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New Orleans
Alone

Name: New Orleans Alone
Price: 6.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Jennifer Brandt

A solo travel guide for women 50 and over
By Jennifer Brandt

Beyond Bourbon Street's plastic cups, New Orleans offers the layers of an old port city. Give its cemeteries, architecture and music the time and attention they deserve.

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Ebook · Updated Q4 2026

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Where you might stay

BudgetHampton Inn & Suites New Orleans Downtownbreakfast included near the Quarter
Mid-rangeHotel Provincialcourtyards, pool, and a bar
A treatThe Roosevelt New Orleans, A Waldorf Astoria Hotelstaffed lobby and a landmark bar

Two places to eat alone

Domilise'sInformal counter dining where eating alone is unremarkable.
Parkway Bakery and TavernA classic po'boy counter comfortable for eating alone.

SAMPLE

Why New Orleans Works

New Orleans has a reputation problem, and the reputation is not wrong so much as it is incomplete. Ask most people what happens here and they will describe a long weekend of Bourbon Street and frozen drinks in plastic cups, three days engineered for maximum noise and minimum sleep. That version of the city exists. It occupies about six blocks. The rest of New Orleans is a three-hundred-year-old port city with its own language, its own food, its own funeral customs, its own sense of what a Tuesday afternoon is for, and none of it requires raising your voice to enjoy it.
The distinction matters for how the trip gets planned. New Orleans is not a party you attend. It is a culture you spend time inside of, one built by French colonists, Spanish administrators, enslaved Africans and their descendants, Haitian refugees, Sicilian immigrants, and Vietnamese fishing families, layered over two and a half centuries on ground that should not hold a city at all and somehow holds one of the most distinctive cities in the country. Come for the food and the music alone and the week will be a good one. Come instead for the history, the architecture, the cemeteries, and the unhurried rhythm of a place that keeps its own calendar, and the week will be entirely different and just as good.

A free excerpt from New Orleans Alone.

PRACTICAL SAMPLE

Eating Alone Well in a City Built Around the Table

New Orleans is one of the easiest cities in the country to eat well by yourself, because so much of its food culture already runs on counters, bars, and quick purposeful meals rather than the long paired-off dinner the word restaurant sometimes implies elsewhere. A po’boy counter does not care if you are one or four. A bar seat at an oyster house is often the best seat in the room. Approach the city’s food that way and you will eat as well as anyone at the four-top beside you, usually for less money and with a better view of the kitchen.
Oyster houses in particular are built around the counter: a marble or stainless counter with a shucker working in front of you, calling out what came in, where a half dozen at a time and a cold beer or a glass of white wine is a complete and unhurried meal. The same logic holds at Creole and Cajun kitchens with an open pass and at the city’s smaller wine bars, several of which have built their entire seating plan around a long counter. If a restaurant’s website shows only tables in its photographs, call and ask. Kitchens here are used to the question and will tell you plainly whether counter seats exist and how to claim one.

A free excerpt from New Orleans Alone.

Inside this book

New Orleans Awaits
A City Shaped by History
Planning Your Escape
The Solo Woman’s New Orleans
Where to Stay
Neighborhood by Neighborhood

View the chapter contents

New Orleans Awaits
A City Shaped by History
Planning Your Escape
The Solo Woman’s New Orleans
Where to Stay
Neighborhood by Neighborhood
Days in New Orleans
Art, Culture & Creativity
The Pleasures of the Table
Evening & After Dark
Retail Therapy
Beyond the City: Day Trips
Talking to New Orleans
Practical Matters

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