Tag: Allison Entrekin

Born in Acadiana (Louisiana’s historically French region) in the sixties, a plate lunch is a working person’s meal. Portions are large so as to keep hunger at bay until nightfall.

Their primary job is to serve the most central of daily meals: lunch. They are early risers, okra choppers, roux stirrers, crowd herders. They are keepers of their family’s long-held recipes. They bear up under pressure. They are survivors.

Recently, after a particularly gloomy day of virtual school, my 11-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son were in tears. “I’m so sick of screens!” she said. “I’m sick of everything,” he said. It was all I needed to hear.

Truman Capote was not born inside New Orleans’s Hotel Monteleone. But when he drank there with friends, which was often, he liked to claim he was.

Situated on a mountain plateau in western North Carolina, some 4,000 feet above sea level, the four-stoplight town of Highlands is no secluded hamlet. Dubbed the Aspen of the East, it attracts 200,000 visitors a year.

Some AAA Five Diamond resorts are playgrounds for A-listers like Sir Elton John, Cameron Diaz, and Sofia Vergara. Others have a history of welcoming American royalty like the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Astors. But few resorts can make both claims.

I would start by kayaking on the French Broad River downtown with a six-pack of Asheville Brewing Company’s Perfect Day IPA. Then I’d go to South Slope, our unofficial brewery district with eleven breweries.

Slicing through downtown Pensacola all the way to the bay, Palafox Street is known as the city’s core cultural artery. It’s a distinction the street has enjoyed for the past two-and-a-half centuries, during which it has been subject to—and shaped by—British, Spanish, and American rule.

In North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians found a way to take care of their people: In 1997, they opened a casino on their lands. Now South Carolina’s Catawba tribe wants to do the same. But there is a problem.

To open an independent boutique hotel inside Atlanta’s perimeter is a big deal. (There are precious few in the city, for reasons upon which no one can quite agree.) But to open an independent boutique hotel above Atlanta’s most legendary strip club? Yes, that’s a big deal indeed.