Eating New Orleans Snowballs (Pictures!)

[Jason Perlow]

NOTE: This topic is part of the Eating New Orleans series.

Hansen's Sno-Bliz

4801 Tchoupitoulas St.

504-891-9788

Tee-Eva's

4430 Magazine Street

504-899-8350

William's Plum Street Snowballs

1300 Burdette Street

504-866-7996

This week, Rachel and I got our required education in the New Orleans-style Sno Ball. Not Snow Cones, not Granita, but SNO BALLS.

There are probably several dozen such shops (maybe a hundred?) in the greater New Orleans area, but only a few have "legendary" status or are in the Sno Ball big leagues. The three here we have listed are in the pantheon of great Sno Ball shops. If we've missed a couple, blame Pableaux Johnson -- we simply visited the ones in his book.

Tee-Eva's probably deserves to be called more than just a Sno Ball shop, because she makes hella good made to order small-batch pralines, and she cooks creole food as well (which unfortunately, we didn't have time to try). Rachel particularly liked her lemonade flavors, having an affinity for their tartness instead of the sickly sweetness of some of the other prominent Sno Ball flavors. Tee-Eva's also has the distinction of serving Sno Balls year round, whereas many of the other shops in New Orleans are seasonal.

Tee-eva's Storefront

The legendary Tee-eva

The flavor list

[Jason Perlow]

Next to Hansens, Williams Plum Street SnowBalls is probably the greatest Sno Ball vendor in the entire city -- its list of flavors dwarfs many of its competitors, and it has the added bonus of making its own condensed milk, which has a markedly different flavor than the Eagle brand which is used by many of the shops.

I'm not sure if it is commonplace practice, but unlike Hansen's and Tee-Evas, Williams Plum Street serves its larger size Sno Balls in Chinese Food containers, which have the nasty tendancy to leak sticky drippy melting Sno Ball liquid. "Make sure you suck the liquid out of the bottom and you'll be OK" is a frequent mantra of the teenage Sno Ball jockeys at the store.

(Partial!) Flavor List and gallery of syrups

A professional pouring job

Mango with condensed milk

[Varmint]

We also hit a nice Snowball place near city park back in March:

Of course, I failed to take a picture of the final product!

[Jason Perlow]

Oh cool, you went to Pandora's. We tried to visit Pandora's but we got there at around 9:15 at night, just after closing. They wouldn't make us any -- so we went to Plum Street, which is actually in Pableaux's book. Pandora's appears to have a flavor list just as impressive as Plum Street's.