Strolling sweets
First-time visitors come to New Orleans seemingly very familiar with pralines, beignets, and Lucky Dog carts. Lesser known but equally important to the city’s street-food story is the Roman Candy Cart.
Roman Candy is a taffy stick originally made by Angelina Napoli Cortese in her home kitchen in the early 20th century and served to family and friends on special occasions like Christmas and St. Joseph’s Day. It was called “Roman” due to some anti-Italian sentiment at the time.
Info
Address Sells from various spots throughout New Orleans, www.romancandy.com, Facebook: Roman Candy | Hours Check Facebook for location and hours| Tip For considerably more than $1, you can ride a mule-drawn carriage through the French Quarter. Once the only mode of transport through the city, they are lined up and waiting on Decatur St in front of Jackson Square. Be warned: local motorists will curse you as the slow-moving carriages clog the narrow streets.
After losing both legs below the knees in a streetcar accident, Angelina’s 12-year-old son, Sam, sold fruit and vegetables from a goat-drawn cart. He would often bring leftovers of his mother’s taffy to sell on his wagon. The candy always sold well and customers began to request it, so Sam decided to start peddling the confections on a regular basis. He drew up a design for a special mule-drawn candy cart with a wheelwright named Tom Brinker. The two launched the new company in 1915, selling vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry taffy for five cents a stick. For 55 years, the price stayed the same. Today, a stick will set you back $1, but the original three flavors are still all that are sold off the back of that same carriage with the distinctive red-spoked wheels.
After Sam’s death in 1969, his grandson Ron Kottemann took over the business, and he continues to this day. Kottemann began making rounds with his grandfather as a young boy. In those years, the cart traveled throughout the city, ferrying across the Industrial Canal to reach Chalmette and the Mississippi to sell in Algiers.
You can now track the Roman Candy cart’s day-to-day location via Facebook. It is most common to find the mule half asleep and the cart parked in a shady spot along St. Charles Avenue in Uptown. In the mid-1980s, Kotteman added a second cart at a permanent location inside the Audubon Zoo, just outside the primates’ exhibit.
Back
To the online map