The night before Drew Brees was inducted into the Hall of Fame, the measure of his New Orleans legacy showed up in a place only this city could produce: Snake & Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge, where free Jäger shots became part of the Saints experience.
Behind the bar off Oak Street, longtime bartender Juan Parke pulled out a bottle of Jägermeister and poured two shots. One was just a thin splash, the kind most bars would call a sliver.
The other was the Snake & Jake’s version of a sliver - a fuller pour, handed to a patron like a small gift. That was the rhythm Parke settled into for 15 years whenever the Saints scored.
From 2011, when Parke started working there during the Saints’ record-setting offensive years, through Brees’ retirement in 2020, the giveaways piled up fast enough that he eventually began keeping track. He wanted to show owner Dave Clements what the free booze was really adding up to.
“I started to look at, OK, how many people are in the bar, how many points did we score, how many bottles did we go through,” Parke said. “I brought it up to Dave and I said, ‘We might need to stop this,’ and he said, ‘No f*****g way! This is what we do.’”
Parke’s notebook became its own strange little archive of Brees’ run in New Orleans. He recorded the game date, the score, how much Jäger he poured, and often a note about the crowd. The entries read like barroom anthropology, a record of how one player could pull people together in a place that thrives on that kind of communal energy.
There may be no more New Orleans way to explain Brees’ greatness than that. He was already one of the most prolific passers in NFL history, but at Snake & Jake’s, his impact was measured in another currency entirely: people showing up and staying together.
“They would come here, and the Jäger was the communion wine,” Parke said. “Nobody goes to church for the f*****g wine; it’s the community.”
Some of the entries still stand out. After a 38-17 win over the Dolphins in 2012, Parke wrote, “we had a nice crowd, and man, Dave is going to go broke.”
In a 2018 win over the Rams, Brees passed for 346 yards and four touchdowns in a 45-35 victory, and Parke remembered how quickly the second bottle disappeared. Then came Christmas Day 2020, the bar’s biggest Jäger day of all, when the Saints beat the Vikings 52-33 and Parke burned through three and a quarter bottles.
He knew the routine by then. As soon as Brees was getting ready to take the field, the mood in the bar shifted.
“We would just start to laugh and smile when he’s putting his helmet on to go out on the field,” Parke said. “And you would have people in here like, ‘Eh, I think we’re going to get a drink.’
“He could make that feeling. And I’d be like, ‘No, you can’t … oh, that’s a touchdown.’ So I got in the habit of having the cups already ready when Brees was in.”
Parke, who is Harvard educated and learning Hellenic Greek so he can read “The Odyssey” in its original text, treated the whole thing as more than a running tab. To him, it was a study in how a player becomes part of a city in a small but meaningful way.
He also understands what Saints fandom looked like long before the Brees years. He went to games in the 1980s when the team was the ’Aints, and he still has the K&B paper bag he found in his mother’s attic.
“I’m kind of proud of the fact that you might not be able to be more New Orleans, because it was a K&B paper bag. But we still went to the games, we still believed.”
That’s what stays with him now. The free Jäger mattered, but not because of the booze itself. It mattered because it came with bodies in the bar, noise in the room and the sense that something bigger was happening.
“I can show you exactly how much Jaeger was given away by the bottle, but it was the crowd,” Parke said. “When he was here, more people cared.
And yes, the slivers were truly lagniappe. But they came because they knew it was an experience - and we win.”
For a place like Snake & Jake’s, that was the whole point. During the Brees era, the bar felt less like a neighborhood dive and more like a neighborhood all its own.
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