Not really sure how to answer this one honestly. For social and practical reasons:

1. Rich and generous

2. Well-connected in New Orleans (other major cities negotiable)

3. Stable

4. Not overly jealous or insistent on monogamy 

5. Tasteful

While for personal reasons:

1. Stable

2. Within 10 years of my age, with a preference for older over younger

3. Dominant without being too aggressive about it

4. Kink-friendly

5. Hairy

These are pretty general, but it’s tough for me to identify specific dishes I’d rank as the best in all circumstances.

1. shrimp 

An incredibly plentiful shellfish in southern Louisiana, and I can say that I’ve tried and enjoyed shrimp prepared and served in dozens of different ways. Fried, grilled, boiled, baked, broiled, barbecued, in pastas, salads, cocktails, crêpes, soups and bisques, on sandwiches, as a topping for other meat dishes…that silly monologue from Forrest Gump about the sheer versatility of shrimp and its significance in Gulf Coast cuisine is not at all an exaggeration (even if it did spawn a mediocre chain restaurant that I do not recommend). That’s not to say that I’ve never had bad shrimp – the Anglo South can and will ruin basically any dish through sheer blandness – but those moments far outnumber the good. Fried shrimp garnished with lemon and well-seasoned tartar or cocktail sauce is practically my comfort food.

2. alligator

I thought about including foie gras on this list as the most succulent meat I’ve ever enjoyed, but it’s such a rarity that I opted to go with a slightly more common Louisiana “delicacy.” It’s chewy and naturally tangy and works surprisingly well as an hors d’oeuvre, even if non-locals will look at you funny for ordering it. I don’t care for how it’s usually prepared in Cajun cuisine – extremely spicy, not unlike their sausage (assuming they’re not just serving alligator sausage, of course), but that’s less common in New Orleans anyway.

3. grapes

Great for a tart and refreshing snack or as a complement to a cheese plate or the like. In terms of fruit I also like apples and strawberries, but grapes have the edge for the wondrous and sometimes literally divine things one can do with them through fermentation. Louisiana grapes are pretty terrible, but thankfully they’re rarely seen on the shelves here and mostly end up making equally terrible moonshine wine.

4. chocolate

When ordering dessert it’s always a sure bet with me if it involves chocolate: cake, ice cream, mousse, fudge (if it’s not too rich – there is such a thing as too sweet in my opinion), cheesecake, and all manner of pastries. I prefer darker chocolates usually, though really creamy milk chocolate can taste wonderful. I also like chocolate with nuts, especially walnuts or almonds.

5. (quality) bread

Not the flavorless sliced bread in a plastic bag that some people in the US apparently consider a staple of a normal diet, but real bread with body and texture and a flavor independent of whatever is being served with it. Butter may be the northern European way and oil the southern, but I happen to enjoy both. As for the baguettes dubbed “French bread” that serve as the basis for Louisiana’s distinctive po’boys, they can either be really good or really, really bad, so I’m wary about ordering them from most places. Great loaves can be eaten all on their own, though those are hard to come by.

1. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

No big surprise since I already wrote an entire series on the thing even though it’s practically the second-most incomprehensible work of English modernism after Finnegan’s Wake so no one has read it, but it’s such a dark and poetic high tragedy that tears into the Anglo South and its enduring cultural malaise with significant help from Louisiana and the Latin Caribbean.

2. Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Watching the 80s film adaptation and later reading this novel (and then even later re-reading it in French) was my first exposure outside familial anecdote to the workings of the upper echelons of French society to which we had vainly aspired. Hyperbole for the sake of moral instruction and/or revolutionary sentiment it may be, but the story is fun in that vein of witnessing horrible people do horrible things for horrible reasons, and the significance of both deceit and sexual conquest greatly contributed to shaping my opinions on the fundamental artificiality of all human interaction.

3. The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Another one where I watched the movie first and only later picked up the novel; both have their merits to the point where I’d have trouble calling either superior. I love the device of a segmented narrative woven across multiple lives and time periods (seen also in Cloud Atlas, though there less tightly structured in my opinion), and it builds off the life and fiction of Virginia Woolf whose writing I generally enjoy. The story also hits some personal notes in reference to my mother and my perspective on her life and death, and as thoroughly demonstrated in my ranking of the women of Fire Emblem that seems to be my only notable window into female-driven stories.

4. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Really this applies to her collective body of work – Chopin presents a fascinating window on the increasingly frayed lives of Louisiana Creoles at the turn of the 20th century, just as we were slipping into political and social irrelevance. It can sometimes be a little painful to read her writing for that reason, but there’s usually enough distance from the subject either because of her protagonists (like Edna Pontellier of the aforementioned novel, an Anglo from Kentucky married to a Créole) or her specific setting (ex. “Athénaïse,” set partially in the north Louisiana town of Natchitoches, a Créole community that gets almost no attention anywhere). The Awakening itself is powerful for its unfeeling brutality culminating in suicide, a Madame Bovary stripped of the anti-Romantic elements.

5. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

It’s hard to pick just one part of La Comédie humaine, but this was my first taste of Balzac and also one that prominently features the gay thief Vautrin. That’s always fun. Like Les Liaisons this novel is also concerned with the affairs of upper class Parisians, though it’s interesting to contrast someone like Rastignac with the established aristocrats of pre-Revolutionary writing or, conversely, bourgeois protagonists like Lucien Chardon or most of Flaubert’s characters. It’s good for some perspective on my own set and to what extent we may truly be said to be putting on airs once the Anglos have been removed from the picture. Certainly not as much as the established Carnival krewes with their pretensions of royalty, hmph.