10 Souvenirs in New Orleans Worth Taking Home

Souvenirs in New Orleans

New Orleans has better things to bring home than shot glasses and street beads. The city’s real treasures hide in local markets and old shops, where tradition still matters and quality beats quick sales. Here’s your guide to the souvenirs that capture the true spirit of the Big Easy.

1. Authentic Voodoo Dolls

The real voodoo dolls use Spanish moss and twigs yanked from the swamps, stuffed with cypress branches from the bayou. 

Stores like Voodoo Authentica on Dumaine Street makes them the old way – blessed and ready for use. 

2. Café du Monde Beignet Mix and Chicory Coffee

That green and white striped coffee stand at 800 Decatur has been slinging the same stuff since 1862. 

Nothing fancy, nothing complicated – just coffee cut with chicory root in a 4:1 ratio and square pieces of fried dough buried in powdered sugar. 

The chicory blend was born from necessity when coffee ran short, but like most great culinary traditions, hardship created something better than the original. 

3. Handcrafted Fleur-de-lis Merchandise

The fleur-de-lis isn’t just some pretty French symbol; it’s woven into the soul of New Orleans since 1718. 

The three parts represent faith, wisdom, and honor. Places like Fleur d’Orleans and Beatrix Bell make jewelry based on the iron fences and buildings that give this city its character. 

4. Authentic Creole Spice Blends

The World Famous N’awlins Cafe and Spice Shop doesn’t mess around with watered-down tourist versions. 

These are the real blends – the ones local grandmothers would recognize. Made in small batches with fresh local herbs and pepper that’ll wake up your taste buds. Fresh-mixed daily, so the oils in those peppers are alive when they hit your kitchen.

5. Handmade Pralines

There’s something almost religious about watching pralines being made at Aunt Sally’s, where they’ve been doing the same dance since 1925. 

Toasted pecans, sugar, butter, cream. They still use copper pots and mix brown and white sugar for depth that mass-produced candy can never touch.  The good ones have a slight snap before dissolving in your mouth. 

6. Local Vinyl Records

New Orleans gave birth to jazz, and the local record shops are practically temples to that legacy. 

Louisiana Music Factory in the Quarter stocks the real stuff. Euclid Records in Bywater is where the serious diggers go, hunting for those rare 45s that never made it to the digital age.

7. Handcrafted Mardi Gras Masks

Royal Street has shops where you can watch artists hunched over their work, using techniques that haven’t changed in generations. It’s serious artwork, masks that take days to craft with real feathers and beadwork. 

8. Original Jackson Square Art

The artists ringing Jackson Square aren’t just painting pretty pictures; they’re documenting a city that refuses to stand still.

These aren’t reproduction prints – each piece is one-of-a-kind, made by people who understand the soul of this place. 

The best time to browse is early morning when the light’s soft and the artists are setting up, before the cruise ship crowds descend. 

9. Locally-Distilled Spirits

New Orleans has always been a drinking town, and the local distilleries take that heritage seriously. 

Old New Orleans Rum ages their bottles in oak barrels exposed to the brutal humidity that makes this place both hellish and heavenly. Some small-batch producers are working from 19th-century Creole recipes that never left the city. 

The green wax seal on craft absinthe bottles marks the authentic stuff, made with herbs grown in local gardens. 

10. Artisanal Mosaic Art

In the Bywater, artists are creating mosaics that capture the riot of color that defines New Orleans. 

They’re not using store-bought tiles; they’re incorporating broken bits of pottery from demolished houses, pieces of the city itself embedded in art. You can watch them cut and set each fragment by hand.