TulaneLSU's Top 10 memories and dishes at The Napoleon House

Dear Friends,

A couple of months after the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil, I was found at one of the great cross streets of the world: St. Louis and Royal. Mother and my father and I had our routine Saturday brunch at Brennan’s after which I was allowed to wander through James Cohen’s pirate treasure and antiques store. If you want to stoke a stripling’s imagination and writing, there are few American locales better to do so. Five minutes in that store and I’m ready to don a swashbuckler’s coat with sailor vest, eye patch, and cutlass, dulled to no point, as I am, like my friend Rummey, a lover, not a fighter. On my knees, I obsecrated my father for just one pirate’s coin recovered from a Caribbean shipwreck. The answer was and always has been no. Even as I have earned my own money, I hear the “No,” and the pirate’s coin still eludes me.

As we left, a raucous busker had commandeered that famed corner. A large JVC boombox blasted Steve Winwood’s odious “Roll With It.” Its profane peal muffled the more pleasing glass harpist’s marvelous melodies, created with his fingers, glass, and water alone. A talented glass harpist is among the most enjoyable street performances available and I’m sad to say I haven’t heard a glass harpist in the French Quarter in two decades.

This less cultured street performer was now atop a unicycle, moving precariously forward and backward, approaching an invisible precipice he appeared he would trespass at any moment. The three of us gazed with the crowd when suddenly I was snatched discourteously from Mother’s loose clutch. In an instant I found myself atop his shoulders with his sweaty, smelly top hat covering my head and eyes. I adjusted the ill-fitting hat so that I could see.

The world had never previously looked so expanse and open to my four year old eyes as it did that moment. It was superior to the views afforded by the Mardi Gras stands at the Boston Club. Speaking of which, is it just me or has its membership, and that of the Pickwick Club, greatly declined in sophistication this decade? If my grandfather knew they accepted members with tattoos he would be furious and start quite an uproar. I am grateful that those social clubs, so filled with insecure climbers and callow descendants of slave traders and bankers who have whittled their family’s inherited fortunes like that of the landed gentry in England whose estates, owing to decades of dereliction, are leaking barns more fit for horses than humans, no longer play a role in my life.

I saw the tops of adults’ heads, a real novelty for a youth, as I lost sight of the streets. A child appreciates the textures and details of the streets and sidewalks, partially due to their ocular proximity. Adults forget how the world appeared before we hit four feet in height. The street seems smaller and less significant when your head grazes the clouds. Most of us lose that appreciation as we get older and taller. If there exists one American neighborhood that deserves appreciation for its physical surface it’s the French Quarter. I love its broken, slanted, blacktopped and slated pavements.They fume with history and I wonder as I walk them how many millions of others have also walked there. If it were not a social taboo, I might crawl the Quarter’s streets, sniffing them for the past like a bloodhound for a fox.



Backward and forward we rapidly rocked. As my proprioception adjusted, I looked riverward. I caught a view of a hanging planar bicorne, atramentous but greying with age, fixed in noblesse attention. Mother refused to countenance my lofty physical stature on the shoulders of this street urchin and retrieved me while scolding this man who used me as a money-making prop. It would not be the last time I was so used.

“Mother,” I asked, “What is that hat down there?” I was pointing to the eastern corner of Chartres.

She responded, “The Napoleon House. Would you like to go?”



“Yes, Mother. I would very much like that. Am I appropriate?” I was precociously unaware of the relaxed dress code. I was wearing, as I always did on Saturday mornings, a fetching wool suit, either custom fitted by Mr. Myron at Goldberg’s, which I am told no longer is open -- a tragedy to our city’s clothing situation -- or my favorite Mother had recently had made at Gieves and Hawkes -- she brought my measurements as I have never been.



She did not bother to answer my unworthy question and led us on my first trip to The Napoleon House. I vividly recall my entrance. The doors, like so many other French restaurants, including la Madeleine, chiseled from the walls, form a 45 degree opening reminiscent of arms embracing you after a long sojourn. The walls filled with pictures, peeling paint, and the echoes of poetry. Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor, K. 626, Lacrimosa dies illa played. Although I yet did not understand its words, which I include below, I knew them, even then, to be words of love, truth, sorrow, and beautiful hope.

Full of tears will be that day
When from the ashes shall arise
The guilty man to be judged;
Therefore spare him, O God,
Merciful Lord Jesus,
Grant them eternal rest. Amen.



Does a restaurant anywhere else use music more effectively than does The Napoleon House? Rue de la Course, which once had several coffee outlets around town, also uses music beautifully. It was always a struggle choosing between the Carrollton la Madeleine’s and Rue de la Course as a study spot when I was in high school and at Tulane. Most restaurants today pollute the air with noxious auditory refuse. On a side note, you will profit immensely in your words and reading if while typing and reading message board you listen to classics like Beethoven, Mozart, Dubssy, Bach, Handel, and Pachelbel.



We sat in the main dining room on the right as you enter at one of the tables open to St. Louis where mule drawn carts guided by tour guides teach of Maspero’s and slavery. It was at that age, when I first learned to read, that I made it my lifelong goal to carry with me at all times a copy of The Book of Common Prayer, 1928 edition as any lover of the English language would. I retrieved it from my pocket and prayed my favorite grace for meal times: O most merciful Father, who of thy gracious goodness hast heard the devout prayers of thy Church, and turned our dearth and scarcity into plenty; We give thee humble thanks for this thy special bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness unto us, that our land may yield us her fruits of increase, to thy glory and our comfort; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. A pocket edition of the BCP is more essential, in my view, than a wallet or a phone. One never knows when he will be called upon to deliver grace or questioned on the Catechism of our Faith.



The mold on our plates, the tenebrous, molding walls, and the Mozart in the air left a lasting and permanent memory in my mind and soul. Like much in this city, I am haunted by it. I return to this restaurant at least once a year, but usually three times a year. I intended to write ten memories I have from The Napoleon House, but will leave you with my first memory of it. Perhaps in future chapters I may tell you of more interesting occasions happened upon this historic corner where the past dances with the present.