From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published May 2, 2008 Coffee Pot 2$ French Quarter: 714 St. Peter 524-3500 Breakfast, lunch and dinner continuously, seven days. AE MC V Creole. Breakfast. About a year ago, my wife and I spent a weekend in the French Quarter, playing tourist. We were walking down Royal Street one morning when I caught sight of the Coffee Pot. That was the first restaurant I reviewed on the radio, back in 1975. It was easy to comment upon at the time: I lived in the Quarter then, and like many other Quarterites, I was a regular at the Coffee Pot. But it was many years since my last visit there. So there we went the next morning for the Coffee Pot's most celebrated meal: breakfast. The restaurant, in an old townhouse next door to Pat O’Brien’s, is more historic than well known. It unapologetically served pure homestyle Creole cooking at a time when that was thought of as passe. Leah Chase, one of the superstars of Creole cuisine, began her career at the Coffee Pot, in the 1940s. It has another culinary claim to fame. For decades, it was the only restaurant in town serving calas. Calas are golf-ball-size rice cakes, held together with rice flour, flavored with cinnamon and vanilla, fried, then dusted with powdered sugar and moistened with syrup. A couple of those with grits and sausage makes a breakfast that could only be had in New Orleans. An authentic Creole treat going back at least a century, calas had disappeared from all its former vendors (along with the vendors themselves)--save for the Coffee Pot. I asked the waitress whether she knew what had happened to Pearl, who took care of my table (and made most of the desserts) in my long-ago visits. "Pearl?" she asked. "She's right back there!" Sure enough. Not only that, but she looked the same as the last time I'd seen her. She's waited tables at the Coffee Pot for 46 years--which may be the current record for active servers. The calas were delicious, the grits were perfect, the bacon was thick and crunchy, and they even had chicory coffee, which solves the only complaint I ever had about the Coffee Pot -- that their coffee was never particularly good, ironically enough. And I met the owner, a dentist who bought the place shortly before the hurricane. I like that he has the good sense to let this historic cafe be. Also here are terrific omelettes, with standard fillings as well as more fanciful ones like red beans or chicken livers. The lunch and dinner menus still include all the standards: red beans and rice (every day, not just Monday), fried chicken and seafood, and some imaginative pot food. I wouldn't say that any of this qualifies as the best in town. But it is all very good, and the unrelenting local character of the place makes it taste even better. The evolution of the French Quarter since the days when I ate here regularly is such that the Coffee Pot is attended now mostly by visitors. But it's nice to know that they're getting the real thing. No matter how touristy it now looks, the Coffee Pot remains the French Quarter's classic neighborhood cafe. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.