Culinary consciousness
If you’re in New Orleans as a visitor, after a few days of subsisting on pork wrapped in bacon with a side of cracklins, you may be ready for a break from the meat sweats. For more than 30 years, the Hare Krishna Temple on Esplanade Avenue has served a vegetarian feast every Sunday night to anyone who shows up at their door. Dishes include samosas stuffed with cauliflower and peas, pakoras, assorted vegetables in a chickpea batter, pushpanna rice with nuts and spices, puris, a tortilla-like fried wheat bread, and various curries and cheeses. Desserts can be kheer, a rice pudding made with sweetened condensed milk, or burfi, a sweet with a vanilla fudge consistency.
Best of all, and most surprisingly, the entire meal is absolutely free. More than free: you can bring Tupperware containers to take food home.
Info
Address 2936 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70119, +1 504.638.3244, www.iskconcenters.com/new-orleans | Hours Sun 6pm–9pm| Tip If you’d rather pay for your dinner, close to the temple is New Orleans’ best Spanish restaurant, Lola’s (3312 Esplanade Ave). If you love garlic, you will love Lola’s. Surprisingly, there are only two Spanish restaurants in New Orleans; curious for a city that was under Spanish rule for nearly 40 years.
Although some people partaking in the buffet will be homeless or in desperate need, what makes the Sunday “soup kitchen” unique is that the weekly crowd also includes many neighborhood residents, university students, and some regulars who just enjoy being part of a community and meeting new people.
The dinners began when the founder and spiritual master of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Srila Prabhupada, saw children fighting in the street over scraps of food. He told his yoga students no one should go hungry and quickly set up a network of free food kitchens, which grew in scope to become 350 Hare Krishna temples across the world. The Sunday feast, called prasadam, embodies an important tenet of the faith.
The New Orleans Hare Krishna community has about 300 members. Immediately after Katrina, the Krishnas joined the Food for Life program to serve more than 5000 free meals. For the Sunday dinners, there will be chanting, dancing, and philosophizing, but no one will care if you’re just there for noshing.
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