The following is an excerpt from our September issue:

By Jonathan Lindberg

It’s Saturday night in New Orleans and Rosie’s Diner is out of gumbo soup. Not a good sign for a restaurant in the French Quarter, famous for its gumbo soup. “We only have one cook in the kitchen tonight,” the waiter explains. “He just hasn’t had time to get around to preparing the soup. We haven’t had gumbo for days.”

Though the restaurant is large, there are only two waiters working the floor. They hurry among tables, balancing orders along with apologies for the slow cook time. When the tables begin to thin, the waiter stops to tell me they have been running crazy like this all day long. I ask him about the crowds I had seen on Canal and Bourbon Streets, in the heart of the French Quarter. “A lot of tou