📍 Only the Best 10 in New Orleans, LA

Gumbo at Dooky Chase's Restaurant. A bowl of gumbo runs about $14 at this Treme kitchen, where Leah Chase cooked for over 70 years in a dining room that quietly hosted civil rights strategy sessions during segregation — one of the only places Black and white activists could legally sit down together at the time. The restaurant's history is now part of the National Civil Rights Trail.

Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral. The cathedral behind the square is the oldest continuously operating Catholic cathedral in the United States, its three steeples visible from nearly every riverfront photo of the city ever taken, and walking in during open hours costs nothing at all. The square itself, ringed by street artists and fortune tellers, is free to sit in for as long as you want.

French Quarter Festival. This is the largest free music festival in the American South, four days every April with dozens of stages scattered across the Quarter and riverfront, and admission has never cost a cent in its history. Food and drink cost extra, but the actual music — genuinely major regional and national acts — is entirely free to walk up and watch.