Conference food - mass cooking by a hotel kitchen. If you're lucky, it's edible. One conference - which I wasn't at, but heard stories about - the food was so bad people who didn't have time to go out and buy their own food were living on the Goo Goo Clusters one of the exhibitors was handing out. So the fact that the restaurants are serving actual good food is important.

At our conferences the publishers supply us with pretty good food-bribes, actually. However, I still have a per diem I can spend!

I really appreciate everyone's suggestions!

Wasn't there a line that went down to the Aquarium?

Yeah, runs along the levee. I don't know where the other stops are, I've never managed to catch it - I'd always get bored and just walk.

Ditto. There may be a stop by the convention center, but honestly, if I was doing down there, I was already in a car, so it was park and walk.

The Gumbo Shop (Shoppe?) is also really nice, but a bit more low key and reasonably priced than some.

Bacco is in the Quarter and has an amazing menu. It's not cheap, but if you go for lunch you can squeeze by for around $20 a person (I don't know if they still do it, but they used to do 25 cent martinis with the lunch menu), and it's all rich and satisfying enough that your stomach won't need much for the rest of the day and your mouth won't want to disturb its reverential reverie.

Hec and I got the lobster ravioli off the lunch menu when we were there, accompanied by a dollar's worth of excellent martinis. Easily the second-best meal we had in NOLA -- so swoonily, dreamily decadent.

The Gumbo Shop (Shoppe?) is also really nice, but a bit more low key and reasonably priced than some.

Shop. That's one of my favorites.

Come to think of it, a lot of places run really excellent lunch specials during the summer. Commander's Palace was doing $15 lunches at one point. Check one of the free weekly papers that will no doubt litter the Convention Center.

I was at a conference at, iirc, that very Marriott about 15 years ago and the banquet was the best I've ever had at a hotel. I still remember the bread pudding with bourbon sauce with fondness. That is the conference members think of as the Conference without Coffee. The organizers, who were apparently not coffee drinkers or even human, decided that coffee cost too much. There's a branch of the Cafe du Monde in the adjacent mall, and between sessions, about 50 of us would hike over to the Cafe du Monde to get coffee and fortify ourselves with insulting the organizers and occasionally with beignets. It caused me to miss about 10 minutes out of every session, but that was better than sleeping through the whole thing.

Anyway. Cafe du Monde in the middle of the night. Muffalettas at Central Grocery.

Unfortunately, Bacco's menu doesn't have anything on it that my DH can/will eat. (Pity me! sniff!) I suppose I should be glad that we are not going with my relatives with the celiac disease, to add another wrinkle to food-finding.