"NILE" THE BEST EATS IN NEW ORLEANS BY FAR

I will be posting more on this later.  I just ate at the best restaurant in New Orleans and it was Ethiopian Food.   My friend Mulu introduced me to it.  We were both looking for a place to eat after a conference in New Orleans, where the conference food was TERRIBLE and everyone seemed to be sick 3 days into it, including yours truly.  Mulu is from Ethiopia so I thought it might be interesting to try to find Ethiopian food while we were here.  Thanks to the internet reviews we chose the NILE restaurant, where the service was excellent and the food was incredible.  We split a dish between us and I couldn't get enough of it.   There is a certain way to eat the food and it was demonstrated for me.   So, my fingers are stained with the sauce but my stomach is now calm, I loved it.
The other interesting part was that it took us an hour to get there, because we were walking.   The best part about that was that the walk was through a part of New Orleans that had not been rebuilt, so we were able to see how people were trying to survive, rebuild and move into an area that looks like it had been destroyed.  It is a valiant effort.  Mixture of cobblestone sidewalks with broken cement.  Empty lots where houses were torn down.   Boarded up buildings, like street waifs, with plastic scarves waving in the humid breeze over windows some closed some shut.   I could go on.  Street lights flickering inconsistently over the broken streets.  Mostly younger people walking around like they had just moved in and hadn't decided to stay yet.   Buildings for sale as "condominiums".  Everything was looking kind of tentative.
The Ethiopian Restaurant was fresh, we were the only "occasional tourists" who were accidentally there.  Everyone else seemed to have been there before:  a long table with a dozen or more Ethiopians talking and sharing food and hot tea out of a large silver hot water server and a family of 5 lacksidasically draped on their chairs all looking in opposite directions, only occasionally entering into a conversation.  It was peaceful and the language was all sotto voce.  Usually I can perceive a word or two in a different language, but this time I could not, I guessed before it was said that Ciao would be the word for goodbye.  I learned that Salam was the word for hello.