An hour into my first visit to the Café du Monde, I sat thoroughly pleased by the warm night, warm coffee, warm beignets. This is the place I’ve been waiting to come to ever since seeing, as a child, a bright orange tin of their coffee in my mother’s pantry and imagining its lazy Louisiana evenings.

I looked around and saw that many tables were occupied by obvious tourists, probably also brought here by a preconception, some personal equivalent of my mother’s coffee tin. I was not surprised. The place has all the markings of a tourist trap—souvenirs for sale, a ramshackle shabbiness, a stuck-in-amber spirit that serves to both attract visitors and forbid the place from changing. (It added soft drinks to its menu in 1988, 126 years after it opened. No one orders them.) It seems like the sort of destination that is so closely associated with the stereotypical idea of a place that one would never find a local, like how Times Square is the best place to avoid running into New Yorkers.

And yet while talking to New Orleanians, I found that the Café du Monde is still very much a landmark—an experience—that they claim for themselves, that they call home.

When I started asking around, many wanted to tell me stories of their first visit to the Café after Katrina. Brooks Hamaker made a point of going there the day it reopened, “Just to be able to pretend that life was going to return to normal.” Sara Roahen, author of “Gumbo Tales,” a memoir of food and consequently of this city, told me about being waited on by a server with an enormous bust and a pencil-thin mustache, which actually may qualify as normal here. When you talk to New Orleanians, you hear lots of stories of post-storm firsts, but their urge to talk about the Café in this way speaks of its centrality in their idea of their home.

As this is a city known for its love affair with its food, the first thing is what’s on the menu. John Currence, the New Orleans–bred chef of the City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi conceded, “Sure, the Café du Monde is a tourist trap.” But, he insists, “Their beignets are as iconic New Orleans as it gets. They’re imperative.”

For Cynthia Joyce, they helped to define her cultural relationship with this place. Moving here six years ago, she struggled at first to find her Acadian heritage in what is French America’s capital. Then she went to the Café du Monde. “The beignets were exactly what my aunt would make,” she recalls. For her, this flavor helped to bridge the foreign and familiar; it made her feel at home.