When I was a little boy in New Orleans, my family had a late-night (and early-morning) tradition: Pile into the car and head for the French Quarter, where we would crowd around a tiny table at the Cafe du Monde and order hot chocolate, cafe au lait and platters of deep-fried dough, dusted with confectioner’s sugar that gave us snowy mustaches.
Those pillowy pastries, called beignets, served another purpose years later, when friends and I would wolf them after a night on the town, much as our Midwestern counterparts feasted on White Castles.
After I moved to Chicago, beignets became an addiction indulged infrequently. But now comes a chain called Crescent City Beignets hoping to introduce the rest of the world to New Orleans’ tasty answer to the Krispy Kreme.
Its new outlet (2200 N. Lincoln Ave., 773-404-2593) has the right look, with plenty of small tables, attractive photos of New Orleans and a heady smell of burbling grease and hot coffee.
The cafe au lait came pre-mixed — horrors — from a spigot behind the counter, but it was powerful and soothing and boiling hot.
The beignets looked right — crispy brown with plenty of powdered sugar — but one of our order of three beignets was gummy inside, an indication that perhaps the frying oil wasn’t hot enough. The two others were fine.
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One complaint: Two cafes and three beignets set me back nearly $10. In New Orleans, the same order would be less than $4.