In this week's chow lead, about a new Creole food truck called Where Ya At?, I ransack some old books for stories about New Orleans food: the origin of the po' boy (it involved a streetcar strike), the Peacemaker sandwich (it involved angry wives), and the muffuletta (it involved Sicilian farmers).

But there wasn't enough room for my favorite New Orleans food story, from my old copy of A Treasury of Southern Folklore. This is it, slightly condensed:

One night many years ago at a Mardis Gras ball, a young man visiting from the East Coast met a young Creole lady. They fell instantly, deliriously in love and left the ball—and the Creole lady’s fiance. “You have ruined my reputation,” she cried, torn with guilt about her fiance incapable of rejecting her new love.

"If I've done that," he replied, "then I'll have to marry you, won't I? However, it might be an idea if we had supper first.”

They went to a certain restaurant on Royal Street and had the longest, best, most romantic meal anyone’s ever eaten. In the morning, Ash Wednesday, they were quietly married at St. Louis Cathedral and the man took his bride north. Then, as always happens in such romantic tales, the girl died.

Just before the next year’s Mardis Gras, the restaurateurs on Royal Street received a check and a letter from the young man, asking them to recreate the fateful dinner—same courses, same wines, same flowers on the table.

The annual ghost dinner went on for 20-odd years, until the annual letter and check was replaced by a letter from an attorney and a much bigger check. The Easterner had died and left a bequest in his will “to pay for this annual commemoration of his love affair for as long as the restaurant remained in business.”

They say that every Mardis Gras, a certain restaurant on Royal Street still serves this long, elaborate dinner for two ghosts.

Or at least that's what they said in 1947, when that story was first published.

Now go get an oyster po' boy at Where Ya At. You look thin.