against the railing of the veranda, looking out over vast, empty fields of cane. The fields, when I imagined them, were always empty. The people who’d worked them did not appear in the story we told, because really it was a myth, built to do what myths do: mask the truth.
If you’re an American, you know this house, too: Scarlett runs in white ruffles from the awkward bulk of Tara. Django rides postilion up the red road toward Evergreen. As a teenager, maybe you got off a bus with your gaggle of classmates, tried to keep it together as a hoop-skirted guide led you on the rounds: dovecote, widow’s walk, cone of sugar. Maybe, as a young man, you drank bourbon beneath Edison-lit oaks, cringed at the cotton in the bride’s bouquet. Maybe this house appears in the bottom drawer of your bathroom vanity, printed on the handfuls of soaps that you stuffed at some point in a suitcase. Or maybe you’ve avoided this house, country-driving, hunting boudin. Maybe, slowed behind a bridal limousine, you averted your gaze as the white pickets flashed, grumbled something about how no one would host a wedding at Auschwitz.
For a long time, a book by surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin lay on my mother’s coffee table. Full of images of plantation houses—Rienzi among them—this book, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, seemed seductive to me, occult. Like William Mumler, the charlatan photographer who used double exposure to produce pictures of “spirits”—ostensibly the ghosts of loved ones his clients had lost during the Civil War—Laughlin exposed house upon house, collaged colonnade within colonnade. Trying to create an “elegy” for plantation culture, Laughlin shot the houses from low, close vantage, so that their columns stand against clouds that rise “like the smoke of destruction.” Looking at these buildings through the lens of the “mythos of plantation culture,” he wrote, characteristically maudlin,
we often sense . . . the swish of a silken invisible dress on stairs once dustless, the fragrance of an unseen blossom of other years, the wraith momentarily given form in a begrimed mirror. These wordless perceptions can be due only, it seems, to something still retained in these walls; something crystallized from the energy of human emotion and the activities of human nerves. And, perhaps, it is because of this nameless life of memory and desire and, correlatively, because of a superior power of suggestion, that for those who are sensitive, the ruined houses have a fascination far exceeding that of the intact, and inhabited structures.
Indeed, looking at these pictures as a child, I thought I was looking at something ancient, something over. Gutted by fire, eroded by rain, reduced to a colonnade choked by vines (Laughlin called this one “Enigma”), these places seemed safe to romanticize, like the ruins of ancient Rome. Slavery was over, I thought—white supremacy was over—and these houses were beautiful in their destruction, emblems of decontextualized despair.
What it took me a long time to grasp is that beauty is often a con—a lure, an advertisement, and a blind. Think of Stalin’s symmetrical Seven Sisters, the Cathedral of Light shining above the Zeppelin Tribune during Nazi rallies. Think of Vivien Leigh’s face, that dress made of drapes.
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April 2, 2020
What Happens on Bourbon St. Stays on Bourbon St.
One month before the first coronavirus tests arrived in Louisiana, I pushed through a raucous crowd of strangers in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Down the middle of Royal Street, Krewe du Vieux was lewdly rolling, all papier-mâché flesh and half-naked dancers — one of the first parades of the Carnival season. At that point, in early February, only 12 cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed in the United States. “Social distancing” had not entered our vocabulary, and the French Quarter was a crush of bodies, the crowd the kind that has a current — move with it or be moved. When the parade ended, friends and I squeezed into a packed art gallery, where a party lasted well into the night, until the only people left dancing were barefoot and giddy with the late hour, the exhausting beginning of the fun.
A few days later, a friend stood on my back steps, ready to harvest lemons from my prolific tree. “Don’t hug me — I have the weirdest cough,” he said as he backed away from my open arms. “My lungs hurt. Honestly, it’s kind of scaring me.”
During Carnival, a festival that lasts from Jan. 6 to Mardi Gras, New Orleans welcomes the world to join us in nonstop, over-the-top celebration. It is, normally, a time of joy and togetherness, excess and hospitality. This year, though, people talked of a Mardi Gras curse: As the wreckage of the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel loomed over Canal Street, two people died after slipping under the wheels of tandem floats. Meanwhile, a virus circulated among us, unseen.
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March 10, 2020
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