Saint John will be offering “Local’s Lunch” every Thursday and Friday – NOLA residents who show their ID (only one ID per table needed) on Thursday and Friday during brunch will receive 20% off the table! Saint John’s newest brunch item, the CRAWFISH BREAD & BREAKFAST and NEW Bottomless MUMM-Mosas PLUS a 20% discount! Just in time for spring and summer lunch/brunches, Saint John is excited to give locals some love for the support they’ve received since opening.

Saint John also recently announced new brunch and dinner specials, along with amazing Mumm’s Champagne bottomless brunch specials + by-the-bottle dinner specials. Details are below. Would love your help in spreading the word!

MUMM’s BRUNCH (available daily, 11 am – 4 pm):
Bottomless Mumm Mimosas: Choice of Mumm Napa Brut Prestige or Brut Rose for only $45.
G.H. Mumm by the Bottle for ONLY $75 (Over $40 difference in savings when you dine for brunch!!).
Saint John is also adding Bottomless Bloody Mary’s featuring Kettle One Vodka and Zatarains to the brunch menu ($25).

MUMM FOR DINNER:
Mumm Napa, Brut Prestige:  $16/gl   $62/bottle
Mumm Napa, Brut Rose:    $16/gl   $62/bottle
G.H. Mumm, Grand Cordon Brut     $30/gl  $118/bottle
See saintjohnnola.com

Bakery Bar
Costa Rican Chef Lydia Solano will be featuring an Elote Crawfish Bread from Friday, April 28 – Sunday, May 7th. Keeping in tune with Bakery Bar’s Latin American-meets-New Orleans cuisine, the Elote Crawfish Bread combines a Jazz Fest favorite (which will be sorely missed) with classic Latin American street food and features housemade crawfish dip served atop half a New Orleans French Bread loaf with grilled corn, queso fresca, sliced jalapeños and crema. Bakery Bar is located at 1179 Annunciation. For hours and information, visit www.bakery.bar.
 
Jack Rose
The restaurant will feature an array of Jazz Fest Specials, perfect for indulging pre or post fest. Available during dinner and weekend brunch April 28 – 30 & May 4 – 7, specialty dishes follow:
Dirty Rice Arancini
bbq aioli, pepper jelly
Crawfish Radiatore
seafood fumet, mascarpone
Smoked Double Cut Pork Chops
Creole beans, braised greens
Jack Rose is located at the Pontchartrain Hotel, 2031 St Charles Avenue/www.jackroserestaurant.com                

Bayou Bar
In addition to the very intimate and special Jazz Fest Dinner & Show on April 30th, Bayou Bar will also run a variety of specials both weekends. Guests can enjoy free live music Tuesdays – Sundays, featuring all-star ensembles curated by Peter Harris, along with the following Jazz Fest-inspired treats:
Crawfish Cornbread
lemon, cherry peppers
Hot Sausage Po Boy
creolaise, lettuce, tomato, pickle
Alligator Sauce Picante
popcorn rice
Jambalaya
smoked sausage, crispy duck confit
Bayou Bar located at 2031 St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District / www.bayoubar.com

Little Beau Creep
Review: Beau Is Afraid

If you don’t already suffer from anxiety going into this movie, you may want to prepare for an immersive experience. In this epic cinematic fever dream, Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) answers the question, what if Uncut Gems was remade by Charlie Kauffman but instead of an Ethiopian opal, it’s your mother’s judgment?

The first hour is stress porn at its most visceral. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is a psychologically-delicate loser living in squalor in an unnamed city. In this movie, though, he doesn’t become Joker, he instead attempts to visit his remote but domineering mother. Increasingly horrifying developments prevent this from happening. Beau lives in an urban hellscape with dangers - many imagined but some perhaps real - that are at his throat as soon as he opens his front door. 

Set upon from the start by a tidal wave of anxiety and Cronenbergian levels of psycho-physical violence, Beau’s only solace lies in his drug-administering therapist. Even at rest, he is tortured by memories of his mother, which swing between overly-affectionate and abusive. Escaping from the incredibly choreographed unhinged venality and street terror propels us into Beau’s voyage, much of which experiences passively, tossed along on an unpredictable stream of random circumstance and hallucination. 

Aster’s own tropes are present from these early scenes, his fascination with decapitation, devils hanging from ceilings and people jumping off ledges all touched on. They appear in various guises throughout Beau’s odyssey - the foreshadowing tapestry in the opening of Midsommar is replaced by a video tape that seems to predict an inescapable future. People as puppets or painted models or characters in a play - another of Aster’s fixations - is another theme. 

Beau lands in a suburban sanctuary that becomes more sinister by the day, and then escapes to a dreamlike woodland camp, before arriving at his mother’s house for a final reckoning. The plot is really a series of increasingly surreal, horrific tableaux, each with their own stakes. What if swallowing pills without water killed you? What if you left your apartment door open and unattended in a feral neighborhood? What if every single feeling of safety that you ever felt was an illusion? It’s a series of rug pulls, with the added feeling that mother is watching at all times. 

The cast is a parade of national treasures: Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind and Patti LuPone. There are also some gasp-inducing cameos that I won’t spoil. Phoenix delivers his exasperating milquetoast of a man with impressive discipline, and in flashbacks Armen Nahapetian is excellent as young Beau, as is Zoe Lister-Jones as his mother. Kylie Rogers also stands out as the suburban couple’s chaotically unhinged teen daughter. 

It’s all here. Comedy, body horror, animation, post-modern framings, Black Mirror-esque weirdness and relentless Freudian symbolism. At three hours long, it might be a stretch for some, but the pacing, cast and sheer variety of Aster’s cinematic toolbox were compelling. You might not love all of it, but you can’t help but admire the ambition. (PO)

Beau Is Afraid is playing at the Prytania Theater Canal Place and across the city.

To the Bat Cage!
Review: Renfield

If I have any complaints about this high-octane gore fest, it’s that it could have used more Nicolas Cage. I mean, that’s my complaint with almost all movies, but here especially. We’ll get to his performance, but the upshot is an absurd vampiric romp that slashes its bloodthirsty way through New Orleans, seen through the eyes of young Renfield (a foppish Nicholas Hoult). 

Dracula (Cage) is living in the abandoned Charity Hospital after centuries of adventures with his familiar, Renfield. We’re shown some very satisfying black and white flashbacks, Cage doing his best Bela Lugosi in the flickering footage. Times are hard, though, and fighting the church’s vampire hunters has taken its toll. Dracula needs fresh victims, and in his weakened state, it’s down to Renfield to supply them. 

Our boy is experiencing a kind of class consciousness, though, relating the exploitative relationship he has, and slowly coming to the conclusion that Dracula is kind of abusive. Inspired by a support group for toxic relationship survivors and the goriest meet cute ever with a local cop Rebecca Quincy (played by Awkwafina), Renfield moves out of the derelict hospital, determined to make his own way in the world.

The subplot is a chaotic mix of police corruption within the “PDNO”, as an organized crime group flexes its muscles. The crime family is fronted by a manic son (the hilarious Ben Schwarz), doing his mother’s bidding (Shohreh Aghdashloo as the hard-nosed matriarch). 

Renfield tries to escape Dracula’s clutches as he also helps Quincy and pursues self-improvement in the group. Dracula is a tenacious boss, though, and chases Renfield down. It’s here that Cage excels, delivering a wonderfully camp portrayal, mixed with sinister undercurrents of bullying. He obviously relishes every word, and every flamboyant body movement. 

There are a couple of large fight scenes, each doused with such cartoonish amounts of blood and carnage that it’s hard to be squeamish about. People are beaten to death with another person’s limbs, heads and legs are detached and fly through the air, and it feels like the director (Chris McKay) is just seeing what he can get away with. The effects are great, Cage becoming a smoke cloud or a colony of bats as he terrorizes just about everyone. 

There are some good local jokes, it being set in New Orleans and being a great addition to the canon of NOLA media post-lockdown [see our feature on that here]. Renfield and Quincy escape a fight and need to meet to regroup and one of them yells, "Meet me at Cafe du Monde!", you know, WHERE THE LOCALS MEET. Quincy also delivers a good bit about the Sysyphian task of sobriety traffic stops in a city that has drive-through daiquiri stores. 

Is the movie ridiculous? Yes. Is the plot, even within its own universe, completely goofy? Hell yes. Would I almost immediately see it again because it was a fun time? Absolutely. I wish Dracula had a few more dramatic flourishes, but hey, I’ll stick my neck out for Renfield.  (PO)

New New Orleans Media! (feature)

The Southern Food & Beverage Museum (SoFAB) and the Meraux Foundation are excited to announce the return of SoFAB’s popular Cookbook Creation Class. Thanks to the generous support of the Meraux Foundation, the class will be offered free of charge. The cookbook creation class offers participants the opportunity to learn how to produce a cookbook in a step-by-step way.
At the end of the program, the participants will have the knowledge and skills needed to develop their own cookbook for self-publishing or digital distribution. The class is taught by SoFAB Founder and multi-cookbook author Liz Williams (pictured), with help from specialists in food photography and design.
“Our cookbook creation class has been one of our most popular offerings since SoFAB opened nearly 15 years ago,” said Liz Williams, SoFAB founder and teacher of the cookbook class. “It’s very exciting to bring the program to our library in St. Bernard Parish and to have the support of the Meraux Foundation so that we can make the class accessible to anyone in the community.”
The class is free but spots are limited to 40 people. Refreshments served at each class. Single session sign-ups are not available and participants are encouraged to attend each session.
WHEN: Classes will take place from 10AM - NOON and will be offered at the SoFAB Research Center at Nunez Community College. The class is structured as a 4-session program, and during each session a different element of cookbook production is discussed and explored. 

• April 15th: Why Create a Cookbook and How to Tell Culinary Stories
• April 29: Gathering Recipes & Testing Recipes
• May 13: Photography, Illustration and Creating a Cookbook Layout
• May 27th: Marketing, Self-Publishing, and Program Wrap-Up

 WHERE: The SoFAB Research Center and Boyd Library at Nunez Community College is located
at 3710 Paris Rd, Chalmette, LA 70043. The Research Center contains over 40,000 books, 5,000 menus, and thousands of culinary pamphlets and other culinary ephemera. All of the materials in the library and archive will be available for class participants, providing inspiration for stories, recipes, photography and design of their books. Register HERE

Last week, we listed a few of our favorite New Orleans visual artists, and we asked you for any we'd missed. Here's a dozen more names you should check out, and examples of their work in the gallery above. All works are copyright of the artists - click through to their websites for more! Many thanks for all of these suggestions. 
1. Nurhan Goturk
2. AZ Smith
3. Ayo Y. Scott
4. Jon Guillaume
5. Sean G Clark
6. Mecca
7. Duerty Boys
8. Rev Varg Vargas
9. Monica Zeringue
10. Chandar Chandar
11. ​JACQ FRANÇOI$
12. Jay Frostt

Seeing red: Moulin Rouge! The Musical

When a musical’s title contains an exclamation mark, you know it means business. This stage version of Baz ‘The Michael Bay of Jazz Hands’ Luhrmann’s 2001 cinematic jukebox romance comes at you hard from the start. The clicking fingers and filthy bassline of Lady Marmalade thrust you into the glittering, gaudy chaos of Paris’ Moulin Rouge nightclub, where tutu’d twirlers and corseted courtesans promise to fulfil your every desire. 

This becomes a literal plot point as the club is in financial trouble (booo!), although club patron the Duke of Monroth will perhaps invest (hurrah!), but that is dependent on him sleeping with and owning the club’s sultry star, Satine (ewww!) who is incidentally coming down with a fatal case of terminal consumption (awww!). Enter Christian (Conor Ryan), a sappily romantic Ohioan visitor who has fallen in with the charismatic socialist ‘bohemians’ Toulouse-Lautrec (Nick Rashad Burroughs) and Santiago (Gabe Martínez). 

Christian just wants to write and perform his love songs, and in a classic mix-up, he ends up in a dressing room with Satine (Courtney Reed) delivering his best Elton John while she believes him to be the Duke and they fall instantly in love. When the Duke DOES turn up for what he paid for, they convince him to back a new show, and Christian is relegated to sad boi side piece (conflict ensues). The entire enterprise is handled by campy, opportunistic hedonist Zidler (Austin Durant), the club’s manager. 

The pop musical numbers come thick and fast, especially when a lyric can be crowbarred into the conversation, and the playlist has been fully updated from 20 years ago, so expect more Lady Gaga than Nirvana. The plot isn’t the most convoluted, and for me, the show is at its best when exploring the themes of found family within the bohemians or the club employees. Christian and Satine trade ballads (both have impressive pipes), and Toulouse-Lautrec and Santiago both get evocative set pieces. 

The costumes (Catherine Zuber) and scenic design (Derek McLane) do a lot of great work, your ticket money right up there on stage, seamlessly swinging from baroque theater to the grimy Montmartre to the sophistication of Champs-Élysées. There are quite a few huge, exuberant dance numbers that show off Sonya Tayeh’s expert choreography. 

The songs work well for the most part (the musical jump scare of Cee-lo Green very much excepted) and renditions of ‘Firework’ and of course ‘Your Song’ get ecstatic audience reactions. There are a couple of high-octane medleys that pinball you through two decades of pop hits, and the second half opener of Bad Romance builds from a sexy two-hander to a full-out joyous ensemble whirlwind. 

It’s a spectacle. Yes, it’s sentimental in parts, and don’t think about the plot too hard, but if you love pop music and huge neon sets and streamers popping out of canes and saucy innuendo and large-format burlesque, then you’ll have a memorable night out. And at the end of the day, that’s really all that the Moulin Rouge wants for you.

Moulin Rouge! The Musical plays at the Saenger until April 16th. 

Known for its “inauthentic” global cuisine, killer cocktails, and funky atmosphere, Mister Mao  is known for supporting the community with its wildly-popular Guest Chef Pop-Up Series – a seasonal roster of dinners showcasing the talents of various Chefs, food trucks, vendors and more. For April, Mister Mao will host Deauxjo, the BIPOC owned pop-up and event catering company from Louisiana natives  JP Peterson and Lashonda Cross. Visitors are invited to enjoy a tantalizing feast priced at $85 (per person plus tax & gratuity). Menu:

1st Course -  Lotus Tea & A Bite
Lotus Tea Welcome Cocktail with Sake, Pine Nut Simple Syrup, Lime and Soda
Tuna Nduja, Soy Cured Egg Yolk, Crispy Black Eyed Peas, Chive Oil

2nd Course - Smoked Mirliton w/ Black Garlic
Black Garlic Ice Cream, Fried Ginger, 5 Spiced Smoked Mirliton

3rd Course - Chili Soft Shell Crab
Pickled Soft Shell  Fried, Nori Butter, Watercress, Compressed Watermelon, Chili Powder

4th Course - Red Snapper Sashimi
Kombu Cured Red Snapper, Squid Ink Brined Okra Pearls, Japanese Giardiniera

5th Course - Lo Mai Crawfish Boil
Steamed Black Rice, Lotus Leaf Wrap, Crawfish, Andouille, Khao Soi Nage

6th Course - Black Sesame Shu Cream
Black Sesame Pate a Choux, Sweet potato Miso Custard, Soy Sauce Caramel

WHEN/WHERE: Wednesday, April 12th, at 7PM at Mister Mao, 4501 Tchoupitoulas in New Orleans.

RESERVATIONS: Reservations can be made on RESY

Uptown New Orleans’ highly-anticipated Northern Italian restaurant will officially open to the public on Wednesday, April 5, 2023 at 4609 Magazine Street. The brainchild of Chef Brian Burns and Reno De Ranieri, who own the popular Spanish-inspired restaurant Costera, Osteria Lupo will offer locals and visitors refined Northern Italian cuisine featuring house made pastas, wood-fired specialties, and a stellar wine & cocktail program, served up in a chic and sophisticated setting.

Osteria Lupo’s menu is conceptualized by Burns, a graduate of Tulane’s A.B. Freeman School and École Grégoire-Ferrandi, one of France’s leading professional training schools. Burns’ impressive vitae includes stints at Michelin starred Joël Robuchon and Château Cordeillan-Bages in France. 

Dishes, many of which will come from the restaurant’s central wood-fire oven, will showcase the bounty of the mountains and lakes of Piedmont, Liguria and other regions in Northern Italy. “There is such a rich culinary landscape in the north, with its own unique flavors and ingredients,” says Burns. “I’ve always loved these regions and am excited to shine a spotlight on them here in New Orleans.” Osteria Lupo website