Café du Monde

History

Coffee was brought to the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River by the French around 1700. During the American Civil War, New Orleans Creoles developed chicory-blended coffee due to a coffee shortage, a practice that continues at Café du Monde. Chicory adds a chocolate-like flavor to café au lait. The Acadians (Cajuns) from Nova Scotia brought the beignet to Louisiana in the 18th century.

Beignets are squared pieces of dough with no hole, often covered with powdered sugar; at Café du Monde they are served with a thick coating of powdered sugar in orders of three. Café du Monde opened as a simple coffee stand in 1862, making it the oldest coffee shop in New Orleans. Its menu has changed little, still offering dark-roasted coffee with chicory, beignets, white and chocolate milk, hot chocolate, and fresh-squeezed orange juice, with sodas and iced coffee as more recent additions.

The shop closed at midnight on August 27, 2005 due to Hurricane Katrina, suffering only minor damage but remaining closed for nearly two months. Owners refurbished the eating areas and kitchens during the low-traffic interval. Six weeks after the hurricane, Café du Monde promoted its re-opening as a sign of the city's recovery, and over 100 news media outlets, including ABC-TV's Good Morning America, reported on it. The French Quarter location reopened on October 19, 2005 to national media attention.

Locations

The building that originally housed the site of Café du Monde, known as The Butcher's Hall, was constructed by Spanish authorities in 1791. A hurricane damaged it in 1812, and a replacement market building was completed the following year. The coffee stand itself opened at the upriver end of the French Market in 1862. For more than a hundred years, it shared the market with a similar coffee-and-beignet operation called Morning Call, which started in 1870 and relocated to Metairie in 1974.

Café du Monde began expanding into shopping malls in the late 1980s. Today, the New Orleans area has nine locations: the original at 800 Decatur Street, plus spots at Riverwalk Marketplace, Esplanade Mall, Lakeside Mall, Oakwood Mall, on Veterans Boulevard, in Mandeville, Covington, City Park, and at Louis Armstrong International Airport. Interest from Japanese businesses followed the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition. The Duskin Company reached out in 1989, and a franchise deal allowed the first Japanese outlets to open in 1990.

At its height, the franchise had 32 locations. The Japanese stores kept the familiar green-and-white color scheme and French Quarter architectural style, but they added different beignet varieties and seasonal desserts to the menu. The coffee with chicory remained unchanged. By 2016, only ten Japanese locations remained. Duskin ended the partnership in early 2018, closing all Japanese Café du Monde shops on March 31 of that year.

In popular culture

Café du Monde has popped up in plenty of New Orleans stories, from James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels to books by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and others. The 1955 version of the spot shows up in the William Castle film New Orleans Uncensored, and its pre-Katrina look appears in the 2003 movie Runaway Jury. Jimmy Buffett sang about the place in his 1974 song “The Wino and I Know,” and Adam Richman stopped by for a 2009 episode of Man v. Food. In the 2013 film Now You See Me, Woody Harrelson’s character pulls off magic tricks there. The café also turns up multiple times in the TV series Tremé and gets a starring role in the 2014 movie Chef. It even made an appearance on The Simpsons, and Marcus King mentions it in his song “Too Much Whiskey.”