Café du Monde: Beignets, Chicory Coffee, and 160 Years of New Orleans

Open Since 1862. Closed Only for Hurricanes.

Café du Monde sits at the corner of Decatur and St. Ann streets, at the edge of Jackson Square, in the spot where the French Market has operated since the 1700s. It opened in 1862 — in the middle of the Civil War, while Union troops occupied New Orleans — and it has been serving coffee and beignets to the city ever since. It is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with the sole exception of Christmas Day and the occasional hurricane. Even then, it reopens as soon as possible, because New Orleans without Café du Monde is like New Orleans without the river.

Three Beignets and a Coffee

The menu at Café du Monde is famously simple. You can order beignets — three to an order, always three. You can order café au lait — coffee mixed with hot milk, made with chicory-blend coffee that gives it a dark, slightly bitter, utterly distinctive flavor. You can order orange juice or milk. That's essentially it. There are no croissants, no avocado toast, no seasonal specials. The simplicity is the point. Café du Monde figured out what it does perfectly and has never seen a reason to do anything else.

The beignets arrive on a plate, square pillows of fried dough buried under a mountain of powdered sugar so high that breathing near them sends a white cloud into the air. They're hot — just out of the fryer, hot enough that the sugar melts slightly on contact. The inside is light, airy, almost hollow. The outside has the faintest crispness. They are not doughnuts, despite what outsiders might assume. They're something else, something that exists only here.

The Chicory Coffee

The café au lait is made with coffee blended with chicory root, a tradition that dates to the Civil War when coffee was scarce and New Orleanians stretched their supply by adding roasted chicory. The blockade ended. The habit didn't. Chicory gives the coffee a slightly woody, almost chocolate-like depth that pairs perfectly with the sweetness of the beignets. The combination — the bitter coffee, the sweet fried dough, the cloud of powdered sugar — is one of the great flavor combinations in American eating.

The Experience

Café du Monde has no walls. The original location is an open-air pavilion with a green-and-white striped awning, marble-topped tables, and bentwood chairs. In summer, the humidity wraps around you like a blanket. In winter — what passes for winter in New Orleans — the air off the river carries a chill that makes the hot coffee feel necessary. At two in the morning, the crowd is a mix of musicians just off their gigs, tourists who stumbled out of the Quarter, couples on dates, and locals who've been coming here since before they could walk.

The service is brisk. The waiters — many of whom have worked there for decades — take your order, deliver your food, and present your check with an efficiency that borders on art. There is no lingering at Café du Monde. You eat your beignets, you drink your coffee, you leave powdered sugar on everything you own for the rest of the day, and you get up so the next person can sit down.

More Than a Restaurant

Café du Monde is not the best restaurant in New Orleans. It doesn't try to be. It's something more important — it's a ritual. First-time visitors go because they're supposed to. Returning visitors go because they need to. Locals go because some things in life should be permanent, and a plate of beignets and a cup of chicory coffee at the edge of the French Market, with Jackson Square visible through the powdered sugar haze, is one of them.

The cafe has expanded — there are locations in malls and airports now, plus a line of packaged beignet mix that sells in grocery stores nationwide. But the original location, the one on Decatur Street that's been open since the Civil War, remains the one that matters. It's the taste of New Orleans at its most elemental: French, sweet, simple, available to everyone, and best at an hour when you probably should be asleep.