The Mayan Import Company

Away from the Quarter's noise, on the gallery-and-boutique stretch of Magazine Street, the Garden District keeps its tobacconist in a building that used to raise orphans.

Mayan Import has traded from the historic Orphanage Building since 1997, and Cigar Aficionado once sized it up as the largest retail tobacconist in the city. It's the neighborhood counterweight to the tourist rooms downriver: unhurried, deeply stocked, and shaded.

The Shop

A walk-in humidor of some thirty marques, plus the thing almost nobody else in this guide carries — a proper pipe wall, with tobaccos to match. It's a tobacconist in the full old sense, the kind where browsing is half the visit.

The Patio

The reason to cross town: an outdoor smoking patio under live oaks a century old, with an indoor lounge for the rain. No bar — the tobacconist's exemption doesn't pour — but a Magazine Street coffee in hand completes the picture better than most cocktails would.

Why We Picked It

Because every city list needs the room locals keep for themselves, and this is the Garden District's. A cigar under hundred-year oaks, streetcar bells in the distance — New Orleans has fancier sits, but few finer ones.