“Come Pass a Good Time”

Dr. Jessica B. Harris is a culinary historian and the author of twelve critically acclaimed books documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora, including High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, which was transformed into a four-part Netflix docuseries in 2021. My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. Her most recent book is Vintage Postcards from the African World: In the Dignity of their Work and the Joy of Their Play. Harris is professor emerita at Queens College, CUNY, and holds an AB from Bryn Mawr College; an MA in French literature from Queens College, CUNY; a Licence ès Lettres from the Université de Nancy, France; and a doctorate in performance studies from New York University. She was the inaugural scholar in residence in the Ray Charles Chair at Dillard University in New Orleans. Harris has received many honors, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Amelia Award from the New York Culinary Historians, and the Carol DeMasters Service to Food Journalism Award from the Association of Food Journalists. Harris was named to the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America in 2010, her cookbooks were inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2019, and in 2020 she was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the same organization. Harris was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2021 by TIME magazine. 

Megan Braden-Perry is an author, award-winning journalist, multigenerational Black Creole New Orleans native, and mom. In addition to her own books, Braden-Perry’s byline has appeared in NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune, Gambit Weekly, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Oxford American, The New York Times, and many, many more. She’s covered everything, including New Orleans culture, Black culture, food, drink, travel, crime, education, parenting, religion, Creole culture, and politics. 

Braden-Perry is the recipient of a 2025 Black Women in Food Amplifier award, a 2024 Dillard University 40 Under 40 award, the 2024 New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund Literary Arts and Humanities award, the 2017 Delta Sigma Theta New Orleans alumnae Artie Award in literature, and a 2013 Press Club of New Orleans Excellence in Journalism award. 

When she’s not writing, she’s hanging out with her son, Franklin. Her best friend Jenny says she’ll “talk to the Devil for a sandwich,” and that is the most accurate biographical detail to date. 

Lydia Blackmore is the decorative arts curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. She earned an MA and certificate in museum studies from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware; she also holds a degree in history from the College of William and Mary. As curator, Blackmore oversees research, acquisition, and preservation of decorative and fine art collections. She manages the Decorative Arts of the Gulf South project and is coordinating preservation projects at the historic 533 Royal Street campus. In eleven years at HNOC, Blackmore has curated or cocurated several exhibitions, including Making Mardi Gras (2022), A Vanishing Bounty (2024), and Unknown Sitters (2024). Outside of HNOC, she is a member of the board of trustees of the Historic BK House & Gardens. 

James Clesi’s restaurant career began as a teenager at the Copeland’s on Veterans Boulevard in New Orleans. He bused tables, then moved to dishwashing. Clesi fell in love with the atmosphere in the kitchen—the smells, the sounds, the camaraderie. After studying at Nicholls State University, Clesi worked for several years in disaster relief catering, a job that took him across the country to share traditional New Orleans food with people who often had never tried it before. In 2013, Clesi started doing pop-ups in front of local bars. On January 1, 2015, he opened a brick and mortar in the Mid-City neighborhood on Banks Street. Clesi’s Restaurant and Catering has since moved to a larger location on nearby Bienville. He is proud to be a part of Mid-City, the neighborhood his father grew up in. 

Dawn DeDeaux is a highly-regarded American artist born and based in New Orleans. Her work from recent decades is influenced by cataclysmic events such as Hurricane Katrina, the BP Oil Spill, Louisiana’s vanishing coastline, and challenges to planetary existence.  DeDeaux has been at the forefront of envisioning a post-Anthropocene world as part of her ongoing MotherShip Series, recently on view for two years at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and at Houston’s Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology.   
 
DeDeaux has been an artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome and the Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell Foundations where she contributed works for her 2022 career retrospective at New Orleans Museum of Art. That retrospective, The Space Between Worlds, was accompanied by a comprehensive book published by Hatje Cantz, Berlin.  
 
DeDeaux’s future-tense works consider both the micro and macro challenges ranging from pandemics to environmental hazards—inspiring her survivor wardrobe series Space Clowns and other futurist meditations featured in Eva Diaz’s book After Spaceship Earth and her related essay Aperture magazine. 
 
Works by DeDeaux are currently on view at Longhouse Reserve Sculpture Garden in East Hampton, New York and at the Shepherd Art Center in Detroit, Michigan.

Rien Fertel is the author of four books, most recently, Brown Pelican, a finalist for the Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award. He regularly reviews books for a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal and 64 Parishes, where his Lost Lit column won the Press Club of New Orleans's Best Critical Review prize four years in a row. He currently reviews new books for the Times-Picayune. He earned a PhD in history from Tulane University and has held teaching appointments at several colleges, most recently at Tulane, where he was a visiting professor in the History Department. 

Philip Greene is an award-winning attorney, historian, and writer. He recently retired from his role as trademark counsel for the US Marine Corps at the Pentagon and was a 1986 graduate of Loyola Law School. A descendant of the Peychaud family of New Orleans (Antoine Amédée Peychaud created Peychaud’s Bitters in the 1800s), he’s well-versed in the history and folklore of the Crescent City’s food, drink, and hospitality scene. He was one of the founders of the Museum of the American Cocktail and is currently on the board of directors of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum—both located in New Orleans. He has presented at food and drink events worldwide. 

Phil is the author of five books: To Have and Have Another—A Hemingway Cocktail Companion; The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail; A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris; Cheers! Cocktails and Toasts to Celebrate Every Day of the Year; and his latest book, SOURS: A History of the World’s Most Storied Cocktail. 

Phil was also a contributing author for The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails and was a drinks columnist for The Daily Beast. He will soon start a new writing gig with Men’s Journal. In 2019, he was profiled in the New York Times in a feature titled “A Cocktail Writer's Life: The Pentagon by Day, a Barstool by Night.” 

For more than three decades, bons vivant and musicians Michael Harold and Quinn Peeper have entertained and inspired with their unique blend of tablescapes, entertaining tips, and recipes. Despite demanding day jobs—Harold as a successful attorney and Peeper as a prominent physician—the duo has led double lives as concert pianists and consummate hosts, captivating audiences from intimate gatherings of five to grand soirees. In 2024, they published Classical Shindig: Amateur Artistry: From the Simple to the Sublime with Susan Schadt Press.

Andrew LaMar Hopkins paints meticulous, lush, minute depictions of nineteenth-century interior scenes and architectural set pieces based on the histories of free Creole people in New Orleans, the city he has called home for over a decade. Growing up in Alabama, Hopkins was particularly fixated on the Southern Creole culture to which his family is linked, and which the Civil War largely erased. Hopkins can trace his lineage to a major Creole family, descended from Nicolas Baudin, a Frenchman who received a Louisiana land grant in 1710. Drawing from this history and his expertise as an antiquarian, Hopkins carefully researches the architecture, material culture, and daily life of Creole populations in Southern cities circa 1830. Hopkins’ more recent works are set in Savannah, Georgia, where he currently resides. The self-taught Hopkins’ pictorial compositions visually recall the paintings of Clementine Hunter, Grandma Moses, and Horace Pippin. Rendering interiors and exteriors with exquisite detail and depicting both free Creoles of color and white Creoles, Hopkins deconstructs and reimagines an idealized Antebellum history of Southern port cities—often injecting overtly homosocial scenarios or obvert references to queer culture that excavate the often-repressed histories of LGBTQ people in the Antebellum South. Likewise, these queer characters echo Hopkins’ own biography and his parallel practice as a drag queen: his alter ego, Désirée Joséphine Duplantier, is a retro grande dame from New Orleans. 

Photo by Ellis Anderson for French Quarter Journal

ÌFÉ is an artist, producer, and touring musician based in New Orleans. His music and design work spans more than 30 years of releases across multiple genres and languages, with headline performances including NPR’s Tiny Desk, NYC Winter Jazzfest, and SummerStage in Central Park. He currently records and releases music for his in-house record label Discos Ifá, while obsessing over his Ralph Lauren collection and co-curating events with his partner Mária Rowinska in their home salon space, ILÉ ÌFÉ. 

Mária Rowinska is an artist, event coordinator, and vocalist dedicated to building unique and radical experiences through the arts and hospitality. Drawing on her travels and residence in the US, Poland, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, and heavily influenced by her experience as a first-generation US citizen, she has dedicated herself to the pursuit of curating spaces and moments that make people feel at home, no matter where they’re coming from. Whether it be through musical performance, culinary experience, or community organization, her North Star is always to pursue the magic of the stories and experiences that connect us. 

ILÉ ÌFÉ is a salon and event space in the home of ÌFÉ and Mária Rowinska in New Orleans. ÌFÉ and Mária offer music, culinary arts, and cultural events from a lavish, beautifully designed room in a converted corner grocery on Louisa Street in the Ninth Ward. ILÉ ÌFÉ is a place to be inspired and connect with people in our city in a way that feels both familiar and out of the ordinary. There’s a library, a vinyl and cassette collection, a listening room, chess board and games, a kitchen trickling out interesting food and drinks, a baby grand piano just waiting to be played and listened to, and a dozen different nooks and crannies where folks can settle in and lose themselves in music, literature, conversation, and friendship. 

Growing up surrounded by the Old World sophistication and cool attitude that New Orleans is known for, Alexa Pulitzer infuses her native culture with her vast experiences abroad to create iconic, sophisticated, and original paper collections. For over 25 years, Pulitzer has proudly manufactured her products in the USA and grown to be one of New Orleans’s proudest exports. Her biggest passion, though, lies in live music. Pulitzer bought a party house and created a beautiful, salon-style room during her renovation. She’s often found hosting jazz salons. 

Julie Frederick Vaucresson is a native New Orleanian whose career and life’s journey has come full circle. Julie has a bachelor of arts degree from Xavier University in political science and Spanish. While at Xavier, she studied abroad at the University of San Diego at Guadalajara, Mexico. With dreams of working at the United Nations, Julie continued her studies at the University of Notre Dame, receiving a master of arts degree in Government. Returning to New Orleans after school, she began a career in housing. Throughout this journey Julie never lost sight of her first love: good food. She began cooking at the age of twelve and continued preparing delicious meals for friends and family throughout college and her single life. When Julie married Vance Vaucresson, her passion for food came to the forefront. In the 24 years they have been married, she has worked with him at the family’s sausage company and has an active role in their new venture, Vaucresson’s Creole Café and Deli. She has written her first cookbook which showcases the Vaucresson family’s long-standing place in the New Orleans culinary culture. Julie has repeatedly appeared on the local Fox 8 affiliate preparing many of these dishes. Julie also has started her own Creole lifestyle brand, Creole Made Easy, which makes a condiment line/peripheral brand for Vaucresson Sausage Company. Julie is also a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated, the New Orleans Chapter of the Circle-Lets, and the Tufts social organization.