On July 31, Axios New Orleans ran a story about a drink you can order about forty feet inside our front door. Chelsea Brasted wrote up the Bayou Beast, the pandan iced latte from CR Coffee, one of the eleven independent vendors under this roof and one of the originals here since 2015.
If you've walked past the coffee stall lately and wondered what the green drink was, that's the one.
It's iced coffee and milk over pandan, a sweet Southeast Asian leaf that tastes a little like vanilla and coconut and settles into the bottom of the glass a bright, unmistakable green. The idea came out of a real New Orleans problem. Fall menus start landing in August, when the city is still sitting in the middle of hurricane season and nobody wants to wrap their hands around a hot latte. So CR built a fall drink that runs cold.
It caught on. Regulars started planning their falls around it, and a Muses rider liked it enough to decorate a shoe in its honor. That shoe still lives at CR's Magazine Street shop.
Chelsea's story gets further into the backstory than we will here. Read the whole thing at Axios New Orleans.
The short version for anyone standing in the market right now: the Bayou Beast is pouring at the CR Coffee stall every day through Halloween, along with Magazine Street and Old Metairie. After that it's gone until next summer.
Thanks to Chelsea Brasted and Axios New Orleans for the write-up.