SELA WARD'S NEW ORLEANS

by Mark Seal

Join the Emmy-winning star of Once and Again for a soulful look at one of her favorite spots.

I’ve always been drawn to New Orleans,” says Sela Ward. “I feel like I lived there in another lifetime or something.” A true Southern belle, Ward is the daughter of an electrical engineer and a homemaker from Meridian, Mississippi. For as long as she can remember, the family made the three-hour drive from puritanical Meridian to visit relatives in the bustling Louisiana port. In fact, New Orleans has been central to almost every epoch of Ward’s experience, from childhood escapades in the French Quarter to football games at the Sugar Bowl (where she reigned as a University of Alabama cheerleader and homecoming queen), to weekend getaways from modeling in New York and early TV and film roles. Today, Ward spends most of her time in L.A., starring as Lily Manning in ABC’s hit series Once and Again. This year, Ward received her second Emmy nod for Best Actress in a Drama. But her biggest reward is returning to New Orleans, where, she says, “the texture of life there is so rich. I mean, New Orleans has such a deep, deep soul.” Here’s a soulful weekend with Sela Ward in New Orleans. “I love the Soniat House because the rooms are furnished with antiques and you really feel like you’re in New Orleans. It’s an old Quarter house, so you get the feeling of what it would have been like to really live there. They have an outdoor patio and an honor bar. Now, with the kids, we stay at the Windsor Court. They have a great Sunday brunch, and I love their afternoon tea. It’s really well-located. You’re not smack dab in the middle of the Quarter, but you’re right on the edge. Windsor Court is great, but it’s a little more homogenized, in that you’re not going to get the real flavor of staying at a place in the Quarter, like Hotel Maison de Ville and the Audubon Cottages, which are charming. They’re tucked away in little courtyards.”

FRIDAY
Dinner
“Bayona is really good. The chef is Susan Spicer. I love their crawfish turnovers. And then there’s Peristyle, a bistro that’s on the site of a place where Tennessee Williams sat on the balcony and played poker. Another place I really love to go even though it is very touristy is Arnaud’s. Arnaud’s and Antoine’s — those are two of my oldest memories. And, of course, going to Galatoire’s is always fun. I order all the same things. I have a great fish dish or gumbo. I’m always trying out gumbo everywhere, and Galatoire’s has some of the best. I love the turtle soup and café brûlot, flaming coffee that they make in front of you at Arnaud’s, Antoine’s, and Galatoire’s. Ever since I was old enough to drink coffee, I’ve been fascinated with it. It’s so exotic. The bananas Foster and all those flaming things were incredibly exotic for a little girl from Mississippi.”

Nightlife
“Go to Café Du Monde and get the beignets and chicory coffee no matter what time it is. Chicory is a root, and it just makes the coffee really rich and thick. The beignets are awesome. They’re square French doughnuts covered in powdered sugar. And I love taking a carriage ride to this day. They’re parked in front of Jackson Square. Sometimes I would have them take me back to the hotel. Or I’d take a ride, just going around and around, always discovering something totally different. That’s the ritual: Go to dinner, then Café Du Monde, then a carriage ride back to the hotel.”

SATURDAY
Breakfast
“Take the streetcar to Camellia Grill. It’s like one big soda fountain counter with the best breakfasts and hamburgers. I crave it. They’re famous for their omelets. I’ve never been a po’ boy person, but Mother’s has the best. I like their breakfasts with the grits and ‘debris’ [gravy with bits of beef] and blueberry muffins. People stand in line there for their breakfast. It’s down and dirty, and you could be sitting next to a banker in a suit or a guy in his overalls. You just have such a mix of clientele there. It’s real southern Louisiana.”

Sights
“I love the French Market. It’s been there for 200 years, and you can always find somebody selling something interesting that you haven’t seen, like little shoes some guy had that I just fell in love with and bought for all my friends. I saw them at a boutique a couple of months later on Montana Avenue in L.A. The French Market has that European flavor. I’ll always stop in Jackson Square and watch the street performers, who are incredibly entertaining. I was in Barcelona recently, where there are a lot of street performers, but I have to say, New Orleans probably has the best I’ve seen.”

Shopping
“I always peek my head in at Moss Antiques, Keil’s Antiques, Royal Antiques, Dixon and Dixon, and other shops along and near Royal Street. They have a lot of antique jewelry, really interesting pieces. I never shop for clothes in New Orleans, but I’m always picking up another cookbook or more Zatarain’s spices or shrimp boil or things for the kitchen. The shops at Jackson Brewery — they took that whole brewery and made it into a little mall — have a lot of that stuff now. But if I could only buy one thing in New Orleans it would be the beignet mix and chicory coffee from Café Du Monde.”

Lunch
“One of the first places I would go is Uglesich’s. It’s nothing but a hole in the wall in a dubious part of town, but people are lined up around the sidewalk. Until maybe recently, only the locals really went there. There is nothing refined or touristy about it. It gives you the true local flavor in terms of the food and the clientele. My favorite thing is the garlic trout. I save up all my calories to go there.”

Sights
“I love the historical homes in the Garden District. I always look for ‘the wedding cake house.’ It’s the one on St. Charles Avenue that looks like a wedding cake. That’s what’s so incredibly charming about New Orleans. I just love all that Creole architecture and the mix of the Spanish and the French. It’s really the closest thing we have to Europe. The other great thing about New Orleans is the cemeteries. The oldest is St. Louis No. 1, where the famous scene from Easy Rider was shot. I find the cemeteries fascinating. I love reading the dates and the epitaphs.”

Culture
“This local businessman named Roger Ogden donated over 1,000 pieces of art to the University of New Orleans Foundation. They’re going to have this Odgen Museum of Southern Art at the University of New Orleans in 2002. It’s going to be mostly Louisiana art. That will be a real addition to New Orleans. Until then, you can see his art in a small gallery at 603 Julia Street.”

Local Cuisine
“I’m totally into oysters. I go to the Acme Oyster House, where you just sit and eat dozens. They’re shucked fresh right there … and ice cold beer. Love it, love it, love it.”

Dinner
“I might go to one of Emeril’s restaurants, like Delmonico. It was decorated by Holden & Dupuy in New Orleans, and I love their work. It’s really warm, with traditional dark wood. It’s classic food and a real grown-up restaurant.”

Nightlife “I still love Preservation Hall. It’s so authentic and the guys playing are incredibly gifted, and it’s a real part of New Orleans. Otherwise, there’s always some place you can check out that has music if you still have the energy after you’ve eaten all that food, which I usually don’t. But after dinner, I would go to the Napoleon House for a drink. They’re always playing opera. It was a house that was prepared for Napoleon, but he never actually lived there. The Columns Hotel on St. Charles is my favorite place to have a drink in the Garden District. It’s so cool, sitting on that porch. The oldest bar in New Orleans is Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. It’s a grungy, down-and-dirty kind of little bar, but it’s so old and it has so much history.”

SUNDAY
Excursion
“All the plantation tours are wonderful. I did the ones at Nottoway and Oak Alley. When I saw Oak Alley, with that whole alley of trees, I decided I was going to get married there. I had invitations printed and everything, and then I called off the wedding, and then I met Mr. Wonderful. The invitations didn’t go out, thank God, but they were all printed.”

Dinner
“I filmed a movie in Baton Rouge recently and fell in love with Lafitte’s Landing, a restaurant in Donaldsonville, about an hour from New Orleans. Lafitte’s has been there forever. It’s in this old house, so it’s like being in somebody’s home. They have awesome gumbo. [Food writer] Craig Claiborne named one of the gumbos Death by Gumbo, because it was so incredible. I think they put a piece of stuffed quail in the middle of it.”

EARLY MEMORIES OF NEW ORLEANS
“Growing up, we would all pile in the car and drive from Meridian to New Orleans for the weekend. Meridian was a quiet, provincial, Bible-Belt town. Then, three hours away was Sodom and Gomorrah. I think the strangest part of it was Bourbon Street. I remember that pair of legs always swinging out of the topless bar. New Orleans is such an anomaly. It’s not your daily bread. We would visit relatives and then do all the old standbys like Commander’s Palace and Brennan’s and walk around the Quarter. I remember eating in the restaurants with the flaming desserts and then, later, in high school, going down there for a friend’s birthday party at Antoine’s or Arnaud’s and having lobster for the first time and baked Alaska for dessert. I had all of these culinary discoveries and also discovered the sort of dark side of life, given Bourbon Street. It was a gritty kind of a place and people were drunk everywhere and there was always a celebration. As a kid, I was just sort of wide-eyed. New Orleans teaches you early on the reality of life. You see people that are really down and out, and learn that it’s not all sunshine. But it’s also a lot of fun and is intriguing. Very seductive, that city.” __American Way Magazine (October 1, 2001)