Cafe Du Monde

Café Du Monde, at 800 Decatur Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, has served beignets and café au lait continuously since 1862, making it one of the oldest food establishments in the American South and one of the most globally recognized cafés in the United States. The café occupies a large open-air pavilion directly adjacent to Jackson Square, with the St. Louis Cathedral as a backdrop and the Mississippi River a short walk away, providing a setting of pronounced New Orleans character that has remained essentially unchanged for generations. The menu is famously brief: beignets in orders of three served dusted with a blizzard of powdered sugar, café au lait (dark chicory coffee cut with hot scalded milk), hot chocolate, and a small selection of cold beverages. Beignets are French-derived deep-fried pastry squares — made from a yeast-leavened dough, fried to a golden puff, and immediately buried under powdered sugar — that arrive hot, hollow, and extraordinarily light. The chicory coffee is a New Orleans tradition dating to the Civil War, when coffee was scarce and chicory root was used to stretch or substitute for it; the resulting flavor — deeper, slightly bitter, and roasted — has become an acquired taste that regular visitors return for specifically. Café Du Monde is open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-four days a year (closed on Christmas Day), meaning it accommodates post-Mardi Gras revelers at 3 a.m. as readily as it serves tourists waiting for the cathedral doors to open at noon. Waits are endemic; they are accepted as part of the experience.