Manning's New Orleans

When you are traveling over a major holiday there won't always be a lot of open restaurants or bars. This was the case for us on Thanksgiving Day. After waiting a stupidly long time at one of the only open places serving breakfast (Camillia's in the French Quarter) for simple eggs & hash browns (never got our order of toast), we scoped out a place to have drinks and watch the afternoon football games.

Lucky for us our first choice, Manning's on Fulton Street was open. If you haven't been and love sports, this is a pretty awesome bar. A big place with tables along one side, more tables in the center of the restaurant up half a level, a few dozen recliner seats down in front of a massive, full wall TV screen (13 feet by 7.5 feet), huge bar and an impressive outdoor patio with another incredibly large TV screen. Besides the two big ones, there are another 30 or so flat screen TVs along every available inch of wall space showing all broadcast games.

The menu is a mix of southern comfort and Creole dishes in the spirit of bar food. We settled into a table with great views of the big screen to catch the second half of the first game -Houston vs. Detroit. We ordered fried, hot chicken wings and the blue crab and spinach dip served with baked focaccia chips. The wings were really good served with a traditional crumble of blue cheese and blue cheese dressing for dipping. Alan's only comment regarding the half a dozen wings on the plate is that he wished there were twice as many. I liked the crab and spinach dip but we were mixed on the focaccia chips...they were in between soft and crunchy which made for an odd texture.

We kept the drinks coming through the first game and by the start of the Dallas vs. Washington match we ordered round two of appetizers. This time I went with a classic Caesar salad of romaine, organic chicken, romano cheese, house-made croutons, olives and a creamy, thick Parmesan Caesar dressing. Excellent salad - great flavor on the dressing! Alan picked the corn-fried Des Allemands catfish chips served with a ravigote dipping sauce. These were fantastic! Perfect little fried bites and a sauce that was thick and flavorful. The catfish was moist and flaky and really good.

We killed about three hours at Manning's that afternoon and the crowd swelled, calmed and swelled again with lots of groups coming in wearing their team jerseys and ordering beer by the bucket. The only downside was that the restaurant seemed understaffed and the service was sketchy. Our empty glasses were not cleared away even as new drinks were being brought out and a general sense that you needed to actively seek out your server if you wanted something. We chalked this up to it being Thanksgiving Day and wouldn't hold it against the restaurant. Definitely a fun place to hang out if you're down there looking for a place to watch sports.