French Quarter Fest is Here

Today marks the beginning of French Quarter Fest, the largest free music festival in the South. With more than 65 local restaurants participating this year, French Quarter Fest will be the hottest meal ticket in the city over the next 4 days.

Photo by renee b. photography.

A new addition to this year's list of French Quarter Fest food vendors is Blue Dot Donuts, who we profiled in this month's issue of OffBeat Magazine. Blue Dot will be offering it’s signature donut: the maple bacon long john. Think of it as a better version of dragging your breakfast sausage links through the pool of syrup leftover from your short stack of pancakes. And they will also be serving up the Dough Boy - a regular long john donut filled with your choice of Thai pulled pork or grilled shrimp.

Breakfast: it's what's for lunch and dinner.

Blue Dot Donuts
4301 Canal Street
(504) 218-4866
Mon-Fri: 6:00am - 4:00pm; Sat-Sun 6:00am - 3:00pm

Blue Dot Special

Doughnuts were standard Saturday morning fair growing up. While most of you exalt the rather dry and commissary style doughnuts of McKenzie's, we opted instead for Ross's Donuts at the end of Metairie Road. Besides being an incredible baker, Ross also had a bit of a stutter and liked to tell jokes. The result was a run for doughnuts could easily eat up your entire morning.

Recently, Blue Dot Donuts opened on Canal St. which just so happens to be well-positioned as a detour following an early Saturday morning walk around City Park with The Hounds. The Hounds are fans of the glazed ones, but only with a cup of coffee and the Saturday cartoons. What a bunch of weird dogs.

While the regular doughnuts at Blue Dot are nothing to sneeze at, it is the special flavors that really grab my attention. Peanut butter and jelly just so happens to be one of the all time greatest flavor combinations known to man. And here it is, a jelly filled doughnut with a topping of creamy peanut butter, some chopped peanuts and then a wedge of strawberry. It is as the French would say, "Pretty bad ass."

Lindsay is very partial to cake doughnuts. We have been searching for a chocolate cake doughnut throughout the the Gulf South for the last three plus years to no avail. While we did not find the elusive Black Pearl at Blue Dot, she did find a very good selection of flavored cake doughnuts like the strawberry, blueberry, cake with strawberry icing, and a chocolate and coconut one. The strawberry cake was her favorite, and I must say she has impeccable taste.

Finally, because what good is a meal without dessert, we had a red velvet cupcake. I've never really understood the appeal of red velvet cake as it really just seems like a conduit for cream cheese frosting. But this doughnut was moist and a damn fine conduit at that.

Blue Dot - Birdie
4301 Canal St.
218-4866