French Quarter Festival: The world’s largest Jazz brunch
With more festivals than there are weeks in a year, and new restaurants constantly popping up, the good times are always rolling (and cooking) in New Orleans. With all these offerings, we’ve returned every year following Easter weekend to cover and enjoy our favorite event: the French Quarter Festival. This year the festival celebrates its 40th anniversary.
The French Quarter Festival has consistently been voted “favorite festival” overall, and specifically “favorite food festival” by locals (and ourselves). The reason for the “favorite” status is simple—there’s no other place to sample food from prominent chefs and restaurants from the area like Commander’s Palace, see residential celebrities like John Goodman, and enjoy free performances by musicians from the dedicated area of the French Quarter.
Founded in 1984, the French Quarter Festival began as a mission to bring people back to the area following the World’s Fair. We first attended FQF in 2008, just three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. Back then, we saw a modest but steady attendance of a few thousand residents who ventured into the Quarter to sample the delicious food being offered by a handful of popular restaurants from Jackson Square. There were a small number of scattered stages that hosted esteemed artists including Preservation Hall’s Ben Jaffe, Charmaine Neville, Irvin Mayfield, Jeremy Davenport, and Rockin’ Doopsie, Jr.—all of whom we had the privilege of interviewing at the time.
For us, the French Quarter Festival has become a family affair of sorts. Each visit is an opportunity to visit our extensive family living there, and over the years we have gradually introduced other family and friends, most notably our mothers. Despite being initially skeptical about traveling to NOLA, they fell in love with the city’s hospitality, food, history, and vibe, eventually working as festival volunteers one year and affectionately becoming known by staff as “the moms.” Now the moms love New Orleans as much as we do and set their own traditions for each visit, their first stops being Acme Oysters and Harrah’s Casino, after which they join our travels as we broadcast and discover new attractions.
Today, the festival’s annual attendance is in the hundreds of thousands, and there are more than 60 local restaurants serving food and beverages in Jackson Square, Riverfront Park, JAX Brewery, and at the Jazz Museum at the Mint. More than 20 stages throughout the French Quarter showcase local music celebrating multiple genres from Jazz, Zydeco, folk and brass, R&B, classical, New Orleans funk, gospel, Latin, to international and cabaret. In recent years, FQF has included STEM tents and other activities for children, and an extra day has been added to make the festival an extended weekend event.
Despite the larger crowds and global visitors, the French Quarter Festival maintains its local feel. The FQF employs over 1,700 musicians and stage and sound crew entirely from the area. We have watched the festival grow year after year and can only imagine the new things we’ll see and enjoy during this year’s 40th anniversary.
The Fitzpatricks are in New Orleans already enjoying the festivities from April 13-16, 2023 (with our favorite beverages in hand) and stage-hopping at the French Quarter Festival, and along with other festival goers we will let the good times roll over and over. Salute!
Click HERE to listen to previous LIVE World Footprints podcasts from the French Quarter Festival and other podcasts from New Orleans.
Ian and Tonya Fitzpatrick are contributors to DETOUR and the founders of World Footprints, a social impact travel storytelling content hub.
This story was originally published April 13, 2023 at 10:10 PM.