New Orleans — “Days go by now where I don’t think of Katrina,” says Randy Boudreaux. “You almost have to drive out to specific destinations, like the Ninth Ward, to look for devastation.” Boudreaux is an old friend and attorney whose family arrived here around 1760, when France’s King Louis XV ruled this city from the extreme comfort of Versailles. Boudreaux’s somewhat less regal Uptown NOLA home endured five feet of floodwater in its downstairs unit, so he evacuated to Arkansas for four weeks after The Storm, as locals dub the hurricane.

The fact that Katrina is fading even from Boudreaux’s memory is powerful testimony to this fine city’s resilience and how far it has come since Katrina kicked it to the curb on August 29, 2005.

“Who’s Katrina?” asks Jeremy Hildreth, a Los-Angeles born, London-based author and branding consultant who was in NOLA early this month for the first time since 2001. “Seriously, to the unaided eye, there’s no trace of Katrina in New Orleans. If I’d slept through all news of the hurricane, nothing I saw on this visit would have raised the slightest suspicion in me that anything sinister whatsoever had befallen the Big Easy.”

Destruction still exists, although beyond the areas that most visitors frequent. St. Bernard Parish, just east of Orleans Parish, was flooded almost completely. Some former homes are now just concrete slabs. On Jean Lafitte Parkway — named after the 18th-century pirate whose blacksmith shop is now a French Quarter bar — The Frederick J. Sigur Civic Center remains boarded up. So do the local Wal-Mart and Winn Dixie. A fire station under construction offers a ray of hope.

The once-submerged Lower Ninth Ward contains a few auto carcasses on its streets, fully stripped of tires, doors, and other parts. Much of the debris that clogged this area has been carted away. Former front porches now open onto grass where living rooms once stood. Some people have moved back into the few homes that survived. On Tennessee Street, just steps from where the Industrial Canal fatally ruptured and inundated this neighborhood, new, ultra-modern houses are sprouting up, thanks to Academy Award nominee Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation. These homes, painted sky blue here and mustard yellow there, look like geometry problems. They bend at multiple, acute angles. They also boast roof-top solar panels and rest on pylons that lift them above sea level.

A brand-new home brightens New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, thanks to Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation.

The media largely ignored Katrina’s heavy blow to the high-income, predominantly white Lakeview district, which undermined their narrative of the hurricane as a Republican assault on poor blacks. Today, Lakeview has improved dramatically. While some homes remain abandoned, many have been restored or replaced. Perhaps a fifth to a quarter of this affluent area’s lots have been cleared completely. This has created an unintentional blessing: Until new homes fill these now-vacated lots, Lakeview is dotted with de facto side yards and well-kept mini-parks beside every fourth or fifth home. A sense of leafy openness prevails.

ON THE ROAD TO URBAN REFORM

Once-omnipresent FEMA trailers largely have vanished citywide. Local officials ordered them out of parish limits, lest they become permanent eyesores and potential projectiles, in the event of other hurricanes.

NOLA’s streets offer one area for immediate improvement. They are bumpier than ever. The high-water table and spongy soil offer a squishy foundation for firm roads. This city certainly could stand some steam rollers and fresh asphalt.

That said, positives abound.

While the city has a way to go before matching its pre-Katrina headcount of 450,000, the Census Bureau reported in March that NOLA’s population has reached 311,000. This is the first time since Katrina that it has exceeded 300,000.

One huge slice of good news could help re-populate NOLA: The majority of its government schools are now independently operated charters.

“New Orleans is America’s charter-school capital,” says Kevin Kane, president of the free-market Pelican Institute for Public Policy and board member of the Lafayette Academy Charter School. It serves 750 low-income students from pre-Kindergarten through seventh grade, with kids on waiting lists at every level. “No city has such a high percentage of students enrolled in charters.”

“The single most important development in post-Katrina New Orleans is the charter-school movement.” Kane adds. “Our cities are shaped by a combination of policy and culture. Allowing schools to innovate and operate independently can transform the culture by taking kids who would have been on the road to nowhere and instead preparing them for college and professional success. This also will help New Orleans attract and retain the middle-class families that have been abandoning the city for the past 40 years.”

“One of the key elements of the New Orleans charter-school system is that the students can choose their schools,” Kane continues. “So, schools effectively are competing for students. This has introduced the market forces that are usually absent from public schools and ensures that charters will stay on their toes or suffer the consequences.”

NOLA’S HISTORIC STRENGTHS

For all its past and present woes, New Orleans is still a smorgasbord for the senses.

The Crescent City’s ancient buildings, stately mansions, and modest but attractive “shotgun” houses — with their whimsical, wooden adornments — are ubiquitous and a pleasure to behold.

NOLA remains a culinary wonderland. Local chefs dazzlingly blend classical cooking techniques and styles with strange ingredients rarely found elsewhere.

Toulouse Street’s Bistro Maison de Ville serves frog legs with apple-smoked bacon and cheddar-cheese grits. Ahi tuna soon arrives, flanked by avocado gnocchi and bits of alligator meat.

Chef Scott Boswell leads two Chartres Street restaurants. Stella! and Stanley! are both named after characters in Tennessee Williams’s classic wrist-slasher, A Streetcar Named Desire. Stella! serves dinner in a quiet, elegant room. Duck Five Ways thrillingly features, according to the menu, “Szechwan Seared Breast, Lacquered Leg and Thigh, Moo Shoo Pancake Stir-Fry, Duck Miso Broth, Foie Gras Won Tons and Currant Cassis Reduction.”

Meanwhile, Stella!’s chefs freeze water balloons in advance. As dessert orders come in, they pop the balloons and drain the excess water that remains within. This leaves behind a hollowed out, balloon-shaped ice sculpture with room for cherry-chocolate-cake ice cream and two sorbets — cantaloupe and strawberry-ginger. They then balance this entire arrangement in a shallow bowl and surround it in an evanescent ring of liquid nitrogen, which smolders at 319 degrees below zero. “This is for dramatic effect, mostly,” says sommelier Josh Prados. “People definitely get a kick out of it.”

Stanley! — a casual, modestly priced breakfast and lunch spot — offers a dark-brown gumbo that hosts firm shrimp, tender oysters, and white rice. Two small slices of French bread gently round out this delicious appetizer. Eggs Stella follows, featuring a crunchy soft-shell crab perched atop Eggs Benedict. With its claws extended outward, the crab appears to have been flash-fried while in attack mode. Thankfully, it is delightfully docile while being devoured.

Stanley! occupies the ground floor of the Pontalba Apartments, built circa 1850 by the Baroness Michaela Pontalba. The restaurant’s huge picture windows open onto Jackson Square, a beautiful plaza dominated by St. Louis Cathedral, the seat of Orleans Parish’s Catholic archdiocese. The square is named after Gen. Andrew Jackson, who foiled an attempted British invasion in the decisive Battle of New Orleans that concluded the War of 1812.

On a recent Monday, Briton Jon Cleary dines at Stanley! with a friend. Cleary is a phenomenal pianist and leader of his own R&B/funk band. He came to NOLA to visit and stayed for more than two decades. Also on hand is Academy Award nominee Josh Brolin, looking surprisingly disheveled. A far-more sheveled Academy Award nominee, Laurence Fishburne, biked through the French Quarter the previous weekend.

NOLA just enjoyed a successful Jazz and Heritage Festival, commonly called Jazz Fest. “Over 400,000 attended,” says Festival press secretary Matthew Goldman. “That’s the largest since Katrina.” Twelve stages at the local Fairgrounds feature jazz, funk, rock, Zydeco, Latin, and numerous other genres, with the merciful exception of opera.

Daytime highlights include the Hot Club of New Orleans, with its traditional-jazz sound that recalls Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli’s stellar 1930s collaboration on guitar and violin, respectively. The Treme Brass Band play lively, second-line arrangements of the sorts of festive tunes they perform at NOLA’s legendary jazz funerals. The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars deliver high-speed melodies on guitar, bass, accordion, and a hybrid violin-trumpet. Some in the crowd respond to the Jewish-wedding-type sounds by dancing in circles and carrying T-shirt-clad music fans over their heads in a beach chair. Across the Fairgrounds, the crowd jumps and shouts in the Gospel Tent to the sounds of the Coolie Family Singers and another choir called The Johnson Extension.

Jazz Fest shines at night when NOLA’s bars, clubs, and streetcorners highlight a seemingly infinite array of sounds to keep revelers shaking at all hours. House of Blues features Chicago’s Umphrey’s McGee and its crisply played, sharp-edged jam-band music with exceptional lighting design by Jefferson Waful, whose first word as a baby was “light.” (An April 11 Umphrey’s concert at Manhattan’s Nokia Theater was no less than the second best-lit show I ever have seen, exceeded perhaps by a circa 1990 Paul McCartney appearance at Madison Square Garden. “The lights were half the show,” my friend Paul Torres said of Umphrey’s gig. He also called its unique sound “jazz from the year 3000.”)

See the music: Umphrey’s McGee rocks New Orleans’ House of Blues to the accompaniment of Jefferson Waful’s stunning lighting design. (Photo: Beau Blackburn.)

Umphrey’s peaks with a powerful crowd pleaser: an incongruous cover of Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil.” Drummer Kris Meyers gets a chance to sing this song and looks as thrilled to do so as a first grader unwrapping his first train set beneath the Christmas tree.

On Sunday at 2:00 AM, House of Blues also showcases the New Master Sounds, an outstanding, Leeds, England-based quartet whose guitar, bass, drums, and electric organ fill the spacious venue with a septet’s share of musical thrust. Their captivating instrumental groove recalls Booker T. and the MGs and the J. B. Horns, James Brown’s backup band. From one energetic flash of brilliance to the next, this band mesmerizes the crowd and keeps it gyrating very, very hard until Simon Allen and Eddie Roberts, respectively, lay down their drum sticks and guitar pick at 5:20 in the morning.

As the show ends, fans step into the dawn’s early light. One group of revelers — whose members have flown in from the Hudson to the Himalayas — retires to a local tavern to continue the amusement. At 5:45 AM, their bartender serves cocktails, either to be consumed on the premises or carried away onto the streets (perfectly legally) in plastic “go cups.”

Do your retinas, taste buds, ear drums, and liver a favor: Take them on vacation as soon as humanly possible, down to New Orleans.