North Shore Day: Covington, Abita Brewery & Mandeville Waterfront

Coffee Science on Lee Lane in downtown Covington is the North Shore's best specialty coffee shop — a bright, airy café in a converted Victorian storefront serving single-origin pour-overs, espresso drinks, and house-baked pastries. The morning regulars include artists, doctors, and antique dealers from the Columbia Street galleries, and the atmosphere is exactly what you hope for from a small-town café: genuinely good coffee without pretension, served at an unhurried pace. The lavender latte and the almond croissant are the morning standards.

Covington's historic downtown preserves one of the best antique shopping districts in Louisiana — a concentration of independent dealers on Boston Street and Lee Lane specializing in Louisiana French Colonial furniture, Creole cottage antiques, folk art, and vintage maps of Louisiana and the Gulf South. The surrounding blocks of Victorian storefronts and columned Creole cottages have been carefully restored, making the downtown walk as pleasant as the shopping.

Abita Brewery, founded in 1986, was one of the first craft breweries in the South and remains the most recognizable Louisiana craft beer brand. The original taproom and visitor center in Abita Springs — a small piney-woods resort town known since the 19th century for the natural artesian spring water used in the beers — offers free tours, tastings, and a folk art museum. The Abita Amber is the flagship; the Turbodog, Purple Haze raspberry lager, and seasonal Strawberry Harvest Lager are worth sampling. The taproom opens weekends at 11 a.m.

Old Mandeville's seawall promenade on Lake Pontchartrain is the best evening walk on the North Shore — a Victorian lakefront neighborhood of cottage restaurants, live oaks, and a wooden pier extending into the lake, with views across 24 miles of open water toward New Orleans. The Tammany Trace trailhead park at the western end of the waterfront has a beach and picnic area.