The beginning and ending of the meal are the real highlights of the SAZERACBAR&GRILL’s Reveillon menu.

It’s important to keep local snobbery in check when you live in a tourist town. You could miss something truly worthwhile, like the slosh of the paddlewheel on a breezy summer evening or a trip to the Gumbo Shop during the holidays.

  Forget the fact that someone who claims to be a student of New Orleans cuisine should try every bowl of gumbo she can find. The restaurant’s double-whammy of blatant name and French Quarter location across from a strip of bead and T-shirt shops was enough to keep me at Liuzza’s in Mid-City or Dunbar’s Uptown for my gumbo fix; if the Gumbo Shop didn’t advertise one of the two least-expensive Reveillon dinners in town, I’m not sure what would have gotten me over the restaurant’s threshold. But they do, and after standing in line for 30 minutes surrounded by the tour bus set and their daiquiris, I was rouxed.

  It’s not the best food in the Quarter, and it’s not in the running for quaintest eateries in the city, but at $19.95 for a very decent four-course Reveillon dinner, it’s unbeatable. They throw in a few dashes of Tabasco, a lagniappe at the end and, if you’re lucky like me, some friendly abuse from a very Southern, very busy waitress who ain’t got time for your hemmin’ and hawin’ over the menu. When she finally got our order, she kindly moved onto alligator jokes from the next table.

  Despite heat lamps, the 24-seat courtyard seemed too chilly during my first hesitant outing. My group of three sat instead at the dining room’s basic, symmetrically organized wooden tables. The bright space and dirty golden walls seemed at first as part old-world brewpub and part cafeteria. But as we settled in, the room gradually gained character. I made out the shadowy figures in the walls’ dark, 75-year-old murals of New Orleans streets, and noted customers all around us drinking profusely from the restaurant’s lengthy wine list. By the time our bread arrived wrapped and warm in a linen napkin, I no longer felt like an out-of-place local but another happy patron of the Reveillon party.

  Free will has its place on the Gumbo Shop’s Reveillon menu, unlike the many tidier, bossier menus around town. Granted, the kitchen doesn’t need to alter a lot of its traditional Creole recipes to fit the rules of the historically appropriate meals. But with one member at my table allergic to oysters, one who despises pecan pie and one entree later deemed unpalatable, the chance to fete together with different plates was instrumental in our enjoyment.

  First came the soups, one a cup of a chowder-style artichoke and oyster, and the others samplings of the boasted gumbos. The day’s special duck and oyster gumbo seemed to be missing the duck, but the muddy-colored spicy broth tasted pleasantly like coffee. And although I liked the popular chicken andouille gumbo, it was better a few days later when I leisurely ladled from the large, meat- and rice-crammed bowl while the rain teemed outside. This second visit was in the late afternoon, the down time between meals when workers gather around the coffeepot and tend to housework. Only a table of jolly seniors, two Japanese tourists drinking mint juleps, and I interrupted the busboy’s steady motions of sweeping and wiping.

  Next on the Reveillon bill was a mostly crisp mixed greens salad dressed in spoonfuls of sweet, mustardy vinaigrette thick with pecans. When, after a lengthy wait, we received our entrees I had to look hard to find the crab in my crab cakes. Even then I tasted only breading and the overwhelmingly strong crawfish sauce. Fortunately, my companions’ half duckling and chicken were enough eating for three. The former was medium rare near the bone, a crunchy char on the outside with a light coating of perfectly bitter citrus and rum syrup. The chicken, smothered in a fairly standard creamy mushroom sauce, fell off the bone. It rested on a mound of moist oyster stuffing, spicy with andouille and herbaceous green from file powder, which didn’t last long on the plate. The large portions rendered side dishes superfluous at this point, but we couldn’t resist picking at the garlicky mashed potatoes. The tasty but ordinary turnip greens and uninspired macque choux corn, on the other hand, sat neglected.

  We had watched servers dip into casks of steaming brown liquid while we waited in line in the stone-floored carriageway of the colonial townhouse circa 1795. These demi-tasse shots of cafe brulot – a festive mixture of coffee, orange liquor, brandy, cloves, citrus peel and sugar – were little something extras served with our subtly sweet and droopy pecan pie, and the simple, raisin-studded bread pudding soaked with creamy whisky sauce.

  The place was first called the Gumbo Shop in 1948, long before the name would appeal to armies of conventioneers and the constant jam of Quarter tourists. Even now, the management estimates that locals account for 30 percent of the shop’s business. Especially this time of year, I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t. .